Palestinians need a Gandhi, not a new Arafat

One hundred years after Gandhi first experimented with non-violent tactics in South Africa, his approach to conflict resolution remains widely misunderstood. A wily lawyer who understood the nature of power and how to use it, Gandhi was no pacifist. He was a fighter. His aim, however, was to transform his opponents, not merely defeat them. Gandhi’s non-violent tactics won’t work everywhere. They couldn’t move a Stalin or a Hitler — or a Saddam Hussein. But Israel, like Britain in Gandhi’s time, is a nation that views itself as morally accountable and is therefore a perfect target for non-violent resistance. Already, there are inklings of a nascent non-violent movement among some Palestinians. The prisoners who embarked on a hunger strike at an Israeli prison borrowed a page from Gandhi’s playbook, knowingly or not. So have those who advocate a boycott of Israeli goods and peaceful protests against the wall that Israel is erecting along the West Bank.

But these actions haven’t gone far enough, and too often they have been overshadowed by the suicide bombings and other violent acts carried out by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other factions. These groups argue that the ends (a free Palestine) justify the means (violence). But Gandhi didn’t see it this way. He made no distinction between means and ends. For him, they were one and the same. If Gandhi were alive today, he would no doubt tell Arafat’s successor that freedom won through violence is no freedom.

By adopting non-violent tactics, the Palestinians would have plenty of company. Martin Luther King Jr. borrowed heavily from Gandhi during the US civil rights movement. The Philippines’ ‘‘people power’’ revolution, Solidarity in Poland and, more recently, the peaceful demonstrations in Serbia in 2000 are all successful examples of non-violent resistance. There are examples from the Muslim world as well. In the 1920s and ’30s Abdul Ghaffar Khan used non-violent methods to resist British occupation along what is now the Pakistani-Afghan border. Recently, Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani used his moral standing to peacefully end the standoff at the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. Why can’t the Palestinians be next?

True, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are not likely to adopt non-violent tactics, at least not immediately, and even mainstream Palestinians worry that ‘‘non-violent resistance would look like a form of surrender.’’ Gandhi would counter that such resistance is a continuation of the struggle, only through different means. Pictures of unarmed Palestinians lying down before bulldozers about to raze their homes or marching up to the gates of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza — unarmed and completely peacefully — would be powerful images that could do more to advance the Palestinian cause than 100 suicide bombings.

It wouldn’t be easy. In fact, non-violence is in many ways more difficult to practice than violence. Many Palestinians might die in the process, perhaps in greater numbers than they are dying now. On this, Gandhi was clear-eyed. He and his followers were willing to die for their cause, like the Hamas suicide bombers. Unlike the Hamas bombers, they were not willing to kill for it — under any circumstances.

After years of terrorism, the world would, understandably, cast a wary eye toward a new Palestinian leader espousing non-violence. But once this non-violent intifada, or what some Muslims are calling a ‘‘civil jihad,’’ took hold, it would enable the Palestinians to reclaim the moral high ground and garner international support. And surely Israel wouldn’t object to a shift away from violence. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ripe for Gandhi-style civil disobedience. That’s a fact that Arafat was unable — or unwilling — to grasp. It is one that his successor would be wise to embrace.

LAT-WP