"Palestinians Test Tactic of Unarmed Mass Resistance"
Palestinian activists are calling it a preview of new tactics to pressure Israel and win world support for statehood: Masses of marchers, galvanized by the Arab Spring and brought together by Facebook, descending on borders and military posts — and daring Israeli soldiers to shoot.
It could prove more problematic for Israel than the suicide bombings and other deadly violence of the past — which the current Palestinian Authority leadership feels only tainted their cause.
After attempted border breaches from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza left 15 Palestinians dead Sunday, Israeli officials openly puzzled over how to handle an unfamiliar new phase.
"The Palestinians' transition from terrorism and suicide bombings to deliberately unarmed mass demonstrations is a transition that will present us with difficult challenges," said Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
This slanderous nonsense needs to be repudiated and it needs to be repudiated now. Probably 95% of Palestinian resistance or more is non-violent, unarmed, or characterized by mostly symbolic violence such as throwing stones at tanks. If the first intifada received the attention and hosannas that it deserves as the model of Gandhian resistance that it was, then we would never have to hear about how there is "no Palestinian Gandhi" or that the Palestinians have just discovered non-violence. (The Palestinians are perpetually discovering non-violence; according to Ethan Bronner, they had just discovered non-violence some 13 months ago- only 17 years after the first Intifada.) The fact is, Israel and the US media do not want a Palestinian Gandhi. If they did, then the hundreds of Palestinian Gandhis that are doing the slow work in countless Palestinian villages or the other hundreds that are rotting in Israeli prisons (or those that have possibly been shot) would receive the same front-page attention and encouragement that Mohammed Elbaradei is receiving in Egypt. With one caveat: most of those Palestinians that are educated enough to hold the social status of Elbaradei have left the country, as Palestinian civil society has effectively been destroyed by the occupation.
And let's repudiate the Israeli PR claim that these protests caught their security forces off guard, which the above article uncritically regurgitates. There were Palestinian Facebook campaigns promoting an uprising; there are regular non-violent Palestinian protests in which walls or fences are torn down; the Nakba is generally expected to be a time of disorder. The idea that what are likely the best intelligence agencies in the world (either Shin Bet or the Mossad) were caught off guard by all this stretches credulity. More likely, Israel simply didn't care. They just fell back on their default response, honed during the first and the beginning of the second Intifada, their invasion of Lebanon, and their massacre in Gaza: if the Arabs act up, we're going to respond with overwhelming, violent force. "The only thing the Arabs understand is force" has been the battle maxim of Israel since 1948- earlier, in fact. It's because of the press' sole focus on current events and their structural need to spot "trends" that they would think that Israel would act differently in this single, lone instance.
When you read the above headline, don't read it literally. Read it instead as "now that the Palestinian revolts are happening in the context of the Arab revolts, the Israelis are starting to realize that violent repression may be unfavorably compared to that of other regimes in the region, and that this may cause unacceptable damage to their country's public image." The press' staggering revelation that Palestinians indeed protest unarmed may be too late, but if Israel is pressed to muzzle its response to resistance to its occupation, it may not be entirely too little.
Update: Hard to believe that I just read this in The Economist.
