[ When Palestinians resist oppression in ethical ways — by
calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international
law — the U.S. allies work to ensure those efforts fail, which
convinces Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work]
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THERE IS A JEWISH HOPE FOR PALESTINIAN LIBERATION. IT MUST SURVIVE.
 
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Peter Beinart
October 14, 2023
New York Times
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_ When Palestinians resist oppression in ethical ways — by calling
for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law —
the U.S. allies work to ensure those efforts fail, which convinces
Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work _

Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse (AFP) // New York Times,

 

IN 1988, BOMBS exploded at restaurants, sporting events and arcades
in South Africa. In response, the African National Congress, then in
its 77th year of a struggle to overthrow white domination, did
something remarkable: It accepted responsibility and pledged
[[link removed]] to
prevent its fighters from conducting such operations in the future.
Its logic was straightforward: Targeting civilians is wrong. “Our
morality as revolutionaries,” the A.N.C. declared, “dictates that
we respect the values underpinning the humane conduct of war.”

Historically, geographically and morally, the A.N.C. of 1988 is a
universe away from the Hamas of 2023, so remote that its behavior may
seem irrelevant to the horror that Hamas unleashed last weekend in
southern Israel. But South Africa offers a counter-history, a glimpse
into how ethical resistance works and how it can succeed. It offers
not an instruction manual, but a place — in this season of agony and
rage — to look for hope.

There was nothing inevitable about the A.N.C.’s policy, which, as
Jeff Goodwin, a New York University sociologist, has documented
[[link removed]],
helped ensure that there was “so little terrorism in the
anti-apartheid struggle.” So why didn’t the A.N.C. carry out the
kind of gruesome massacres for which Hamas has become notorious?
There’s no simple answer. But two factors are clear. First, the
A.N.C.’s strategy for fighting apartheid was intimately linked to
its vision of what should follow apartheid. It refused to terrify and
traumatize white South Africans because it wasn’t trying to force
them out. It was trying to win them over to a vision of a multiracial
democracy.

Second, the A.N.C. found it easier to maintain moral discipline —
which required it to focus on popular, nonviolent resistance and use
force only against military installations and industrial sites —
because its strategy was showing signs of success. By 1988, when the
A.N.C. expressed regret for killing civilians, more than 150 American
universities
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least partially divested from companies doing business in South
Africa, and the United States Congress had imposed sanctions
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the apartheid regime. The result was a virtuous cycle: Ethical
resistance elicited international support, and international support
made ethical resistance easier to sustain.
 

In South Africa, protesters opposed to its apartheid policy were
confronted by police officers in 1960.(Photo credit: Ian Berry/Magnum
Photos  //  New York Times)
In Israel today, the dynamic is almost exactly the opposite. Hamas,
whose authoritarian, theocratic ideology could not be farther from the
A.N.C.’s, has committed an unspeakable horror that may damage the
Palestinian cause for decades to come. Yet when Palestinians resist
their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts,
sanctions and the application of international law — the United
States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which
convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work,
which empowers Hamas.

The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this
monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will
require a shared commitment to ending Palestinian oppression in ways
that respect the infinite value of every human life. It will require
Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and
Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane
ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will
risk making themselves pariahs among their own people. It will require
new forms of political community, in Israel-Palestine and around the
world, built around a democratic vision powerful enough to transcend
tribal divides. The effort may fail. It has failed before. The
alternative is to descend, flags waving, into hell.

AS JEWISH ISRAELIS bury their dead and recite psalms for their
captured, few want to hear at this moment that millions of
Palestinians lack basic human rights. Neither do many Jews abroad. I
understand; this attack has awakened the deepest traumas of our badly
scarred people. But the truth remains: The denial of Palestinian
freedom sits at the heart of this conflict, which began long before
Hamas’s creation in the late 1980s.

Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re
the descendants of refugees
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fled in fear, during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. They live
in what Human Rights Watch has called
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“open-air prison,” penned in by an Israeli state that — with
help from Egypt — rations everything that goes in and out,
from tomatoes
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the travel documents children need to get lifesaving medical care
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From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared
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for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean
water, many Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents
and grandparents called home, though most may never set foot in it.

 

After the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991, Palestinians in the West
Bank demonstrated for peace with olive branches near Israeli border
guards.  (Photo credit: A. Abbas/Magnum Photos  //  New York Times)
Palestinians in the West Bank are only slightly better off. For more
than half a century, they have lived without due process, free
movement, citizenship or the ability to vote for the government that
controls their lives. Defenseless against an Israeli government that
includes ministers openly committed
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ethnic cleansing, many are being driven from
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homes in what Palestinians compare to the mass expulsions of 1948.
Americans and Israeli Jews have the luxury of ignoring these harsh
realities. Palestinians do not. Indeed, the commander of Hamas’s
military wing cited
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on Palestinians in the West Bank in justifying its barbarism last
weekend.

Just as Black South Africans resisted apartheid, Palestinians resist a
system that has earned the same designation from the
world’s leading
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rights organizations
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After last weekend, some critics may claim Palestinians are incapable
of resisting in ethical ways. But that’s not true. In 1936, during
the British mandate, Palestinians began what some consider the longest
anticolonial general strike in history. In 1976, on what became known
as Land Day, thousands of Palestinian citizens demonstrated
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the Israeli government’s seizure of Palestinian property in
Israel’s north. The first intifada against Israel’s occupation of
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which lasted from roughly 1987 to
1993, consisted primarily
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nonviolent boycotts of Israeli goods and a refusal to pay Israeli
taxes. While some Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails,
armed attacks were rare, even in the face of an Israeli crackdown
that took more than 1,000 Palestinian lives
[[link removed]]. In 2005,
173 Palestinian civil society organizations asked
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world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives
against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the
apartheid era.”

But in the United States, Palestinians received little credit for
trying to follow Black South Africans’ largely nonviolent path.
Instead, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s call for
full equality, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return
home, was widely deemed antisemitic because it conflicts with the idea
of a state that favors Jews.

It is true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably alongside
an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron
in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand
mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque;
the airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out
primarily by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
and Yasir Arafat’s nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination
of Israeli athletes in Munich carried out by the Palestinian
organization Black September; and the suicide bombings of the 1990s
and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s
Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose victims included a friend of mine in
rabbinical school who I dreamed might one day officiate my wedding.

And yet it is essential to remember that some Palestinians
courageously condemned this inhuman violence. In 1979, Edward Said,
the famed literary critic, declared himself
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at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations,
the bombing of schools and hotels.” Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian
American historian, called
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suicide bombings of the second intifada “a war crime.” After
Hamas’s attack last weekend, a member of the Israeli parliament,
Ayman Odeh, among the most prominent leaders of Israel’s Palestinian
citizens, declared [[link removed]], “It is
absolutely forbidden to accept any attacks on the innocent.”

Tragically, this vision of ethical resistance is being repudiated by
some pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. In a statement
last week, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which is
affiliated with more than 250 Palestinian solidarity groups in North
America, called Hamas’s attack “a historic win for the Palestinian
resistance” that proves that “total return and liberation to
Palestine is near” and added, “from Rhodesia to South Africa to
Algeria, no settler colony can hold out forever.” One of its posters
featured a paraglider that some Hamas fighters used to enter Israel.
 

A home is destroyed in Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Dec.
28, 2021.  (Photo credit: Mussa Issa Qawasma/Reuters  //  New York
Times)
The reference to Algeria reveals the delusion underlying this
celebration of abduction and murder. After eight years of hideous war,
Algeria’s settlers returned to France. But there will be no Algerian
solution in Israel-Palestine. Israel is too militarily powerful to be
conquered. More fundamentally, Israeli Jews have no home country to
which to return. They are already home.

Mr. Said understood this. “The Israeli Jew is there in the Middle
East,” he advised
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in 1974, “and we cannot, I might even say that we must not, pretend
that he will not be there tomorrow, after the struggle is over.” The
Jewish “attachment to the land,” he added, “is something we must
face.” Because Mr. Said saw Israeli Jews as something other than
mere colonizers, he understood the futility — as well as the
immorality — of trying to terrorize them into flight.

 

THE FAILURE OF Hamas and its American defenders to recognize that
will make it much harder for Jews and Palestinians to resist together
in ethical ways. Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some
imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the
mutual liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest
movement against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, through
which more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the
denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own. And
there were signs in the United States, where almost 40 percent of
American Jews under the age of 40 told
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Jewish Electoral Institute in 2021 that they considered Israel an
apartheid state. More Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were
beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation
as well.

That potential alliance has now been gravely damaged. There are many
Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement to end apartheid, even
if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in some cases, our
families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the
kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child.

The struggle to persuade Palestinian activists to repudiate Hamas’s
crimes, affirm a vision of mutual coexistence and continue the spirit
of Mr. Said and the A.N.C. will be waged inside the Palestinian camp.
The role of non-Palestinians is different: to help create the
conditions that allow ethical resistance to succeed.

PALESTINIANS ARE NOT fundamentally different from other people facing
oppression: When moral resistance doesn’t work, they try something
else. In 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which
was modeled on the civil rights movement in the United States,
organized a march to oppose imprisonment without trial. Although some
organizations, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had
already embraced armed resistance, they grew stronger after British
soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody
Sunday. By the early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army had
even detonated a bomb
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Harrods, the department store in London. As Kirssa Cline Ryckman, a
political scientist, observed in a 2019 paper on why certain movements
turn violent, a lack of progress in peaceful protest “can encourage
the use of violence by convincing demonstrators that nonviolence will
fail to achieve meaningful concessions.”

 

The funeral in Jerusalem on Oct. 9 for Col. Roi Levy, 44, killed
fighting Hamas militants in Israel.  (Photo credit:  Tamir Kalifa
for The New York Times)
Israel, with America’s help, has done exactly that. It has
repeatedly undermined Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s
occupation through negotiations or nonviolent pressure. As part of the
1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced
violence and began working with Israel — albeit imperfectly — to
prevent attacks on Israelis, something that revolutionary groups like
the A.N.C. and the Irish Republican Army never did while their people
remained under oppression. At first, as Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian
political scientist, has detailed
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Palestinians supported cooperation with Israel because they thought it
would deliver them a state. In early 1996, Palestinian support for the
Oslo process reached 80 percent while support for violence against
Israelis dropped to 20 percent.

The 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure of Israel and
its American patron to stop settlement growth, however, curdled
Palestinian sentiment. Many Jewish Israelis believe that Ehud Barak,
who succeeded Mr. Netanyahu, offered Palestinians a generous deal in
2000. Most Palestinians, however, saw
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Barak’s offer as falling far short of a fully sovereign state along
the 1967 lines. And their disillusionment with a peace process that
allowed Israel to entrench its hold over the territory on which they
hoped to build their new country ushered in the violence of the second
intifada. In Mr. Shikaki’s words
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loss of confidence in the ability of the peace process to deliver a
permanent agreement on acceptable terms had a dramatic impact on the
level of Palestinian support for violence against Israelis.” As
Palestinians abandoned hope, Hamas gained power.

After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and
other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians,
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad,
his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security
cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again,
the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded
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Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth
that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing
them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The
Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted
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because the “occupation regime is more entrenched,” Palestinians
“question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains
recognition and is strengthened.”

As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the
occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for
its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and
Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these
nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed
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than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing
Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even
as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement
expansion
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the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat
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drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have
condemned settlement growth.

Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s
efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally
hostile. Despite lifting sanctions
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the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the
United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains
adamantly opposed
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any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was
founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second
intifada and which speaks [[link removed]] in the
language of human rights and international law, has been similarly
stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who
celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South
Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud
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his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned
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B.D.S. movement, saying it “too often veers into antisemitism.”
About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from
companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed
laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott
Israel. In many cases
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those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli
settlements in the West Bank.

 

A view of Gaza amid widespread blackouts, Oct. 11.   (Photo credit:
Mohammed Salem/Reuters  //  New York Times)
Palestinians have noticed. In the words
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Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian American political scientist,
“Palestinians have lost faith in the efficacy of nonviolent protest
as well as the possible role of the international community.”
Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, cited
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disillusionment during last Saturday’s attack. “In light of the
orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and
resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and
international silence,” he declared, “we’ve decided to put an
end to all this.”

HAMAS — AND NO one else — bears the blame for its sadistic
violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with
less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many
Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral
strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from
how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American
politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the
A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the
most have empowered it again and again.

Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life
since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where
Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to
leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation
and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world.
Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked
more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In
Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and
Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly
construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the
lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably
intertwined.

Israel desperately needs a genuinely Jewish and Palestinian political
party, not because it can win power but because it can model a
politics based on common liberal democratic values, not tribe.
American Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that
Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask
themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian
resistance to oppression will I support? More Palestinians and their
supporters must express revulsion at the murder of innocent Israeli
Jews and affirm that Palestinian liberation means living equally
alongside them in safety and freedom.

From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and
grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear
that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel
cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities
may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the
world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m
confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it
happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose
lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred
place?

Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and
Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever
known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of
consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe
that can be our motto.

_[PETER BEINART (@PeterBeinart [[link removed]]) is
a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School
of Journalism [[link removed]] at the City
University of New York. He is also an editor at large of Jewish
Currents [[link removed]] and writes The Beinart
Notebook [[link removed]], a weekly newsletter.]_

* Israel
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