The Hypocrisy of Preaching Nonviolence to Palestinians

Nicholas Kristof is in Palestine, though like all mass media journalists he calls
it "the West Bank." He has just discovered that
many Palestinians are resisting the Israeli occupation nonviolently, though
scholars of nonviolence started writing about the Palestinian resistance over 20
years ago. So Kristof is "waiting for Gandhi," as the title of his
latest New York Times column puts it, or at least a "Palestinian version of Martin Luther
King Jr."

Perhaps I
should not be so cynical. Kristof has gained fame as a crusader for human
rights, especially women's rights. Now he's taking a real risk by advocating for
Palestinian rights and praising Palestinian resistance. Any hint of Israeli
wrong-doing has undone many U.S. liberals in the past. And
Kristof is giving more than a hint. His previous column detailed Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and clearly
sympathized with their plight. He praised the work of Rabbis for Human Rights as
"courageous and effective voices on behalf of oppressed Palestinians."

Kristof himself deserves praise for placing the
Palestinians alongside all the other victims of oppression he has written about
so eloquently. He's moving the mass media one more tiny step toward more honest
and balanced reporting on the Israel/Palestine conflict.

But if a writer is not careful, every step forward can
also be a step backward. By calling for a Palestinian Gandhi, Kristof clearly
suggests that Palestinian resistance so far has fallen short of his high moral
standards. He complains that "many Palestinians define 'nonviolence' to include
stone-throwing," so even when they claim to eschew violence their protests
"aren't truly nonviolent."

That reinforces a self-serving stereotype we've been hearing from
supporters of Israeli policy for decades:
We Jews want peace, they say. We've even got an organized peace movement.
But there's no Palestinian equivalent. It seems like those Palestinians are all
a bunch hot-heads, implacably bent on violence. How can we make peace with them?

That kind of stereotyping spurs even more extreme views that are all
too familiar: There's "no partner for peace" on the Palestinian side. "Those
people" are so steeped in violence, there's no reasoning with them. They only
understand one thing: force. And at their worst they ask: What else can you
expect from Muslims?

I'm sure Nick Kristof didn't mean to promote that kind of simplistic
anti-Palestinian prejudice. He sees good guys and bad guys on both sides. But
when you are a top columnist for the nation's top newspaper, you are supposed to
be smart enough to understand the implications of your words, to know what
people can (and some inevitably will) read between the lines.

I don't know Kristof, so I can't say why he might have fallen into
this trap. But I know the U.S. mass media coverage of the issue
pretty well. Even when they begin to break out of their reflexive "pro-Israel"
shell, mass media journalists are still plagued by lines of thinking that are so
old, so deeply ingrained, that they go unnoticed. "Ain't it a shame those
Palestinians are so violent. If only they'd turn to more peaceful ways, all
would be well," is perhaps the oldest and deepest of those lines.

So it's not surprising that, even when a prominent columnist appeals
for sympathy for the victims of oppression, he ends up indirectly but all too
obviously blaming the victims.

Palestinians might well ask, "Who the hell is Nicholas Kristof to
tell us how to resist the occupation anyway?" That's a good question. What can
he really know about their situation after being with them for a day or two?
Critics of American journalism have long noted the declining quality of our news
from other countries. The main culprit, many say, is the ignorance of
journalists who show up in a place for a few days or even a few weeks and write
for the folks back home as if they were experts.

At a deeper level, there's the ever-present tendency
among the stenographers of imperial power to assume that they've got the right
to preach truth to "the natives" and tell them how to live their lives.

Even if
Kristof had been living in Palestine for years, though, the question would
still remain: Does he, or any non-Palestinian, have the right to tell an
oppressed people how to resist their oppression? Maybe they do, if they've
joined the resistance and taken all the risks involved for a long enough time to
earn that right. But neither Kristof nor most any of the other non-Palestinians
who call for a Palestinian Gandhi fit that description.

I've been teaching and writing about, and advocating nonviolence for
a long time. From the beginning, I felt in my gut that I don't have the right to
tell oppressed people to keep their resistance nonviolent, since I haven't
shared in their suffering.

Eventually, I found in Gandhi's own writings a powerful theoretical
argument to explain my gut feeling. It starts with the heart of Gandhi's
teachings. He would have rejected the premise of Kristof's column: that
nonviolence is a smarter tactic for the Palestinians, the best way to get what
they want. For Gandhi, nonviolence was never a tactic or a way to win anything.
It was a way -- the only way, he insisted -- to act out moral truth in daily
life. The core principle of Gandhian nonviolence is to do the right thing in
every situation, regardless how painful or even lethal the consequences.

In other words, nonviolence is not about figuring out how to make the
other side -- even when they are brutal oppressors -- change their ways. It's
not about making others change their ways at all. Gandhi said that such efforts
are senseless, because we cannot control the choices of others. All we can
control is our own choices, trying to make sure that they are as morally correct
as possible.

So telling other people what to do, how to live their lives, or even
how to resist oppression simply doesn't fit Gandhi's vision of nonviolence. It's
only about changing our own ways.

But when Gandhi spoke about controlling our own choices, he included
in "our" not just himself as an individual but his people. That's why, in the
vast corpus of Gandhi's writings, you'll sometimes find indictments of British
colonialism and insistence that the British must leave India -- in effect,
telling the other side what to do -- but far more often you'll find indictments
of Gandhi's own Indian people and insistence that they (Gandhi said "we") stop
cooperating with oppression.

If you're looking for another Gandhi, then, look for someone who
addresses his own people's policy choices rather than telling others about what
they're doing wrong and how to fix it. Kristof made a nod in that direction when
he repeated the words of Palestinian nonviolence advocates like Moustafa
Barghouthi, Ayad Morrar, and Iltezam Morrar. He could have found plenty of
others. They've got the right to call for a Palestinian Gandhi, since they are
talking to their own people.

The only thing Nick Kristof has the right to do -- and the
obligation, Gandhi would have added -- is to address his own American people
about the choices that Americans are making. If any Americans are publicly
waiting for the next Gandhi to appear, they should be waiting and hoping for him
or her not in Palestine or any foreign country, but right here in the U.S. of
A.

Kristof, given his immense readership and influence, has a special
responsibility. Rather than flying half-way around the world for a few days and
lamenting his failure to find another Gandhi, he could be doing what Gandhi did:
writing about America's failure to stand on the
side of justice, which is the only way to stand on the side of peace.

As Gershon Baskin, Israel's leading expert on conflict resolution,
recently wrote, the U.S. must
play a central role if Israel
and Palestine
are to forge a just peace settlement. The two parties mistrust each other so
deeply that they need a truly even-handed third party to bring them together and
guarantee adherence to a peace agreement.

Though the Obama administration has moved a bit closer than its
predecessors to an even-handed approach, it is still far from the genuine
neutrality that the Palestinians must see if they are to come to any negotiating
table. Foolish steps like bolstering Israel's nuclear
arsenal are bound to move
Israel and Palestine away from the
peace that both sides need so badly.

For the sake of that peace, it's we Americans, not the Palestinians,
who need to take up the torch of nonviolence. Until we do, it seems hypocritical
to be blaming Palestinians for failing to live up to Gandhian standards.

But that does not mean we should sit around "waiting for Gandhi." The
Mahatma surely would have scolded Nick Kristof and all of us who waiting for
some extraordinary charismatic leader to rescue us from our wars and injustice.
It's easier to wait for someone else to do the job than to heed the charge
Gandhi famously left us: Be the change you want to see in the
world.

We Americans have already had our Gandhi. And while we elevated him
to the status of a heroic King, most of us conveniently forgot the most
difficult parts of his message, his call to recognize our own nation as the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world and to practice nonviolence no matter
what the consequences.

Now, instead of waiting for another miraculously gifted leader, we
should each be speaking out and acting up, doing whatever little bit we can. We
may not see the greatness of a Gandhi or King again for a very long time. But
that's no reason to give up the quest for nonviolent resolution of our problems.
It's all the more reason for each of us to take responsibility for ourselves and
our own people, to stop telling others what they should do and start, right now,
changing what we do.

Meanwhile, when oppressed, militarily occupied people resist, let's
recognize that it's not our place to tell them what means they should or should
not use -- and certainly not when our own nation is contributing so much to
their oppression.