A Mideast Window to Peace: Nonviolence

The Palestinian bus driver who rammed into a crowd of Israeli soldiers and commuters, killing eight of them, may have been responding to previous violence in which Palestinians were killed and wounded by Israeli troops. But that is no excuse. Violence against Israelis is not an appropriate response to the horrible repression, destruction of homes and livelihoods and shootings of Palestinians being inflicted systematically and daily by the Israeli army.

Most news accounts simply underplay the high rate of Palestinian deaths and casualties from the Israeli occupying force. So when a tragic event like this occurs, many Israelis have no context for it. They don’t know about the numbers of people killed by Israeli forces. But no matter how terrible the occupation and how racist the responses of Israelis and of many in the West who seem oblivious to Palestinian suffering imposed by the Israeli occupation, violence is never an appropriate response.

The most successful struggles waged against oppression of this sort have been those that have had a principled commitment to nonviolence. The Palestinian people should learn from and follow the example of Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas K. Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. In the final analysis, all those struggles were won because the nonviolence of the oppressed touched something deep in the hearts of the oppressors, dividing the community of those who were militarily more powerful and creating a sense of moral obligation to listen to the needs of the less powerful.

Violence, on the other hand, unites the occupier’s community and gives justification for using violence against the oppressed. It’s no use to say, “Well, they were doing that anyway.” If the goal is to undermine the ability of the superior military force to continue to act immorally, the occupied need to claim the higher moral ground, and that can be done only with nonviolence.

Of course, it’s not hard to see why Palestinians would see the election of Ariel Sharon as a statement by the majority of Israelis that they were endorsing more repression against Palestinians. Just like Yasser Arafat, Sharon has blood on his hands. But Palestinians are making a big mistake to write off the many Israelis who want peace.

And there is another reason to reject violence: because it’s morally wrong. The Palestinians who engage in violence are not only doing something that is self-destructive and stupid, but they also are doing something that is a moral outrage. Every human being is equally precious to God. Communicating that human life is sacred is the first step toward persuading your antagonist that real reconciliation is possible. For the same reasons, I condemn Israeli violence, which is an inevitable part of the occupation, and call for Israel to withdraw its troops and its settlers to the pre-1967 borders of Israel. Let the Palestinians have their own national self-determination, just as Jews have our self-determination in Israel.

Instead, Israel has set the worst possible example. It has used state terrorism against civilians. It has deployed its forces to kill individual Palestinians it considers dangerous. It has taken massive reprisals against the entire Palestinian population for the actions of a few. It has killed children who were throwing rocks. It has allowed its settlers to roam through Palestinian villages in quasi-pogrom fashion, doing violence and destruction.

When will this madness end? If history is any indication, the occupation is a lost cause. Eventually, the Israelis will be forced to give up occupying another people. But that won’t happen until the Palestinians have mobilized world opinion on their behalf, and that they cannot do while engaged in acts of violence.

Perhaps the most terrible thing that Israel ever did was to bring Arafat and his band of armed thugs back from Tunisia and impose them on the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat’s history of violence against Israelis is matched by violence against his own people. In arming him and giving him the ability to be the representative of the Palestinians, the Israelis cynically assured that they never would have to face the one thing that could defeat them: a morally based, nonviolent population willing to engage in massive nonviolent civil disobedience over a sustained period of time.

We can only hope that a new leadership will develop in Palestine with a new moral vision. But it’s a hard time to sell nonviolence in principle to those who remember the way that forces under Sharon massacred hundreds of civilians. This is going to be a difficult period. The message that supporters of Israel in the United States must convey to Israel is this: Your security is best achieved by reconciliation with the Palestinian people. And we who love Judaism cannot convince our children that its true message is about love, social justice, generosity, openheartedness and connection to deep spiritual truths if we continually are forced to defend as the embodiment of Jewishness a state that is becoming a worldwide symbol of insensitivity, anger and mean-spirited denial of the rights of others.