The choice of non-violence: Our strategy for Palestine

By Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi
Friday, 04.25.2008

 

Sixty years after the Naqba, the catastrophe, Palestinians are still without a state. They are living under occupation, many are in refugee  camps, others are scattered around the world, and a part of the  Palestinian people are no more than second class citizens in Israel itself.

 

The Palestinian struggle to achieve freedom and independence is therefore firstly a struggle to exist as a people. In this endeavour,  resistance is essential. Resistance through memory, resistance through unwavering demands for their rights, resistance against open or covert attempts to displace them and take their land from them.

But what sort of resistance?

Armed resistance to occupation is legitimate and legal under international law, under the strict condition that it does not target civilians. But as someone who truly believes in the sanctity of human  life, and as a doctor who always puts human life first, I have an inherent belief that non-violence is a fundamental philosophical choice.

Besides this, in a more practical way, I think that armed resistance is a narrow and elitist approach, involving only a select few and  leaving the rest of the people out. And it is based on the assumption that armed force is the only force that exists in the world.

This is wrong. The decolonization struggle in India and the fight against the apartheid regime in South Africa clearly proved that non-violence is a force too, and a much more powerful one. When a whole people moves, it is an irresistible force.

And this is our choice for Palestine.

I lead the Palestinian National Initiative (Al Mubadara), a political party and social movement dedicated to involving people — all people — in a mass, popular, non-violent resistance movement to obtain our  rights as Palestinians.

This choice may seem utopian after sixty years of conflict and so much violence and bloodshed. But this is only an appearance, because the  media only reports on acts of violence, creating the misleading  impression that violence prevails. This is exacerbated by the dominant  Israeli narrative which consistently portrays Palestinians as aggressors and not as a people under occupation struggling for freedom, justice and independence.

In truth, Palestinians are masters of non-violence. They have been resisting the all-pervasive violence of a forty-one year old military occupation every day since it began. Forty-one years of resilience, of silent and stubborn efforts to live a normal life, to work, to raise  children, to love and to exist, simply to exist, despite the hundreds of checkpoints, the incursions, the arrests, the killings, the house demolitions, the land dispossession, the discriminatory laws, the arbitrary and unjust actions of the Israeli military.

In such a situation building a school, choosing to become a doctor, cultivating your ancestral olive grove are all acts of resistance.

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