THE MIDDLE EAST:
The power and danger of nonviolent protest

By ANGIE O'GORMAN
Monday, Jul. 26 2004

Volunteers attempting peaceful resistance to Israeli-Palestinian conflict are met with force by Israel's military.

I am neither Jewish nor Palestinian, which gives me either more or less objectivity when thinking about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. My only personal involvement in the issue is that my tax dollars are paying for large swaths of the ongoing bloodshed and horror. Last fall, I went to the West Bank to see my tax dollars at work. This month, I will return.

Because I have not lived in Israel, I do not know what it is like to enter a bus or restaurant wondering if I will be alive when it is time to leave. Enlarge this gnawing anxiety beyond buses and restaurants to anywhere at any time. Add tanks, bulldozers, missiles fired into neighborhoods, armored personal carriers, checkpoints between you and everywhere you need to go, trigger happy 18-year-old soldiers, tear gas, concussion sound bombs and bullets exploding into shrapnel. This is the fear Palestinians live with under the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Our understanding of this conflict tends to be constructed around two apparent opposites: Israel's right to exist and Palestinian terrorism. Yet the inverse is also true: Palestine's right to exist and Israeli terrorism. This we don't talk about much.

Nor do we talk about efforts on both sides to build grass-roots alternatives to terrorism. Given all the verbal condemnations of terrorism, this silence is astounding. It is also dangerous. Nonviolent struggle pits unarmed civilians against armed government force, and the safety of participants depends on support from the wider community.

This summer, several Israeli and Palestinian groups have been working together in the West Bank to apply nonviolence against the Israeli occupation at checkpoints, the wall, house demolitions, refugee camps and roadblocks. You would think the United States and Israel would hail this effort. Yet our
government and media are silent, and the Israeli authorities are responding with armed force.

Unless one believes that all Palestinians, or all who oppose the occupation, belong to Hamas, which is clearly not the case, how can one explain this violent response to unarmed, nonviolent resistance? If an alternative to terrorism is an Israeli goal, Palestinian nonviolence should be a dream come true. Or are Palestinians not allowed any right of defense against the occupation?

Extremists on both sides deny the right of the other to exist. But the majority of people on both sides are not extremists. They want to live safely on a land of their own without suicide bombers and missiles from the sky. Working out a modus operandi through which Palestinian nonviolence is met with Israeli nonviolence could help break the current bankruptcy of mutual terrorism. Why play to the extremists when there is a viable alternative?

Angie O'Gorman of St. Louis works with immigrants and refugees. She leaves this month to participate with Israelis and Palestinians in the Freedom Summer Campaign on the West Bank.