I know that there are some Palestinians who advocate the tactics of Gandhi and King, although they are, to an American at least, rather obscure. I had never heard of them until I asked about it here. I also noticed that none of the people mentioned was a Muslim. Is it just a case of too much bad blood that makes this approach untenable?
Thanks,
Rob
For starters, I’m not sure that many people in this world COULD follow their approach. It’s HARD. It doesn’t mean simply sitting down in places where people don’t want you to sit. It means, when you’re crossing a bridge, and some cops start beating your head in with a billy club, you don’t fight back.
That’s really hard. I’m fairly sure I couldn’t do it. Just visiting Selma and seeing photos of Bloody Sunday made me angry enough to want to punch cops in the face and chuck them off that damn bridge.
Second, the approach of civil disobedience relies upon sympathetic people within the opposing side (Israel, white America, etc.) becoming horrified at the injustice to the point that THEY take up your cause and try to end the injustice. It’s possible that Palestinians wouldn’t believe that there are enough Israelis who would be sympathetic to them. At the end of the day, the Palestinians might get their heads smashed in for years without fighting back, only to see the rest of Israel shrug their shoulders and look the other way. (Not saying that such would be the case, but it might be how the Palestinians view it.)
And, what exactly would it accomplish? What “civil” are they going to “disobedience” What right do they claim has been violated? The right to kill Jew3s? The right to go anywhere they please within a country not their own? What are they going to do, go sit at the border crossing and whine? :rolleyes:
Exactly. It’s not as if they can tell Hamas to take a flying one and then go and watch Celebrity Big Brother. I bet most of them haven’t even got a living room now, nevermind a tv!
Israelis aren’t dependent upon pliant Palestinian workers in the same way as the citizens of Alabama were on their African American population. The bus boycott in Montgomery worked precisely because they were the primary clientele of the buses.
This isn’t at all fair.
They’d want freedom of movement and self-governance on what would become the sovereign state of Palestine.
And civil disobedience would almost definitely work. If, tomorrow, every single man woman and child in the West Bank declared that they renounced violence and would not ever again support it (and they proved their commitment by dismantling hate indoctrination and eagerly supporting reconciliation and negotiation with Israel), there would be a new round of negotiations and a sovereign state in the West Bank very quickly.
And, and to the OP: the reason that there aren’t more is two fold. First, because there is a tremendous amount of hate indoctrination in Palestinian culture. And second, because those who are seen as overly friendly to Israel are often murdered.
I’m afraid this is true. As heroic as MLK and other leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement were, they didn’t face nearly the level of potential violence from both sides that Palestinian nonviolent resisters would today.
Sad but true.
I’d also add that if the Palestinians renounced violence and were seen as actively working towards peace, that I doubt that even the United States would fail to apply massive pressure to Israel. Much of Israel’s support comes from the fact that they’re fairly constantly under terrorist attack, and not many of its supporters feel comfortable with demanding that terrorism should be rewarded or that it’s right to force Israel to compromise in the face of violence directed against its citizens.
I’d bet that would change damn quick if terrorism was taken off the table and it was obvious that a peace deal wouldn’t mean rockets falling on Tel Aviv.
One thing that Americans have trouble understanding is that some cultures are really, really different than others. Just because an idea works in America doesn’t mean that it will work in other countries.
For Palestinians in Gaza to adopt non-violence would require a vast change in their culture.
It would be like asking the Taliban in Afghanistan to adopt jeans and T-shirts for their women.
Here’s an analogy to help answer the OP: instead of asking why a foreign culture doesn’t adopt American methods, ask yourself why American culture doesn’t adopt foreign methods.
For example: Why don’t Americans adopt Japanese work ethics?
( Think of “Japan, Inc.” back in its glory days of the 1980’s.) Americans couldn’t compete, because the cultural differences would have required a vast change in US culture. Before each shift at Mitsubishi, Japanese factory workers proudly lined up and stood at attention like soldiers, saluted the corporate flag, sang the corporate anthem, performed calisthenic exercises in unison, and than worked hard–not for their salary, but for the honor of the corporation, and the fear of “losing face” with their fellow workers.
Some ideas that seem so natural and effective in one country( Japanese sense of honor) simply won’t work in other cultures( American individualism)
The same is true for Islamic cultures adopting Martin Luther King’s tactics
I think I’ve seen that movie! Was it called “Antz”?
No, Gung Ho. 
I would think, the right to live & work in their own country, instead of being cooped up in refugee cities/reservations/“homelands.”
However, I have been told that to assume that the ME/Arab/Palastinian culture does not want peace, or has negative (violent) tendencies and won’t embrase an olive branch as a bigoted stereotype.
The underlying assumption behind diplomacy is that two parties can find common ground, and/or mutually shared goals.
So, is “peace” (as in: the absence of folks trying to kill each other on a mass scale) not a shared human ideal that transcends culture? (Unlike good fashion or food.)
Perhaps not, but MLK’s inspiration, Gandhi, certainly did.
But there are a hell of a lot of Indians in the world. Having a Gandhi around when you need him is still a low probability event. A Gandhi arising from the relatively small Palestinian community strikes me as an even more unlikely event.
I don’t think it’s governed by population size.
Actually, I think it probably is.
For every full-blown Gandhi, there must be a staggering number of Gandhis who somehow got cut down in their primes. Either they died young, won the lottery, married a rich woman, whatever. These are unobserved Gandhis, all of whom fall out of the running eventually. And even these truncated Gandhis are few and far between. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to assert that it is extremely unlikely that a leader of this caliber will emerge among a relatively tiny group of people. How many Gandhis have you seen come out of the Upper West Side lately?
Right my point is that the Gandhi might not emerge specifically from an arbitrary ethnic pool, but might emerge from the whole of the population. A Ghandi can be stilted by being born on the upper west side and therefore have no cause to take up. He might become a civil rights lawyer or something instead. There is no reason to think that it is governed by the size of the ethnic population. Two factors have to be satisfied, he has to grow to maturity and there has to be sufficient need for him to become such a person. There is no reason to believe that a big tree has a greater possibility of forming a Ghandi than a small tree, when not all trees bear such fruit.
I don’t know that that’s true. It’s happened before…there was the Beit Sahour protest (which didn’t really end up working very well for them, but still…), and the work of groups like the International Solidarity Movement (mostly) and the Palestinian Center for Raprochment. Look up the career of Ghassan Andoni sometime.
Gandhi was an American? And you’re right, perhaps America should adopt Middle Eastern rhetoric, perhaps chanting in the streets “Death to Iran!” will be more productive.
Not being snarky here, but you do realize we didn’t invent this approach, right? This isn’t an American thingy…we (well, several of our past leaders like MLK) borrowed the idea.
To the OP. Why don’t they do it? My guess is that it hasn’t occurred to the right leader there. This is something that comes, IMHO, from a very special type of leader. The easy way is to do what the Palestinian’s have always done…to just lash out. It’s VERY hard to go the non-violence path and I doubt it would be intuitively obvious given the warrior type culture that prevails in the ME.
That said, the Indian’s managed to do it and to change the British Empire and win their independence. It would certainly work for the Palestinian’s…IF they were able to do it across the board. Almost immediately they would capture the high ground, even among the Israeli’s. However, the other side of this is that by doing so they would have to acknowledge that they will only ever get half a loaf…and the lesser half at that. They will never even get the deal they COULD have gotten in '48 had they just taken what was offered. C’est la vie…but in order to go the non-violence route at this point they would have to accept that in their heart of hearts.
Eventually it will happen…but there is going to be a lot of death and blood before that happens. However, if the Irish could do it I have every faith that our Palestinian brethren and sistren will come to it…some day…
-XT