A
way for Arafat to turn
the tables non-violently
By
Jonathan
Power
April 11, 2002
LONDON - As Israeli tanks roam at will through
Palestinian territory, it is apparent to all but the most
blinded that the ability of Yasser Arafat and his people
to regain the initiative has never been more
circumscribed. No one doubts the power of the Palestinian
militants to inflict enormous pain on Israeli civilians.
No one should minimise the sheer fear that runs through
everyday Israeli family life.
Indeed, no one should be surprised if tens of
thousands of young highly educated families pack up their
bags and join other Israelis in the modern day diasporas
of places like the San Francisco Bay area where some
30,000 of them have already built new - and safer -
lives. And no one should feign surprise if, among battle
hardened veterans of previous Israeli campaigns, the
number of peaceniks begins to grow.
But the truth is however large the peace movement or
the rush-to-escape movement becomes, the majority of
Israelis have made it clear they will fight to the death.
They certainly won't be driven into the sea and they are
not going to vote for politicians to make peace with the
Palestinians until Arafat and his lieutenants make caste
iron guarantees that terrorism and the suicide bomber are
going to be banned for ever into the future.
Arafat seemingly faces a difficult but deciding
choice. Either to continue to encourage a violent
response to the brutal and savage Israeli military
machine, perhaps hoping that in the end that enough of it
will provoke other Arab countries to come to his aid,
perhaps even to fight another Middle East War even though
it could end, if Israel faced the likelihood of being
overrun, with Israel's use of nuclear weapons. Or to
create the atmospherics that make the negotiation of
Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia's peace plan a
possibility.
But this depends on finding a method that can almost
literally turn the tables on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,
make him run for political cover, and make him like putty
in the hands of the combined energies of a war-weary
electorate, and the diplomatic muscle of a joint
American, European, and Russian push for a final
settlement. Sharon will only change his spots if he faces
ejection from office by an electorate that has moved to
the left of him.
But to get to the point of such negotiations is
enormously difficult, given the mood of intransigence
that now permeates Israel. But there is a way: to
repudiate the tactics of violence and to confront Israeli
might with organized non-violence as Gandhi did with the
British colonialist master with his Salt March, and
Martin Luther King did with his march across Pettus
bridge in the face of massive police violence, an act of
defiance that precipitated the intervention of the
American federal government to overturn the policies of
black disenfranchisement of the southern states.
Imagine what the political chemistry would be if
Arafat, a leader now at the height of his charismatic
powers thanks to the Israeli invasion, having pressed the
militants to call off their suicide bombers and guerrilla
attacks, massed hundreds of thousands of ordinary,
unarmed Palestinian families and surrounded the Israeli
tanks with ranks of men, women and children who would sit
on the ground and block their movement?
At the same time other hundreds of thousands would
block the Israeli roads leading across the border to
prevent the arrival of reinforcements. And other hundreds
of thousands would block the movement of the earth
diggers, cranes and construction crews working on
settlement expansion. What if the PLO used its
organizational strengths to make sure, as the warmer
spring weather arrives, these human shields could survive
the night without leaving their non-violent sieges with
food, water, latrines and medical help?
David Shipler, the former New York Times Pulitzer
prize winning Middle East correspondent, has written of
how "It is hard to get a clear view from the wrong end of
a gun. So most Palestinians have been unable to see the
conscience that runs strongly beneath the surface of
Israeli brutality. Palestine leaders have never
understood the power of shame, which Dr King used as
leverage against white America. They have never
comprehended how malleable Israel could become to fulfil
its yearning for virtue and acceptance. Instead they have
made sure that Israelis don't feel safe, and when you
don't feel safe, you don't feel flexible."
Needless to say, the kind of defensive non-violence
described above would have to be matched by aggressive
verbal non-violence in appealing to the Israelis to
negotiate. It would mean telling the Israelis loudly that
the Palestinians want to live in peace, that they don't
want to drive Israel into the sea or overpower it with
vast numbers of returning refugees. Indeed, everyone on
both sides knows what has to be said to flesh out Prince
Abdullah's proposal - it was all worked out at Taba, the
post Camp David negotiation that almost reached unanimous
agreement, but which was sabotaged by the opinion polls
that showed correctly that Prime Minister Ehud Barak was
about to go down to a massive defeat.
Imagine, if this happened. Imagine if the peace
demonstrations now growing larger every weekend on the
streets of Europe were strengthened by the presence of
senior figures from western governments and that this
movement spread to North America, Japan and Russia. Would
the Israeli electorate then refuse to negotiate? Wouldn't
they push Sharon aside if he got in their way? I truly
believe so.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
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link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
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"Like
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