Beyond Violence and Non-Violence: Resistance as a Culture

Resistance is not a band of armed men hell-bent on wreaking
havoc. It is not a cell of terrorists scheming ways to detonate buildings.

True resistance is a culture.

It is a collective retort to oppression.

Understanding the real nature of resistance, however, is not
easy. No newsbyte could be thorough enough to explain why people, as a people,
resist. Even if such an arduous task was possible, the news might not want to
convey it, as it would directly clash with mainstream interpretations of
violence and non-violent resistance. The Afghanistan
story must remain committed to the same language: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Lebanon
must be represented in terms of a menacing Iran-backed Hizbullah. Palestine's
Hamas must be forever shown as a militant group sworn to the destruction of the
Jewish state. Any attempt at offering an alternative reading is tantamount to
sympathizing with terrorists and justifying violence.

The deliberate conflation and misuse of terminology has made
it almost impossible to understand, and thus to actually resolve bloody
conflicts.

Even those who purport to sympathize with resisting nations
often contribute to the confusion. Activists from Western countries tend to
follow an academic comprehension of what is happening in Palestine,
Iraq, Lebanon,
and Afghanistan.
Thus certain ideas are perpetuated: suicide bombings bad, non-violent
resistance good; Hamas rockets bad, slingshots good; armed resistance bad, vigils
in front of Red Cross offices good. Many activists will quote Martin Luther
King Jr., but not Malcolm X. They will infuse a selective understanding of
Gandhi, but never of Guevara. This supposedly 'strategic' discourse has robbed
many of what could be a precious understanding of resistance - as both concept
and culture.

Between the reductionst mainstream understanding of
resistance as violent and terrorist and the 'alternative' defacing of an
inspiring and compelling cultural experience, resistance as a culture is lost.
The two overriding definitions offer no more than narrow depictions. Both
render those attempting to relay the viewpoint of the resisting culture as
almost always on the defensive. Thus we repeatedly hear the same statements:
no, we are not terrorists; no, we are not violent, we actually have a rich
culture of non-violent resistance; no, Hamas is not affiliated with al-Qaeda;
no, Hizbullah is not an Iranian agent. Ironically, Israeli writers,
intellectuals and academicians own up to much less than their Palestinian
counterparts, although the former tend to defend aggression and the latter
defend, or at least try to explain their resistance to aggression. Also ironic
is the fact that instead of seeking to understand why people resist, many wish
to debate about how to suppress their resistance.

By resistance as a culture, I am referencing Edward Said's
elucidation of "culture (as) a way of fighting against extinction and
obliteration." When cultures resist, they don't scheme and play politics. Nor
do they sadistically brutalize. Their decisions as to whether to engage in
armed struggle or to employ non-violent methods, whether to target civilians or
not, whether to conspire with foreign elements or not are all purely strategic.
They are hardly of direct relevance to the concept or resistance itself. Mixing
between the two suggests is manipulative or plain ignorant.

If resistance is "the action of opposing something that you
disapprove or disagree with", then a culture of resistance is what occurs when
an entire culture reaches this collective decision to oppose that disagreeable
element - often a foreign occupation. The decision is not a calculated one. It
is engendered through a long process in which self-awareness, self-assertion,
tradition, collective experiences, symbols and many more factors interact in
specific ways. This might be new to the wealth of that culture's past
experiences, but it is very much an internal process.

It's almost like a chemical reaction, but even more complex
since it isn't always easy to separate its elements. Thus it is also not easy
to fully comprehend, and, in the case of an invading army, it is not easily
suppressed. This is how I tried to explain the first Palestinian uprising of
1987, which I lived in its entirely in Gaza:

"It's not easy to isolate specific dates and events that
spark popular revolutions. Genuine collective rebellion cannot be rationalized
though a coherent line of logic that elapses time and space; its rather a
culmination of experiences that unite the individual to the collective, their
conscious and subconscious, their relationships with their immediate
surroundings and with that which is not so immediate, all colliding and
exploding into a fury that cannot be suppressed." (My Father Was A Freedom
Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story)

Foreign occupiers tend to fight popular resistance through
several means. One includes a varied amount of violence aiming to disorient,
destroy and rebuild a nation to any desired image (read Naomi Klein's The Shock
Doctrine). Another strategy is to weaken the very components that give a
culture its unique identity and inner strengths - and thus defuse the culture's
ability to resist. The former requires firepower, while the latter can be
achieved through soft means of control. Many 'third world' nations that boast
of their sovereignty and independence might in fact be very much occupied, but
due to their fragmented and overpowered cultures - through globalization, for
example - they are unable to comprehend the extent of their tragedy and
dependency. Others, who might effectively be occupied, often possess a culture
of resistance that makes it impossible for their occupiers to achieve any of
their desired objectives.

In Gaza, Palestine,
while the media speaks endlessly of rockets and Israeli security, and debates
who is really responsible for holding Palestinians in the strip hostage, no
heed is paid to the little children living in tents by the ruins of homes they
lost in the latest Israeli onslaught. These kids participate in the same
culture of resistance that Gaza has
witnessed over the course of six decades. In their notebooks they draw fighters
with guns, kids with slingshots, women with flags, as well as menacing Israeli
tanks and warplanes, graves dotted with the word 'martyr', and destroyed homes.
Throughout, the word 'victory' is persistently used.

When I was in Iraq,
I witnessed a local version of these kids' drawings. And while I have yet to
see Afghani children's scrapbooks, I can easily imagine their content too.