Why isn’t there a Palestinian Gandhi? It’s a good question for Western liberals to ask. Just asking the question makes it seem like the oppression of the Palestinians is their own fault: they are too violent, too aggressive, too alienating to world opinion.
A few years ago, Noah Feldman, the Harvard law professor who drafted the new Iraqi constitution after the US invasion, invited readers of Bloomberg Opinion to “Imagine a Palestinian Movement Led by Gandhi”. Lamenting that Palestinians responded to decades of oppression with “rage”. Feldman—whose career peaked as a consultant to a Western military occupation of an Arab country—advised Palestinians to respond to Israeli apartheid with “sit-ins, silent marches and civil disobedience”.
“Pretty quickly,” Feldman asserted, “Americans would start seeing Palestinians as good guys…Palestinians who embraced King-style nonviolence would gradually cease to be seen as terrorists-in-waiting”.
There’s just one problem with this brilliant suggestion. Palestinians and their supporters constantly engage in nonviolent, creative and peaceful civil disobedience. And when they do, they face slander, persecution, imprisonment, torture, and murder. Almost every notable non-violent action taken by Palestinian and their supporters is met with grotesque Israeli violence.
Take for instance the Gaza “Freedom Flotilla” of 2010. The Palestinians of Gaza were subjected to a monstrous Israeli blockade that prevented food and medicine from getting into that tiny, overcrowded strip of land, which had been repeatedly subjected to devastating bombardments by the Israeli military. A small group of ships carrying humanitarian aid attempted to deliver relief to the Palestinians in Gaza. The cargo included medicine, construction materials and toys for children. It was a peaceful act of civil disobedience reminiscent of a lunch-counter sit-in, or a small-scale version of Gandhi’s Salt March of 1930.
Read the article by Revan Oluklu in Red Flag.