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Popular Protest in Palestine
The Uncertain Future of Unarmed Resistance
Marwan Darweish, Andrew Rigby
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eBook - ePub
Popular Protest in Palestine
The Uncertain Future of Unarmed Resistance
Marwan Darweish, Andrew Rigby
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About This Book
This is a thoughtful and sensitive analysis of the history and significance of non-violent civil resistance in the Palestinian national movement. It shows how the thread of unarmed struggle has run through the history of Palestinian liberation, from the establishment of the Israeli state, through the Nakba and to the present day. Set in this historical context, the book draws upon personal conversations and living history in order to focus on the contemporary movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. By analysing this under-emphasised dimension of the Palestinian struggle, the authors argue that today, the popular resistance movement, especially in the West Bank, is the most significant form of struggle against the ongoing occupation. They also address the international dimensions of the struggle, focusing in particular on the BDS campaign, the role of Israeli and international solidarity activists, and the changing forms of engagement developed by international agencies seeking to work on the roots of the conflict.
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1
INTRODUCTION
In 1989 one of the authors (Marwan Darweish) interviewed an activist in Gaza. It was at the height of the Palestinian popular uprising against occupation, the first intifada – a time of high hopes and great expectations for Palestinians. The interviewee commented, ‘You sense that the leadership is not separate from the Palestinian people, but that it is present everywhere. … You feel a unity and an amazing solidarity which differs from anything else we have felt in the twenty or so years since the PLO was formed.’1
At around the same time Andrew Rigby was interviewing a former political prisoner living in the refugee camp at Far’a in the West Bank. This informant echoed the sense of solidarity and hope expressed by his Gazan contemporary as he described the key feature of the popular resistance at that time: ‘Everyone helps each other … all the people have the same way now, the same struggle against the occupation – from the children to the old men, all the same, they want to get rid of the occupation. One soul through many bodies, through many voices.’2
More than 20 years after these interviews took place both authors interviewed a senior Fatah official and member of the Palestinian Authority (PA) at his offices in Ramallah. We were trying to discover how such a person in a leadership position within the party and the administration viewed the spread of popular resistance that had started amidst the violence of the second intifada in opposition to the construction of the Separation Wall and had spread to challenge settlement expansion and land expropriation in other parts of the West Bank. Like the politician he was, he provided us with an up-beat assessment:
Popular resistance is spreading and intensifying … we are planning a more comprehensive approach to nonviolence which will include not just demonstrations but other areas such as the economic boycott of all Israeli goods, not just settlement produce. This will impact on Israel. The aim is to create a culture of popular resistance, a way of living. … We are planning a publication on how to become part of the popular resistance. … There is a degree of consensus amongst all the parties on the importance of popular resistance. Even Hamas supports this form of resistance. In the reconciliation talks between the PA and Hamas this strategy was accepted and agreed.
Nearly two years later, in November 2013, we interviewed another senior Fatah member and district governor with the PA. He was far less sanguine in his assessment of the ‘state of play’ with regard to popular resistance (the term used by Palestinians to refer to their civilian-based unarmed resistance to occupation):
If there was a massive popular resistance, there is a possibility of success. … As a Fatah person I feel that if we do not lead the movement, then it will not move – but Fatah has no programme, so how can we lead? We need a plan, not just an ad hoc reaction to events. But some of the leaders have a personal interest in the status quo. … There is a price to be paid in resistance, and the leaders should be to the fore. It should not just be the people paying the price. So this is part of the cycle of mistrust. People want to see their leaders to the fore, as an example to people on the ground. … At the moment popular resistance is very localised, every Friday the same few villages, the same thing. It is not popular as it does not include the mass of people. If we were serious we would make life hell for the settlers, blocking the roads, making the soldiers work. That would be popular resistance.
Through the voices captured in these four quotes we can begin to grasp the trajectory followed by many Palestinians over the past quarter of a century: from a time of hope in the late 1980s and early 1990s when there was confidence in the power of popular unarmed resistance as a means of bringing an end to the Israeli occupation, through to the waning of that hope and the acknowledgement of the weakness of leadership that has accompanied the failure of the wave of popular resistance that started in 2002 to halt the construction of the Separation Wall. The aim of this book is to delve deeper into the dynamics of this trajectory by examining the Palestinian struggle against occupation through the lens of unarmed civilian-based resistance.
THE RESEARCH PROCESS
Both authors have had a personal and professional interest in the role that unarmed civilian resistance might play in bringing an end to the occupation since the 1980s. As part of this involvement we have made repeated family and research/consultancy related visits to the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel itself. Over time our friendships with Palestinian and Israeli activists have deepened and our contact lists have grown accordingly. In late 2010 we felt that Palestinian interest in unarmed modes of popular resistance had grown to such an extent that the time might be ripe for an in-depth study of the potentialities (and limitations) of such an approach, in the context of the disaster of the second intifada and the clear indications that the so-called ‘peace negotiations’ were leading nowhere. So it was with that intention that we made contact once again with our friends and associates. From them we gathered a basic guide to the main sites of contestation within the West Bank and contact details for key members of local popular resistance committees in each location. Essentially these consisted of those villages that had been active in the struggle to protect their land and their well-being by trying to stop the advance of the Separation Wall; those were the sites where Palestinians had been inspired by the resistance to the Wall and had taken up the struggle to resist the expansion of local settlements that threatened to expropriate more of their land, and those sites – both rural and urban – in territory designated by the Oslo Accords of 1995 as Area C where Palestinians were engaged in an ongoing struggle to protect not just their land but also their homes and their way of life from the assaults of Israeli settlers supported by the Israeli occupation forces.
Starting in 2011 we began to make contact with these local activists, and we stayed in touch with them through to late 2013 when the main body of our fieldwork was completed. During the early period of our fieldwork we shared with our respondents their sense of hope that the struggle against the occupation was taking on a new power with the spread of resistance to new sites. As one of our contacts observed, ‘We came alive in the first intifada. Then we died in the second. Maybe now we are being reborn.’ But over the following months we witnessed the decline in people’s hopes and expectations regarding the leverage power of popular resistance as a means of dislodging the Israeli occupation. This was not something we wanted to experience – like them we had been energised and enthused and so we also shared in the disappointment felt by many who had come to acknowledge that for all their initiative, courage and struggle, they had not managed to impact on Israeli publics and decision makers who remained as committed as ever to the continuation of the occupation and the accompanying abuse of Palestinian human rights. So our focus changed – from trying to understand the factors that had led to an upsurge in popular resistance we had, by late 2013, begun to spend more time with our informants looking backwards in an attempt to understand why the movement had failed to make any appreciable progress towards achieving its basic objective of bringing the occupation to an end.
Accordingly, the analysis that is developed in the following pages is based very much on the insights and judgements of the activists themselves. Each of the face-to-face interviews and conversations – of which there were in excess of one hundred – with Palestinian and Israeli activists, politicians and opinion leaders was carried out in either their own language (Arabic and Hebrew) or in English.3 Marwan, being proficient in all three languages, would normally take the lead in the interviews. If the medium was Arabic or Hebrew, he would also provide Andrew with a simultaneous translation in English, with Andrew busily scribbling notes and checking that the voice recorder was still operating. The notes and the recordings were then transcribed, coded and analysed using one of the standard social science software programmes for the analysis of qualitative data. We gave considerable thought to whether or not we should provide basic source references for the quotations taken from the interviews, which we have used throughout the book. In the end we decided that our paramount concern should be to avoid any actions that might undermine the security of our informants, and this required taking all reasonable measures to guard their identities.
Our approach to the study was informed not just by our long-term personal and professional involvement with different aspects of Palestinian resistance to occupation, but also by our deep value-commitment to nonviolent means of struggle for peace and justice. However, it became very clear early in our fieldwork that Palestinian activists were uncomfortable when we talked about ‘nonviolent resistance’. As one of them explained, ‘When we started we used the language of popular resistance. We did not want to use the term nonviolence – we practised it but did not talk about it. We try to internalise it, so that it becomes part of our culture, but the word itself sounds strange.’ Accordingly we have tended to use the term ‘popular resistance’ to refer to the civilian-based modes of resistance pursued by Palestinians. Moreover, we ourselves felt that nonviolence was not the most appropriate term to use to refer to the methods of resistance typically pursued by Palestinians. In normal usage nonviolent resistance involves a refusal to inflict, or threaten to inflict, direct physical harm or injury upon an opponent in a conflict situation.4 Consequently it has to be acknowledged that many of the clashes that have taken place between Palestinians and Israeli occupying forces and settlers have not been nonviolent insofar as stone-throwing by Palestinians has become a standard part of their repertoire of protest in such situations.5
CIVIL RESISTANCE STUDIES
Our analysis was also informed by the body of literature on civil resistance to tyranny and injustice that has grown in recent years. Most definitions of civil or civilian resistance emphasise that it is a mode of challenging opponents that are not averse to using violence by civilians, relying on the sustained use of methods that are predominantly nonviolent, unarmed or ‘non-military’ in nature, in pursuit of goals that are widely shared within the society.6 It has been noted by a number of scholars and commentators that there has been something of a surge in publications on civil resistance in recent years.7 For example, April Carter observed in 2012 that ‘the increasing number of unarmed resistance struggles in recent decades has led to a growing literature discussing the theory, strategy and methods of such resistance and describing individual movements.’8 Much of this work draws on the original contribution of Gene Sharp who began publishing on nonviolent resistance in the 1950s and whose three-volume study, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973) remains a keynote work in the field.9 More recently the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan has received attention with their evidence-based claims that over the past century nonviolent forms of resistance to oppressive regimes have been more likely to succeed than violent forms of insurrection and armed struggle, a fact that they have attributed primarily to the higher rates of popular participation possible in nonviolent struggles compared with violent ones.10 However, the prime focus of such works has been on unarmed civilian-based resistance to authoritarian domestic regimes by citizens struggling for democratic change. Thus, a recent study by Sharon Nepstad focuses solely on such domestic ‘uprisings’, arguing that the key determinant of success in such struggles is security force defections.11 It is a stimulating study, but the models presented in this and other works are of limited relevance as frameworks for the analysis of cases of unarmed resistance against foreign domination and occupation.
There have been a host of books written about resistance to occupation in continental Europe during the Second World War, but only a limited number have focused on unarmed resistance during that period. Those that have included such a concern within their frame of reference have proven to be particular helpful for our purposes. Jacques Semelin’s work on civilian resistance in Europe during the period 1939–43 has been a source of considerable insight which has informed our study. Particularly important has been his understanding that the aim of unarmed resistance to Nazi occupation was never that of defeating the occupier by nonviolent struggle. People realised that they lacked the means to drive them out. Rather:
The goal of this spontaneous struggle was instead to preserve the collective identity of the attacked societies; that is to say, their fundamental values. ... When a society feels less and less submissive, it becomes more and more uncontrollable. Then, even if the occupier keeps its power, it loses its authority. This expresses how much civilian resistance consisted primarily of a clash of wills, expressing above all a fight for values.12
Hence, the prime aim of civil resistance was to deny the occupier’s claims to legitimacy, whilst waiting for eventual liberation that was expected to come from outside intervention by the armed allied forces. So, for Semelin, the first act of resistance is ‘to find the strength to say NO without necessarily having a clear idea of what one wants.’13 From this perspective the core of resistance is the determination not to give in to the will of the aggressor for, as Semelin has argued, ‘The founding act of a resistance process against an occupation is basically an affirmation of the superiority of the de jure authority over the de facto one.’14
Another study of civilian resistance to occupation that has been a key source has been Werner Rings’ examination of different types of collaboration and resistance in occupied Europe during the Second World War.15 Rings’ work helped us develop our categorisation...