'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Good recent resources on Palestinians and nonviolence

Ten days ago I had the pleasure of attending a book event for Mary E. King, in connection with the recent publication of her book A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (New York: Nation Books, 2007).  Mary is a long-time friend and colleague, and this book is a compendious mine of information on its subject. 

Once I decided to write something here about Mary's book, I thought it would also be a good idea to discuss with the people who were my collaborators and co-authors in the International Quaker Working Party on Israel and Palestine of 2002-2004, to see if we could also put up onto the web the great chapter on Nonviolence in our 2004 book When the Rain Returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel.  So I consulted with Tony Bing, who was the principal author of that chapter and with the 12 other-- mainly Quaker-- people who were the other co-authors of the book project; and now, I am happy to be able to do this. (Sadly, our friend Misty Gerner, who was a wonderful colleague on the project, passed away in 2006.  So I consulted with her widower and literary executor, Phil Schrodt, in her place.)

The good news, therefore: You can now access our Nonviolence chapter here in HTML format and here as a Word doc.  Please note the licensing conditions at the top there -- as well as the instructions for how you can order a copy of the whole of our book, which is certainly still worth reading!

... Mary King brought to her book a long engagement in both the practice and the study of nonviolence.  Back in the early 1960s she was one of "a tiny handful" of white women from the northern American states who traveled to the south to work with the Southern racial eqaulity movement called the "civil rights movement" that was led by Martin Luther King, Jr..  Her memoir of those days, Freedom Song, later won the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award.  Her second book was Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., which surveyed not only the nonviolent freedom movements led by those two men but also half a dozen more recent nonviolent movements for radical social change.  Along the way she also got a doctorate in the topic of the role of nonviolence in international relations.  She has been closely involved in Middle Eastern issues for many years and has done numerous projects with President Jimmy Carter's Carter Center.  Indeed, Carter contributed a short Foreword to Mary's latest book.

Reading the book brought back so many memories for me!  The first intifada, which ran from 1987 through 1993, truly was a time of enormous social, organizational, and ideological excitement for the Palestinians of the occupied territories-- as it was, too, for those Israeli sympathizers who were mounting their own nonviolent actions within Israel, with a view to "Ending the Occupation" and "Bringing the Troops Home."  I spent two periods of time in Palestine and Israel in those years: one visit that lasted two months or so, as I recall it, in the summer of 1989, and then a shorter visit in 1992.  Actually, in 1989, I started off doing some research oin the nonviolent movements on both sides of the Green Line--  work that was subsequently published in two articles in the short-lived "Wolrd Monitor" monthly magazine... (I should really look them out and re-read them.)  But then I became fascinated with the relationship between the people inside the OPTs who were running and leading their own intifada there and the PLO leadership that was stuck in distant Tunis; and I published an article on that topic in the Spring 1990 issue of the Middle East Journal.

A couple of aspects of Mary's book are particularly noteworthy.  One was the way she was able to convey just how widespread and all-encompassing the mass organizing was that lay at the heart of the resilience the Palestinians showed in the first intifada.  For example, she has a whole chapter on "Women at the forefront of nonviolent struggles" during the intifada, and another on the "Movements of students, prisoners, and work committees."  Actually, a really good complement to these chapters is Joost Hiltermann's classic 1993 book Behind the Intifada which provided a very rich account of the development of the many kinds of mass organizations in the OPTs in the years before 1987 as well as (as I recall it) during the early years of the first intifada.

Another notable aspect of Mary's book is that at many points it underlines the huge role that was played during the first intifada by the activist Palestinian intellectuals who were based in occupied East Jerusalem.  Back in those days, the "special" status the Israelis acorded to East Jerusalem by virtue of their claim that it was "part of" Israel meant that the city's 150,000 indigenous Palestinian residents had broad freedoms to travel, both inside Israel and throughout the West Bank; and even down to Gaza-- that their compatriots in the rest of the occupied territories did not have.  Because of those freedoms, and because East Jerusalem really still was in so many ways the historic business, religious, and educational hub of the whole of the West Bank, as it had been since the nakba of 1948, the city's community leaders played a huge role not only in coordinating but also in leading the actions of the first intifada.

As I have noted several times before, it was only after Oslo that the Israelis started erecting a ring of steel around East Jerusalem, cutting it off in any way they could think of from its historic West Bank hinterland and forcing many aspects of the city's life to wither on the vine.  Since Israel was at the same time also building the fence that started to completely enclose Gaza, the residents of East Jerusalem then became effectively shut off from that other main concentration of the "also-occupied" among the Palestinians.  Thus, since Oslo, the Jerusalem Palestinians have been cast into a cut-off form of limbo, and their once-proud institutions have been either suffocated or-- as in so many cases-- shut down completely by the occupation authorities, even while the building of Jews-only settlements and Israeli ministries and other forms of national institutions has continued apace within every corner of the city...

So there is a particular poignancy to reading Mary's account of the crucial and exciting leadership role the Jerusalem Palestinians played in the first intifada.

Her book is very broad, very detailed, and meticulously researched.  I might wish, though, that she had taken the story a couple of steps further and added a couple of chapters about what happened at the end of the first intifada, that is, effectively, what happened with the September 1993 signing of the Oslo Accord and then, hot on its heels, the "Return" of the PLO leadership from Tunis to the OPTs.  In our chapter on Nonviolence in When the Rain Returns we wrote quite a lot about that, because we judged it to be an important part of the whole long story of nonviolence activism among the Palestinians.

Regarding what became of the Palestinians' use of, and attitudes towards, nonviolence as the intifada ground on and on, we wrote:

• ... As the intifada dragged on into its fourth and fifth years with no respite in sight, the Palestinians’ use of physical violence mounted--both against the Israelis and to try to resolve differences of opinion inside Palestinian society.  National unity started to erode, as national exhaustion set in.
• The activists and leaders of the intifada had all along resisted the urgings of Israeli and U.S. government officials that they negotiate their own future themselves, without involving the exiled PLO.  “Only the PLO can represent us,” they stated repeatedly.  In 1993, they got what they had asked for: Israel did finally conclude the Oslo Accords directly with the PLO.   Once Arafat and his colleagues “returned” to the occupied territories, however, they proved a hugely damaging disappointment for the people there.  Long used to the secretive, authoritarian ways of an exile-based underground, Arafat almost immediately felt threatened by the network of community organizations he found in Gaza and the West Bank.  As Raji Sourani reminded us in Gaza, Arafat then set about working to dismantle the very community-based organizations whose grassroots activism had brought him back to his homeland.

We also have a whole section there on the debate that raged inside the Palestinian movement on the question of nonviolence, in the decade after 1993.