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By
Samah Jabr
Samah Jabr is a physician and writer who lives in East Jerusalem.
The overwhelming and ceaseless atrocities of Israel’s government leave most
Palestinians with little opportunity to reflect on the moral aspect of our
resistance. Most often our reactions to events are immediate, instinctive
and emotional. The few who still manage to consider the moral, political and
strategic aspects of our struggle may find themselves all but stymied by the
contradictions, the lack of choice, and the damage done by war to both
reason and conscience.
How can Palestinian resistance be fairly assessed, then, with due
consideration given to the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict? The occupation of Palestine is based on a 19th century ideology
that denied the very existence of the Palestinian people and pursued a
colonial agenda asserting divine claims to a “land without a people.” In
response to this “Theo-colonial” aggression, the Palestinian resistance
adopted the strategy of “a protracted people’s war” to regain recognition
as a dispossessed, rather than “nonexistent” nation.
To this day Palestinians still have no state or armed forces. Our occupiers
subject us to curfews, expulsions, home demolitions, legalized torture, and
a highly imaginative assortment of human rights violations. No justifiable
comparison can be drawn between the level of official accountability to
which Palestinans are held for the actions of a few individuals and the
responsibility for the systematic and intense violence against the entire
Palestinian population practiced with impunity by the state of Israel.
The American media call our search for freedom “terrorism,” thus casting the
Palestinian in the role of the international prototype for the terrorist.
This has shaped Western public consciousness and resulted in an
international bias that tends to describe instances of violence against
Palestinian civilians in neutral language, reducing Palestinian losses to
mere faceless statistics, while using emotional language and visuals to
describe Israeli losses.
This distortion of the Palestinian resistance has clouded all reasonable
dialogue. Many of our efforts to defy the arbitrary rules of the occupier
are reflexively dismissed as “terrorism,” and we are always expected to
apologize for and condemn Palestinian resistance—despite the lack of
agreement on a definition of terrorism, and the fact that the right to
self-determination by armed struggle is permissible under the United Nations
Charter’s Article 51, concerning self-defense.
Why is the word “terrorism” so readily applied to individuals or groups who
use homemade bombs, but not to states using nuclear and
otherinternationally prohibited weapons to ensure submission to the
oppressor? Israel, the United States and Britain should top the list of ting
states for their use of armed attacks against non-combatants in Palestine,
Iraq, Sudan and other parts of the world. But “terrorism” is a political
term used by the colonizer to discredit those who resist—as the Afrikaaners
and Nazis named the Black and French freedom fighters, respectively.
There also is a trend among those who oppose Palestinian resistance to use
the term jihad” as a synonym for terrorism. In doing so, they reduce the
meaning of jihad to mere death. Jihad is a rich concept which includes
struggling against one’s lesser self, the effort to do good deeds, actively
opposing injustice, and being patient in times of hardship. It is not about
violence against God’s creatures, or not fearing death in defending the
rights of God’s creations. Violence can, however, be a rational human’s
means of defense. When a woman reacts violently when threatened with rape,
that is a form of jihad. Moreover, jihad is an Islamic value—and not all
Palestinian fighters are Muslims. The reason why young, sincere altruistic
Palestinians blow themselves up is a secret they take with them to the
grave. Perhaps it is the strange fruit of revenge growing in the fertile
soil of oppression and occupation, or their profound protest against
merciless cruelty; or a desperate attempt at attaining equality with
Israelis in death, since it is impossible for them in life. Those who live
under inhuman conditions all their lives are, unfortunately, capable of
inhuman acts. What is left for the homeless thousands in Rafah except their
resistance? It is not Islam; it is human nature, shared by religious,
secular and agnostic Palestinian men and women. Certainly our women bombers
do not die in the expectation of 70 virgins awaiting them in Paradise.
Another factor influencing Palestinian resistance is the gloomy history of
peace talks and the lack of international support. Negotiations with Israel
have given us nothing but promises of autonomy over our impoverishment,
while enforcing the will of the powerful and establishing illegalities, as
the basis for a lasting settlement. The most glaring absence in this peace
process was an honest peace broker. The United Nations has been unable to
take steps to ensure the implementation of Palestinian rights. The world has
offered not a single remedy for the numerous wounds the Palestinians have suffered; Washington repeatedly has used its veto in the Security Council to
thwart the broad consensus calling for an international monitoring presence
in the West Bank and Gaza.
The relentless denial of Palestinian rights without an effective verbal or
actual international response has left us acutely aware that self-defense is
our only hope. International law grants a people fighting an illegal
occupation the right to use “all necessary means at their disposal” to end
their occupation, and the occupied “are entitled to seek and receive
support” (I quote here from several United Nations resolutions). Armed
resistance was used in the American Revolution, the Afghan resistance
against Russia (which the U.S. supported), the French resistance against the
Nazis, and even in the Nazi concentration camps, or, more famously, in the
Warsaw Ghetto.
Palestinian resistance arises out of a similarly oppressive situation. The
degree of violent response varies from case to case—indeed; in many
instances resistance is mainly nonviolent. Despite all the odds against
them, people resiliently continue to live, study, pray and plant crops in
occupied land. In a few cases, they actively resist and resort to violence.
This violent resistance may be defensive (and, thus, to my mind, morally
acceptable), such as the resistance of the Jenin refugee camp fighters as
Israeli death machines approached; or it may take the form of unacceptable
offensive acts, such as the bombing of Israeli civilians celebrating a
Passover meal. In all cases, however, it is individual Palestinians who
choose the form of resistance, and the choices they make should not
characterize the entire nation. Also, as we have seen, both peaceful and
violent resistance are met with sanctioned, deliberate state violence by the
democratic and free Israeli government and its forces. The death of American
peace activist Rachel Corrie is evidence enough of that. “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” some people wonder. Our Gandhis are either in prison,
in exile or in graves. Nor do we have a population in the hundreds of
millions. We are 3.3 million unarmed, defenseless individuals facing 6
million Israelis, virtually all of them soldiers or reservists. This is not
industrial colonization; the Israelis are practicing ethnic cleansing to
secure the land for Jews alone.
It is ironic that few of those who exhort Palestinians to emulate Gandhi
question Zionism, the root cause of the Israeli occupation. In 1938,
however, Gandhi himself questioned the premise of political Zionism. “My
sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice,” he said. “The
cry for the national home for the Jews does not much appeal to me. The
sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the
Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. Why should they not,
like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they
are born and where they earn their livelihood?” Gandhi clearly rejected the
idea of a Jewish state in the Promised Land by pointing out that the
“Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract.”
Violent resistance arises from an inhuman military occupation, one that
levies punishment arbitrarily and without trial, denies the possibility of
livelihood and systematically destroys the prospects of a future. The
Palestinian people have not gone to another people’s homeland to kill or
dispossess. Our ambition is not to blow ourselves up in order to terrify
others. We are asking for what all other people rightfully have—a decent
life in the land of our birth. What is most troubling about the criticism of
our resistance is that it cares little for our suffering, our dispossession,
and the violation of our most basic right. When we are murdered, these
critics are unmoved. Our peaceful, everyday struggle to live a decent life
makes no impression on them. When some of us succumb to retaliation and
revenge, the outrage and condemnation is directed at us all. Israeli
security is deemed more important than our right to a basic livelihood;
Israeli children are seen as more human than ours; Israeli pain more
unacceptable than ours. When we rebel against the inhuman conditions imposed
upon us, our critics dismiss us as terrorists, enemies of human life and civilization.
But it is not to appease our critics that we must revisit our resistance. It
is because we care about Palestinian morality and morale. International law
and the historical precedent of many nations sanction the right of a people
suffering from colonial oppression to take up arms in their freedom
struggle. Why should it be different in the case of Palestinians? Is not the
point of international law that it is universal? Americans claim life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness as their most fundamental human rights.
It is fitting that the right to life should be mentioned first. After all,
without the right to remain alive, to be safe from attack, to defend oneself
against attack, the other rights become meaningless. Fundamental to that
right is exercising the right of self-defense. We Palestinians continue to
face a brutal occupation with exposed chests and empty hands. I believe in
dialogue in the Israeli-Palestinian encounter, but negotiations should never
be the only option; they must go hand-in-hand with resistance to the
occupation. While the Israelis talk to us they continue to build settlements
and hastily construct a wall that will further constrict and violate our
rights. Why should we abandon our right to resist and remain living in the
realm of the murderously absurd?
To live under oppression and submit to injustice is incompatible with
psychological health. Resistance not only is a right and a duty, but is a
remedy for the oppressed. even if not as a strategic, pragmatic option, we
should resist as an expression of—and insistence on—our human dignity.
Violent resistance must always be in defense, and as the last resort. It is
important, however, to distinguish between permissible (military) and
impermissible (civilian) targets, and to set limits for the use of arms. Nor
must the oppressor be exempt from these same principles.
The history of our resistance must be explored and assessed from the
perspectives of law, morality, experience and politics, taking timing and
context into account and with due regard for human rights, international law
and widely shared norms of behavior. Palestinians must be creative in
providing effective peaceful alternatives for resistance that can invite the
progressives of the world to join our struggle. Ultimately, the strength of
the Palestinian plight lies in its moral, humanitarian characteristics; it
is to our benefit to find moral, humanitarian means to protect that
strength.
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