Refusing to be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation <\/i>(Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2011)<\/p>\n
The book of Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta comes at an opportune time when the US Secretary of State John Kerry is making a concerted effort to mediate in the Israeli-Palestine tensions.\u00a0 As Dore Gold, president of the Jersualem Center for Public Affairs and former Israeli negotiator has said \u201cThere is a consensus in Israel favoring a Palestinian state, but not along the 1967 borders (as the Palestinian leadership insists); not with East Jerusalem as its capital (a cornerstone of every Palestinian plan); and not without maintaining an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley (which Palestinians reject as a challenge to their sovereignty).\u201d\u00a0 Gold could have added that there is no consensus within Israel about a \u201cPalestinian right-to-return beyond not discussing it.<\/p>\n
Moreover, the Israel-Palestine issues are only part of a wider Middle East picture.\u00a0 As Ursula Franklin points out in the Foreword \u201cOurs is a complex global society, in which unforeseen and unforeseeable instruments of power, control and interaction are emerging at rapid rates.\u00a0 These new power structures are frequently superimposed on traditional arrangements and habits of political and social conduct.\u00a0 Such new developments, often related to modernization and globalization, are altering individual and collective behaviours and a society\u2019s sense of belonging and responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her insight is elaborated in the Israel-Palestine context by the Palestinian activist Elias Rishmawi who says \u201cThe world, with globalization, is becoming a small village, then the whole Middle East is what? Israel\/Palestine is what?\u00a0 We are talking here about a small land and a small population.\u00a0 We need to come up with a certain vision that will help both of us to think that without having peace, justice, and equality, there will be no solution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maxime Kaufman-Lacusta has developed through interviews and quotations from talks given at conferences on non-violent action in Israel-Palestine a fascinating book \u2014 an extended evaluation session on tactics and strategies among Palestinians and Israeli activists along with \u201cinternationals\u201d \u2014 Europeans and Americans usually associated with International Solidarity Movement to which belonged Rachel Corrie who was killed in a house demolition protest.<\/p>\n
Maxime is interested in how people became involved in non-violent action, in their family history and their beliefs, how they evaluate the overall situation and the effectiveness of the aims and the tactics. However, the emphasis is on improving the effectiveness of action by asking about individual\u2019s evaluation of the overall situation, the aims, the strategy, the tactics, the effectiveness of the actions and the value of cooperation between Israelis, Palestinians and internationals.\u00a0 \u201cDespite its relative marginality and other impediments to its successes, the non-violent movement has chalked up some notable victories over the years.\u00a0 And even it these have been relatively small when compared to the magnitude of the task, they provide a good entry point for a foray into some speculation on the potential for non-violent struggle in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
For most, Israel Occupation means the land and processes put into effect after the 1967 war with the occupation of the \u201cWest Bank\u201d which had been under the control of Jordan, Gaza and Sinai under Egyptian rule and the Golan Heights, part of Syria \u2014 thus 46 years of \u201cOccupation\u201d. For some, especially Palestinians, occupation begins in 1948 and the Arab refugee flows from villages now in the State of Israel.\u00a0 Discussions on the implementation of the \u201cRight to Return\u201d \u2014 an important Palestinian demand \u2014 concerns if a return should be to the Israeli areas which the Palestinians had left or rather a return to the potential Palestinian State \u2014 basically the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or rather monetary compensation for property lost.<\/p>\n
The first working title of the book was to have been \u201cFrom Beit Sahour to Bil\u2019im\u201d, but the title would have been understood only by those who recalled the town of Beit Sahour\u2019s sustained tax strike in the late 1980s and the continuing weekly protests at Bil\u2019in against the \u201cSeparation Wall\u201d which would deprive Palestinian farmers of access to their lands and land confiscation.<\/p>\n
The title Refusing to be Enemies <\/i>\u00a0may give the impression that the focus will be on attitudes, on the refusal to make the Other the Enemy. However, there is relatively little emphasis on psychology. Gene Sharp is the spiritual \u201cgodfather\u201d with some extended quotations of his talks at seminars in Palestine with Mubarak Awad as the person who had translated into Arabic and distributed widely Sharp\u2019s list of potential actions \u2014 until Mubarak Awad was deported in 1988 from Israel to the USA.\u00a0 However MPubarak Awad had planted many of the seeds which later flowered in part through his nephew Sami Awad of the Holy Land Trust whose observations are often quoted stressing that \u201cNonviolence is not just weapons to resist the occupation; it is how to build the community of the future, how to resolve internal problems, how to unify the different factions and different ideas that you have in your community, which is a very big problem for us today.\u201d<\/p>\n
Originally in much of the Palestinian community non-violence was considered as submissive, as a way for Israel and the West to pacify the Palestinian people. However, little by little, the main thrust of Gene Sharp\u2019s non-violent strategic action which is the power to say \u201cNo\u201d has progressed so that now many Palestinians see non-violence as an active tool to resist and end the occupation.\u00a0 The key to Sharp\u2019s approach is the fundamental proposition that \u201cWithdrawal of popular and institutional cooperation diminishes, and may sever, the availability of the sources of power on which all rulers depend.\u201d\u00a0 Building on this fundamental insight, largely proposed by Mahatma Gandhi, one must then analyse correctly the sources of power on which rulers depend and then develop methods and strategies to weaken or counteract these sources of power \u2014 financial, military, ideological, economic, intellectual etc.<\/p>\n
At first glance, the sources of Israel power, largely backed by the USA, seem strong, and many Palestinians are discouraged by the lack of progress and the inability to make a dent in the power equation.\u00a0 As one Palestinian activist, Zoughbi Zoughbi, director of Wi\u2019am said \u201cThe Palestinians are hitting bottom.\u00a0 There should be a jump-start, a way to have hope, maybe to inject hope in people.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how. Because you need to see progress, and what we see is a lot of retrogression. The Israeli right-wing government is doing a lot of illegal things \u2014 building settlements, building a wall \u2014 so people say non-violence won\u2019t work.\u00a0 The question is, would violence work?\u201d<\/p>\n
However, as we have seen from the \u201cArab Spring\u201d and as we may be seeing these days in such countries as Turkey, Brazil and Greece, it may be possible to weaken radically the sources of power in a relatively short time and in most cases with non-violent methods.\u00a0 What is more difficult is how to establishes new sources of power \u2014 hopefully more just and participative sources of power.\u00a0 Many of the non-violent techniques discussed by those interviewed in this book are good at weakening power. There is relatively little discussion as to what happens next.<\/p>\n
The interview-conversation style of the book gives the feeling of sitting in an extended planning and evaluation session with non-violent activists.\u00a0 As would be true in practice, there is some repetition of ideas and some broad generalizations.\u00a0 However, the issues are crucial, and Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta has done an excellent job of bulling the discussions together and highlighting the basic questions and approaches. This is a book well worth reading carefully.<\/p>\n
__________________________<\/p>\n
Ren\u00e9 Wadlow, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and of its Task Force on the Middle East, is president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of\u00a0World\u00a0Citizens. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Refusing to be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2011). The book of Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta comes at an opportune time when the US Secretary of State John Kerry is making a concerted effort to mediate in the Israeli-Palestine tensions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}