Flickr/Palestine Solidarity Project. Some rights reserved.On 24th November 2015 the US secretary of state John Kerry expressed
his solidarity with his Israeli hosts when he remarked, “Clearly, no people
anywhere should live with daily violence, with attacks on the streets, with
knives, with scissors, cars.” It is just a pity that he did not add that so
long as Israel continues its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories
Israelis will continue to face differing forms of Palestinian resistance.
Since mid-September 87 Palestinians have been killed by
Israeli security forces and settlers, whilst 22 Israelis and foreign
nationals have been killed in Palestinian attacks. Most of these attacks have
been carried out by young Palestinians acting on their own in a relatively
unplanned manner. Israeli security forces have called such acts 'lone-wolf
attacks', and some Israeli security personnel blame their incidence on the
increase in Jewish extremist violence against Palestinians.
The return of direct violence to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
must be a matter of concern to all who dream of sustainable peace in the
region, but it can come as no surprise: it is a direct result of the Israeli
government’s determination to normalise Israel’s occupation, now nearly 50
years old.
Popular Protest in Palestine: The Uncertain Future of Unarmed ResistanceIn our recent book
(co-authored with Marwan Darweish) Popular Protest in Palestine: The uncertain future of unarmed
resistance, we explored the history of Palestinian unarmed
resistance to occupation, with a particular focus on the wave of protests that
accompanied the construction of the Israeli separation wall/barrier and the
accelerated pace of dispossession occasioned by the expansion of Israeli
settlements in the West Bank. Underpinning the research project upon which the
book is based, was our hope that we might find ourselves chronicling a
burgeoning movement of nonviolent resistance of such a scale and
effectiveness as to render the continued Israeli occupation of the
lands captured in 1967 untenable.
What we actually found was more sobering and disturbing. Our
pessimistic conclusion was that the most recent wave of unarmed resistance had
failed to exert sufficient leverage on Israeli publics and decision-makers to
cause any re-evaluation of the occupation. This was expressed most directly by
one of our informants—an Israeli peace activist:
“The worst thing for Israel is peace and quiet. If the occupation continues
there is no future for Israel. The weakening of Palestinian popular resistance
allows the occupation to continue. People here in Israel—they just don’t
realise, they don’t have to deal with the occupation. There was the second
intifada—nothing came out of that and the buses being blown up. Now the buses
are not being blown up and still nothing comes out of it. Israelis are
comfortable with the situation…people look the other way…people live with it…But
it will blow up.”
On the Palestinian side we interviewed scores of courageous
community leaders and activists who were struggling to maintain their hope and
commitment in the face of daily personal, cultural and structural violence
of the occupation, and the growing awareness that under the camouflage of a
so-called peace process Israel was deepening its occupation, whilst the
‘international community’ was failing to hold Israel accountable for
its ongoing gross abuse of Palestinian human rights.
Nowhere was this despondency more apparent than in the
neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem where Palestinians live under direct
Israeli rule. Here are short extracts from interviews carried out with two
community activists from Silwan, a Palestinian neighbourhood directly adjacent
to the walls of the Old City.
J: “Here there are daily clashes with
settlers…There are confrontations and provocations from armed settlers in
addition to all the social deprivation—poor schools, unemployment. The young
are suffering. It makes them angry, and it is easy to provoke them…we are close to our
limit—we cannot take it anymore.”
A: “Many countries in the world break
international laws, and they suffer sanctions, but Israel acts with impunity.
We can expect nothing from the international community…Everything is on a knife-edge with all the pressure…People feel…they
have lost…that they have nothing to lose.”
In such a catch-22 it is surely the responsibility of international civil society to develop more effective strategies to influence publics and policy-makers.
State powers such as the USA and the EU have done little to
pressure Israel, thereby contributing to the anger and desperation of Palestinians
who feel cheated and humiliated by a ‘peace process’ that has resulted in
nothing but an intensification of the Israeli occupation. By contrast to the
indifference of states who have done nothing to challenge the impunity enjoyed
by Israel, there has been increased involvement of international solidarity
activists supporting Palestinian grassroots protests over the last decade. These
activists have played their part as accompaniers and witnesses in a range of
protest actions, but their most important role has been as advocates for the
Palestinian cause in their own countries.
There is a kind of symbiotic relationship between the Palestinian
popular struggle and the advocacy work of the international solidarity networks—the
solidarity activists depend on the popular unarmed resistance of Palestinians (and their Israeli partners) to feed their international campaigns
to delegitimise the Israeli occupation. As one of our informants explained: “International
solidarity activists want to know that there is something happening here around
which they can mobilise—and around BDS.”
So, whilst Palestinian popular resistance has proven to be
relatively weak in relation to its direct impact on Israeli decision-makers and
publics, their presentation of themselves as brave people struggling for their
basic rights by unarmed means against an illegitimate and brutal occupation can
resonate strongly through international networks of sympathisers. These
networks can then use the examples and the stories of resistance to shame the
Israeli occupation regime in the eyes of wider constituencies around the world.
In their turn such people—links in the great chain of nonviolence—can exercise
pressure on their own politicians and policy-makers to take action. And so,
like the flight of a boomerang, the protests and demands of the Palestinians
resisting occupation on the ground can pass through various agents who in their
turn can exercise a level of influence over Israeli publics and
decision-makers.
This at least is the theory and the model. But reality seems once
again to be reluctant to conform to the vision, and as a consequence the
Palestinian activists are faced with the most painful of dilemmas. They know
that any act of lethal violence by Palestinians will feed into Israeli
perceptions and propaganda of ‘Palestinians are terrorists’. But they also know
that their unarmed resistance, whilst it has attracted international civil
society support, has failed to exercise any leverage over Israel.
In such a catch-22 situation it is surely the responsibility of
international civil society networks to develop more effective strategies to
influence publics and policy-makers. The aim must be to intensify pressure on
Israel to commit to withdrawing from the occupied territories, and thereby not
only freeing Palestinians from the violence of occupation but also liberate the
Israelis themselves from the evil of occupation.
