The Promise
of
Palestinian Civil Disobedience
Dennis Fox
July 30, 2002
Defiance of Israel's curfew in Nablus must put Israeli authorities
in a tizzy. Fed up by more than five weeks of enforced house arrest ostensibly
designed to prevent would-be suicide bombers from leaving the West Bank
city, thousands of Palestinian residents have left their homes en masse.
They've effectively declared the curfew over.
Although the curfew in other West Bank cities has lightened
over the past month, in Nablus the crackdown has remained absolute, save
for half a dozen days when authorities let residents out for a few hours
to buy food. Otherwise, families in the city of 200,000 have been trapped
at home 24 hours every day, unable to shop, to work, to visit relatives
or go to a movie or bring their children to day camp. Aid groups report
increasing health problems, including malnutrition.
The dilemma for Israeli authorities is this:
If they crack down once again, forcing back into their houses
nonviolent West Bankers who only want to do what the rest of us take for
granted, they expose their actions as a repressive overreaction against
ordinary people. But if they don't crack down, they risk something we
should all hope comes about: Nablus will become a symbol of peaceful nonviolent
civil disobedience, a model for the kind of activism that could finally
end Israeli domination and create a just solution to the conflict between
Israelis and Palestinians.
Though generally underreported in the mainstream press --
still committed to stereotypes of valiant Israelis and irrational violent
Arabs -- Palestinian nonviolent resistance isn't entirely new. Neither
is Israel's common repressive response. What is new, though, is that more
Palestinians, conscious of both the importance of public image and the
political situation's fluidity, are stepping forward to advocate making
nonviolent struggle central.
Israeli authorities know that their supporters in the United
States generally accept Israel's image as a besieged nation that resorts
to violence only reluctantly, in self-defense, with no choice other than
to expand West Bank settlements, dominate Palestinian life, and restrict
individual liberties. Beating or shooting Palestinians guilty only of
trying to buy their children bread and milk would dent sympathy in the
generally liberal American Jewish community -- and even within Israel
itself, where the public prefers heroics to slaughter and where polls
show the majority would gladly abandon the settlements if Palestinians
would accept a peaceful solution. The shootings a few weeks ago of Palestinians
who mistakenly thought the curfew had been lifted got Israel more criticism
than it liked.
On the other side, supporters of Palestine often reject
calls to turn from suicide bombings and other forms of armed struggle.
They claim, with justification, that past nonviolent actions have been
met by Israeli repression and worldwide indifference. Given the desperation
of the Palestinian people, many argue, armed struggle -- including terrorist
attacks within Israel itself -- is both justified and necessary.
Yet in March, Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian human rights
lawyer and peace activist, and Mubarak Awad, director of Nonviolence International,
disseminated a call for alternative strategies, not because they consider
violence unjustified -- they don't -- but because they think nonviolence
will work better than violence. Apparently they're not the only ones:
After Awad launched a similar effort almost two decades ago, Israeli authorities
arrested and deported him.
In June, dozens of Palestinians publicly called for an end
to suicide bombings. In a full-page ad in the newspaper al-Quds, Palestinian
leaders familiar to many American activists called on local militias to
"stop sending our young people to carry out such attacks." Joining
the appeal were Hanan Ashrawi, often the Palestinian spokesperson; the
senior Palestinian official in Jerusalem, Sari Nusseibeh (whose office
Israel briefly closed two weeks ago); and Gaza human rights activist Eyad
Serraj. The public call followed increasing Palestinian concern that younger
and younger teens were being recruited for suicide bombings.
Despite pessimism and cynicism, the growing effort to rethink
attacks is having some success. Just last week, elements of the Tanzim
militia and even of Hamas were preparing to issue a cease-fire order --
until Sharon's forces dropped a one-ton bomb into a Gaza neighborhood,
killing not just the Hamas militant they sought but more than a dozen
innocent neighbors. They also killed the effort to determine if the cease-fire
overtures were genuine.
Will Israel find a pretext to re-impose its Nablus curfew,
using its might to bring home to ordinary Palestinians that even nonviolent
resistance will get them nothing? Unfortunately, if history repeats itself,
this is the most likely outcome.
But perhaps Israel, for the moment the object of unusual
media attention, will be forced to alter its usual response, even though
letting the curfew wither away would allow Nablus to serve as a dangerous
example. Will former fighters and masses of ordinary residents turn to
large-scale militant civil disobedience, determined to seek justice without
imposing injustice and death on others? That's the outcome Israeli authorities
fear most, even if many Israelis and many Palestinians alike might welcome
it.
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