I have not been shy about sharing my criticism of Israel.
And, unless your support for Israel is painted on, it is not hard to see that they
have gone too far, too violently for far too long. They have turned the
world against them with their actions, just as the United States did after how
they responded to 9/11. This is not hard for most people to process. It is hard
for some though, that is true. But there are ideologues involved in any realm
of public discourse you enter into. The facts are Israel are acting deplorably
and it is going to effect their support on the world stage.
But it is not just Israel’s violence that is a problem in
this war. Just as Israel’s overreaction is causing problems for their highly aid
dependent nation on the world stage, so to is Hamas’ violence, and especially
violence against civilians, a serious problem. It is terrorism, it is morally wrong, and it also
serves to bring the hammer down on the Palestinian people too often.
Putting aside, or even including, all the so-called biblical
justifications for European Jews to colonize the land of Canaan in the 20th
century, what we have here is a highly advanced, numerically and militarily
superior colonizing force, Israel, against a relatively primitive, under resourced
and numerically inferior indigenous population.[1] This is a situation ripe
for fourth generation war, which is exactly what Israel has had on its hands
since at least 1948, arguably even earlier.
In fourth generation war the side which loses the moral
high ground and therefore public support is painted as the most violent and is
often the side that loses. This is why peaceful resistance is often far more
successful than violent resistance, in the context of non-state actors facing
state actors, or even vice versa. This of course does not apply in conventional war - first, second or third generation - where two
armies face off against each other in the battlefield, and matching force to force is vital. Fourth generation warfare is very different.
I would argue that Hamas is a case in point for why
violent resistance is often futile, foolish and counterproductive. They are of course evil, there is that. They are also harming the Palestinian cause. Every civilian or even solider that Hamas kills just makes the
plight of the Palestinian people even worse and does not help their cause
internationally. Especially with those who just automatically see Israel as the
moral paragons in this situation.
This is not just my opinion on resistance, this is
observed by those who study the results of peaceful resistance verses violent
resistance:
“Recent research suggests
that nonviolent civil resistance is far more successful in creating broad-based
change than violent campaigns are, a somewhat surprising finding with a story
behind it.
When Erica Chenoweth started
her predoctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs in 2006, she believed in the strategic logic of armed resistance. She
had studied terrorism, civil war, and major revolutions — Russian, French,
Algerian, and American — and suspected that only violent force had achieved
major social and political change. But then a workshop led her to consider
proving that violent resistance was more successful than the nonviolent kind.
Since the question had never been addressed systematically, she and colleague
Maria J. Stephan began a research project.
For the next two years,
Chenoweth and Stephan collected data on all violent and nonviolent campaigns
from 1900 to 2006 that resulted in the overthrow of a government or in
territorial liberation. They created a data set of 323 mass actions. Chenoweth
analyzed nearly 160 variables related to success criteria, participant
categories, state capacity, and more. The results turned her earlier paradigm
on its head — in the aggregate, nonviolent civil resistance was far more
effective in producing change.
The Weatherhead Center for
International Affairs (WCFIA) sat down with Chenoweth, a new faculty associate
who returned to the Harvard Kennedy School this year as professor of public
policy, and asked her to explain her findings and share her goals for future
research. Chenoweth is also the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at
the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.”[2]
The reasons this happens are really rather simple; nonviolent
resistance is much more likely to increase your supporter base than violent
resistance. And on top of this, it is far more likely to garner sympathy from
those who have the power to make decisions. Violent resistance often begets
even more violent repression and lends moral aid to those doing the repression.
Hence, nonviolent resistance is a moral and practical imperative.
This was also known to the Palestinians at some point,
though it has now been lost. In fact, the trajectory of the plight of the
Palestinian people is clear evidence of the failure of violent resistance,
because it is often morally reprehensible and practically counterproductive. Khalidi
notes,
“The PLO had renounced
violence in 1988, but as large numbers of demonstrators were shot by Israeli
troops and as Hamas responded with suicide attacks, the pressure on Fatah to
act grew, and escalation became inevitable. Triggered by the 1994 massacre inside
the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron of 29 Palestinians by an armed settler, between
1994 and 2000 Hamas and Islamic Jihad had pioneered the use of suicide bombers
inside Israel as part of their campaign against the Oslo Accords, killing 171
Israelis in 27 bombings. By the end of that period, however, these attacks had
been largely contained by the ferocious repression exercised by the PA security
services. The PLO leadership pushed to stop these attacks at all costs to keep
the limping Oslo process going. To that end, the PA security apparatus—largely
made up of Fatah militants who had served time in Israeli jails—used torture on
Hamas suspects just as freely as Israeli interrogators had used it on them.
Such experiences engendered deep fratricidal hatred on both sides, which was to
erupt in the open PLO-Hamas split starting in the mid-2000s.
In stark contrast to the
first, the Second Intifada constituted a major setback for the Palestinian
national movement. Its consequences for the Occupied Territories were severe
and damaging. In 2002, with its heavy weapons causing widespread destruction,
the Israeli army reoccupied the limited areas, mainly cities and towns, that
had been evacuated as part of the Oslo Accords. That same year, Israeli troops
imposed their siege on Yasser ‘Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters, where he fell
mortally ill. Having avoided meeting with him after my disappointing encounter
in Gaza in 1994, I was encouraged to see the ailing old man by my friend Sari
Nuseibeh, and visited him twice during the siege, finding him much diminished
physically and mentally. This harsh treatment of the Palestinian people’s
historic leader was demeaning, as Ariel Sharon intended it to be. It also
confirmed the grave error the PLO had made in moving almost all of its
leadership into the Occupied Territories, where they were vulnerable to such
humiliations.
Coming after the collapse of
the Camp David summit, Israel’s reoccupation of the cities and towns of the
West Bank and Gaza Strip shattered any remaining pretense that the Palestinians
had or would acquire something approaching sovereignty or real authority over
any part of their land. It exacerbated the political differences among
Palestinians and underlined the absence of a viable alternative strategy,
revealing the failure of both the PLO’s diplomatic course and the armed
violence of Hamas and others. These events showed that Oslo had failed, that
the use of guns and suicide bombings had failed, and that for all the
casualties inflicted on Israeli civilians, the biggest losers in every way were
the Palestinians.
Another consequence was that
the terrible violence of the Second Intifada erased the positive image of
Palestinians that had evolved since 1982 and through the First Intifada and the
peace negotiations. With horrifying scenes of recurrent suicide bombings
transmitting globally (and with this coverage eclipsing that of the much
greater violence perpetrated against the Palestinians), Israelis ceased to be
seen as oppressors, reverting to the more familiar role of victims of
irrational, fanatical tormentors. The potent negative impact of the Second
Intifada for the Palestinians and the effect of suicide bombings on Israeli
opinion and politics certainly bear out the trenchant critique of the
Palestinians’ employment of violence expressed by Eqbal Ahmad back in the
1980s.
Such considerations were
undoubtedly far from the minds of the men (and a few women) who planned and
carried out these suicide bombings. It is possible to speculate on what they
sought to achieve, even while showing how flawed their aims were. Even if one
accepts their own narrative which sees suicide bombings as retaliation for
Israel’s indiscriminate use of live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators
for the first several weeks of the Second Intifada, and its attacks on
Palestinian civilians and assassinations in Gaza, that begs the question of
whether these bombings were meant to achieve anything more than blind revenge.
It also elides the fact that Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which launched two-thirds
of the suicide bombings during the intifada, had carried out over twenty such
attacks in the 1990s before Sharon’s visit to the Haram. It may be argued that
these attacks were meant to deter Israel. This is risible, given the
long-established doctrine of the Israeli military that irrespective of the
cost, it must gain the upper hand in any confrontation, and establish its
unchallenged capacity not only to deter its enemies, but to crush them. Sharon
did just that during the Second Intifada, faithfully implementing this
doctrine, as had Rabin before him during the First Intifada, although in that
previous case at great political cost, as Rabin himself recognized.
Equally risible is the idea
that such attacks on civilians were hammer blows that might lead to a
dissolution of Israeli society. This theory is based on a widespread but
fatally flawed analysis of Israel as a deeply divided and “artificial” polity,
which ignores the manifestly successful nation-building efforts of Zionism over
more than a century, as well as the cohesiveness of Israeli society in spite of
its many internal divisions. But the most important factor missing in whatever
calculations were being made by those who planned the bombings was the fact
that the longer the attacks continued, the more unified the Israeli public
became behind Sharon’s hard-line posture. In effect, suicide bombings served to
unite and strengthen the adversary, while weakening and dividing the
Palestinian side. By the end of the Second Intifada, according to reliable
polls, most Palestinians opposed this tactic. Thus, besides raising grave legal
and moral issues, and depriving the Palestinians of a positive media image, on
a strategic level these attacks were massively counterproductive. Whatever
blame attaches to Hamas and Islamic Jihad for the suicide bombings that
produced this fiasco, the PLO leadership that eventually followed suit must
also share it."[3]
Terrorism is morally reprehensible, it really is. And it
is no surprise that the more any side seeks to pursue it, either through
suicide bombing or other means, that they lose the moral high ground and provoke
a severe response. Hamas is an evil organization that the Palestinians need to
be freed from. They are causing more hurt and more pain to be brought on the Palestinian
people with every act of terror and violence they commit. One can only wonder
what the situation in Gaza might look like today if the Palestinian leaders had
stuck to a nonviolent response to Palestinian repression, rather than resorting
to the evil of terrorism.
The only thing that manages to mitigate, in any measure, this for the ordinary Palestinians is that the Israel Defence force is just as willing to use
violence as Hamas, and they are far more equipped to do it on a large scale. This
is why much of the world stage is turning against the nation of Israel. That which
applies to the use of unjustifiable force on the level of resistance, also applies
on the national scale to state forces that use too much force against the
resistance. The side which is perceived to be the most violent often loses,
because all opposition to it is easy to justify.
A nonviolent response to repression is far more successful
and far easier to support morally. Hamas proves this point. As long as they are
involved in the picture, I think things will get worse for the Palestinians and
ongoing war will be the result. This cycle of violence will only beget more violence. Pray that God raises up true peace makers in that region.
List of References
[1] Arabs
originated in Canaan, as much as Israelites did even if they eventually settled
further afield.
[3] Khalidi,
Rashid . The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: The New York Times Bestseller
(pp. 214-216). Profile. Kindle Edition.
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