Noted William James biographer Robert D. Richardson has a short post over at The Second Pass (where they’re doing a William James week in celebration of the centenary of his death) about James’ attempts to grapple with the problem of war. His most well-known confrontation with the matter is of course in the essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” but Richardson also points to another, earlier effort by James to propose an alternative to warmaking, one profoundly reminiscent of Gandhi:

James made two concrete proposals for how this might be done. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he reached back to Thoreau’s Walden and the idea, discussed in the first chapter of that classic, of voluntary poverty. (When Americans see that phrase, they see “poverty” written in boldface. We must train ourselves to see “voluntary,” meaning willed, written in caps and printed in red.)

“What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war,” James wrote in Varieties, “something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. . . . May not voluntarily accepted poverty be ‘the strenuous life’ without the need of crushing weaker peoples?”

By the time he wrote “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James had dropped the idea of voluntary poverty or simplicity—the sort of thing advocated in Walden, and by Wendell Berry, and by the modern “freegans”—in favor of something very close to the modern idea of the Peace Corps. “To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road building and tunnel making, to foundries and stoke holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youth be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.”

One need look no further for resonance with James’ first proposal than Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, as he describes the requirement for Satyagraha, or non-violent resistance. While his life was one of very much the voluntary poverty James proposes, Gandhi emphasized spiritual renunciation more than material:

Just as there is necessity for chastity, so is there for poverty. Pecuniary ambition and passive resistance cannot well go together. Those who have money are not expected to throw it away, but they are expected to be indifferent about it. They must be prepared to lose every penny rather than give up passive resistance.

He added elsewhere, on the significance of suffering in the struggle for justice:

He who has not the capacity of suffering cannot non-co-operate. He who has not learnt to sacrifice his property and even his family when necessary can never non-co-operate. … There lies the test of love, patience, and strength.

Both Gandhi and James recognized that the world without war would not be a world without hardship or suffering—nor would we want it to be.

Lindsay Lohan wearing her ankle bracelet.

It’s an eschatological dream: open the prisons. Let at least nonviolent offenders out and give them a chance to build an honest life in society. Free at last, right? Well, yeah—except for the odd beepers strapped onto their ankles and the boxes on their belts, which broadcast their position (and the chemical composition of their sweat) to an office park in Indiana. The contraptions even periodically issue verbal commands at their wearers. Step away from the liquor store.

Atlantic correspondent Graeme Wood, in his new article “Prison without Walls,” is sold. The United States has one of the world’s most brutal, inhumane, and disastrous incarceration industries, with currently around 2.3 million people locked up in prisons and jails—perhaps half of whom, if ever released, will be back again within three years. The answer? A growing (private) regime of total surveillance by electronic monitoring. Emerging technologies now allow contractors to track offenders better than ever, to the point now that, in many cases, walls, bars, and a jumpsuit are becoming obsolete. Wood imagines that

if we extended this form of enhanced, supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop. Inevitably, some of those released would take the pruning-shears route. And some would offend again. But then, so too do those convicts released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly any measure such “prisons without bars” would represent a giant step forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society.

He has a point. American prisons are horrific and utterly counterproductive places, where inmates learn to live in fear of their guards and each other. Those who get out bring that logic with them into society outside. The fewer people we need to keep in prisons, without doubt, the better off we’ll all be. And the process that Wood describes, of course, is hardly radical, as already two-thirds of those being punished in this country are on probation or parole. But, like most dreams, it carries the ingredients of a nightmare.

Read the rest of this article »

Time’s Up!, “NYC’s direct action environmental organization” (which also fought to save a Brooklyn bike lane earlier this year), is now organizing to protect New York’s community gardens, which may become vulnerable to development in September. The New York Times reports on how:

The bikes departed Tompkins Square, pedaled by men and women dressed in 21st-century thrift-store versions of 18th-century garb. There were tricorn hats, vests and, in a few cases, shirts with long, flowing sleeves. Many of the bicycles were decorated with cardboard cutouts in the shape of a horse’s head. One man rang a bell. Others shouted to passers-by on Avenue B, calling out, “The bulldozers are coming.”

The procession was modeled, of course, on Paul Revere’s nighttime ride to Lexington, Mass., in 1775. But the riders on Thursday night meant to warn people not about an invading military force, but about proposed rules by the city that would alter the status of hundreds of community gardens.

[…] They rode from garden to garden in the East Village to spread news of the rules, then ventured uptown to deliver a message to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

One perhaps can’t help but wonder whether these activists might have gotten the Revolution-era motif from the Tea Party, a movement not exactly known for dedication to the environment. What is it—tribute or reclamation? Or neither?

Time’s Up! has more in store. The Times continues:

Some gardeners said the ride was the first in a series of events meant to sway opinion in favor of explicitly preserving the gardens. Members of a citywide gardening group are encouraging people to bring signs and banners on Aug. 10 to a public comment session for the new rules. Some gardeners said they would deliver fruit and vegetables from gardens to the mayor and members of the City Council on Monday.

The Time’s Up! website describes two upcoming actions, one of which is this morning:

• Harvest Day Rally at City Hall (in conjunction with other garden groups’ press conference) August 2nd – 10 or 11 am (Monday) (exact time and location TBA)

• Proposed Rules Public Hearing/Rally – Let’s rally around the hearing and let them know how we feel about saving our community gardens! Bring instruments and props – be creative! August 10, 10:30 a.m. rally before 11 am public hearing (Tuesday) Chelsea Rec center, 430 W. 25th Street, Manhattan

Bicycle protesters have sometimes been accused of being overly aggressive and disruptive of traffic, but here the mood seems to have remained positive, declaring the good that these gardens do for the city. I experienced this at least twice today: eating lunch at a restaurant in my neighborhood in Brooklyn that serves garden-grown food and then, on a bike ride no less, discovering the large community garden at Floyd Bennett Field where an elderly immigrant couple happily showed my friend and me their day’s harvest of beautiful tomatoes.

It’s out: an enormous trove of documents about the war in Afghanistan yesterday appeared on Wikileaks (whose servers currently seem to be overwhelmed by the traffic) together with comprehensive reports by The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian. The leak represents no less than a historic act of civil disobedience; consisting of 92,201 US military internal records, this is the largest leak of classified material in history. Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, may be a criminal in the eyes of the US government, which has roundly condemned his work even while begging for his help to plug up his sources (this administration has been harsher with informants than its predecessor). A 22-year-old American intelligence analyst in Iraq named Bradley Manning has already been arrested for, under the online handle Bradass87, funneling the documents to where Wikileaks could arrange to publicize them. He wrote in an online chat of the trove, “it[']s beautiful and horrifying … It’s public data, it belongs in the public domain.”

To Assange and Manning, and to many others, keeping records like this classified is far worse a crime than releasing them. Explore the documents, particularly at those three outlets above which have had access to them for several weeks, and see the dark impression they convey about what has really been going on in Afghanistan. The Guardian summarizes:

• coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents

• Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

• a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.

• the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

“The war logs” inevitably bring to mind Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which helped turn the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War. What impact will this leak, which is considerably larger, have?

The documents all date from before December 2009, when the new “surge” was launched, so they don’t tell us anything about its progress. But they do suggest the true challenges that it faces, with a clarity which the public didn’t have access to when it put its continued support behind Obama’s war last year. If we had known then what we know now, would Congress have allowed itself to fund the surge? And, if things are getting so much worse, why does the administration continue to insist on escalating?

Some who have opposed the war since its beginning back in 2001 may feel the temptation to be gratified that Afghanistan has become so much the quagmire that we predicted. That apologists for the war continually use military successes, such as they are, to retroactively justify military force only encourages the war’s critics to claim failures as a kind of vindication—which in turn makes the critics vulnerable to accusations of siding with the so-called enemy. No—what these documents portray is nothing other than a disaster, one to be regretted by all and forcing all to come to grips with what we are actually dealing with: a dreadful war and a government unwilling to admit it.

What the trove reveals, also, is how information resistance may be a form of resistance par excellence today. Bringing the truth to light like this, on such a massive scale and in such a concerted fashion, lends new meaning to Gandhi’s call for “truth force.”

One of the most difficult challenges posed to the antiwar movement in the 20th century was that of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Once the head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, he drifted away from nonviolence on the eve of World War II, insisting that in a fallen world like ours, violence would sometimes be necessary.

Today The Immanent Frame published my interview with sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer, author of, among other books, Terror in the Mind of God and Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution. He has written extensively about Gandhian nonviolence, but he was also a student of Niebuhr’s at Union Theological Seminary, so he has some unique insights about the legacies of the two men. The interview covers a lot of other ground (including reflections on Juergensmeyer’s own interviews with terrorists), but here are the relevant passages:

NS: How does your early work on Gandhi and nonviolence affect your analysis of religious violence?

MJ: In several ways. It helps explain why I became interested in violence in the first place. Pacifists like myself are often fascinated with social violence because it seems so odd. What is there in the human imagination that allows us to switch gears so easily between the normalcy of civil society and the overdrive of warfare? I wanted to understand what happens in people’s minds when they’re so seized with passion about a struggle that they’ll go out and kill in such horrible ways.

What I’ve learned most from my understanding of the Gandhian mode of conflict resolution is the importance of trying to understand another’s perspective. For Gandhi, this was the fun of conflict—and I do mean fun, because Gandhi loved conflict. He was a pacifist, but that doesn’t mean he was passive. Conflict, as Gandhi pointed out, is one time when you’re forced to see the world from another person’s point of view. Unless somebody challenges you forcefully, in a way that makes you stop and think, you’ll just go idly about your business. We all know that from our own relationships; it’s not until somebody comes at you from a different point of view, seemingly from left field, that you really begin to question yourself and look carefully at what you’re doing.

I began my work on religion, politics, and violence by trying to understand worldviews that clash with ours—and by that I mean not only theirs but ours as well. I did so with the awareness that my way of seeing the world is not necessarily the only way. It was, in a sense, a Gandhian project.

NS: And you also studied with Reinhold Niebuhr at Union?

MJ: Niebuhr was probably my greatest single influence as a professor. I was literally his last student. My first year at Union was the last year he taught a seminar, and I was in it. The second year, there was a group of us who met in his apartment every Friday afternoon. Then, the third year, the other two had left Union, and I went up there on my own. One of the things that drew me to Niebuhr—though it was his ideas that drew me more than anything else—was that his family and my family came from the same German immigrant community in central Missouri.

NS: He was someone who began as a pacifist but went on to develop a critique of pacifism. How did Niebuhr’s thought play into how you think about violence?

MJ: Well, I disagree with Niebuhr on his analysis of Gandhi. I think he didn’t understand Gandhi. He regarded Gandhi as a sentimentalist, the same way he regarded Marx as a sentimentalist: as someone with vaunted expectations about human nature. But Gandhi was more of a realist than Niebuhr assumed, and his method of conflict resolution involves exerting a certain kind of pressure. This is not exactly the coercion Niebuhr accused him of, because Gandhi tried to make a distinction between coercive and non-coercive force. Force that is coercive doesn’t give you any choice about accepting or not accepting your opponent’s position. Non-coercive force is about making you dramatically aware of a situation while leaving you to make a choice on your own. Gandhi would want concessions to be made out of free will rather than by coercion. Actually, I don’t think that Niebuhr was as different from Gandhi as he thought.

Over the course of his career primatologist and popularizer Frans de Waal has had a sustained interest in the relationship between human nature and violence. Circumstances in the study of our primate relatives has forced the issue: in the 1970s chimpanzees, which were previously thought to live in Edenic tranquility, were observed conducting raids and even killing one another. Meanwhile, their close relatives, the bonobos, entered the popular imagination as the hope for more utopian future: their females are empowered, and they resolve conflicts in tender orgies. Over at 3QuarksDaily, de Waal summarizes the debate about apes and human violence and thinks about how to apply it to violent conflict in the modern world. His essay is accompanied by a short video produced by the impressive Department of Expansion:

Here’s de Waal:

In recent history, we have seen so much war-related death that we imagine that it must always have been like this, that warfare is written into our DNA. In the words of Winston Churchill: “The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.” But is Churchill’s warmongering state-of-nature any more plausible than Rousseau’s noble savage?

[…]

Comparisons with apes hardly resolve this issue. Since it has been found that chimpanzees sometimes raid their neighbors and take their enemies’ lives, these apes have edged closer to the warrior image that we have of ourselves. Like us, chimps wage violent battles over territory. Genetically speaking, however, our species is exactly equally close to another ape, the bonobo, which does nothing of the kind. Bonobos can be unfriendly to their neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has begun, females often rush to the other side to have sex with both males and other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into a peaceful gathering. Lethal aggression among bonobos has been unheard of.

The danger in any discussion like this is that we might bind the sense of possibility for ourselves by what happens to be reflected in both human history and the natural world. That’s a false restraint; things can change. Social arrangements possible in the modern world, from the United Nations to mass genocide, would have after all been unthinkable in past ages. What we see among apes should expand our sense of human possibility but certainly not contract it.

Click for full-size chart and reference.

To Churchill’s point, one can just as easily say the opposite is true, and far more so. Peace reigns over ordinary life far more than war, even if it goes unnoticed while violence excites our attention. So much is this the case that, in the early history of anthropology, it was thought that “primitive” tribal societies were on the whole blessedly peaceful compared to the turbulence of modern states. Like the observations of chimpanzees for so long, this turned out to be the error of impatient observers; wait around long enough, and they will fight. And they will die, on average, at actually far higher rates than were found in Europe and the US in the 20th century (see chart).

De Waal insists in the end that, given the chance, humans and other animals will opt for less killing. We’re caught between ancient, dueling inclinations to kill and to coexist. The latter, he believes, is the stronger.

Mark Twain’s antiwar leanings are already common knowledge (or should be), perhaps best of all through his haunting short story “The War Prayer.” But now, as his complete autobiography is being published for the first time by University of California Press, the true radicalism of his position is becoming more evident than ever. Writes Larry Rohter in The New York Times:

Twain’s opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines, for example, were well known even in his own time. But the uncensored autobiography makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep and includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers.

In a passage removed by Paine, Twain excoriates “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and Gen. Leonard Wood’s “mephitic record” as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as “our uniformed assassins” and describes their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes this week about the growing trend toward self-conscious nonviolent resistance among Palestinians against Israeli occupation. But he is also quick to point out its shortcomings, as in his account of one action in Bilin:

Most of the marchers were Palestinians, but some were also Israeli Jews and foreigners who support the Palestinian cause. They chanted slogans and waved placards as photographers snapped photos. At first the mood was festive and peaceful, and you could glimpse the potential of this approach.

But then a group of Palestinian youths began to throw rocks at Israeli troops. That’s the biggest challenge: many Palestinians define “nonviolence” to include stone-throwing.

Kristof, often sensitive to matters of gender, points out that women may be leading the charge toward a truly nonviolent resistance in Palestine:

But imagine if Palestinians stopped the rock-throwing and put female pacifists in the lead. What if 1,000 women sat down peacefully on a road to block access to an illegal Jewish settlement built on Palestinian farmland? What if the women allowed themselves to be tear-gassed, beaten and arrested without a single rock being thrown? Those images would be on televisions around the world — particularly if hundreds more women marched in to replace those hauled away.

He tells of one case in which a women’s movement was successful:

Most Palestinian demonstrations are overwhelmingly male, but in Budrus women played a central role. They were led by Mr. Morrar’s quite amazing daughter, Iltezam Morrar. Then 15, she once blocked an Israeli bulldozer by diving in front of it (the bulldozer retreated, and she was unhurt).

Israeli security forces knew how to deal with bombers but were flummoxed by peaceful Palestinian women. Even when beaten and fired on with rubber bullets, the women persevered. Finally, Israel gave up. It rerouted the security fence to bypass nearly all of Budrus.

While it may be that women will play a pivotal role in future nonviolent action in Palestine, men can do it too. If Palestinians, truly want to make progress—and galvanize international opinion—against Israeli power, they should follow the lead of these women and men calling for unyielding, courageous, nonviolent resistance. If they want to continue making matters worse, they can keep throwing rocks and launching rockets.

U.S. Army description: "A Soldier from Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 1st Squadron, 91st Cavalry Regiment (Airborne), watches cattle run for their lives while a CH-47 helicopter prepares to land on Landing Zone Shetland during Operation Saray Has July 19 near Forward Operating Base Naray, Afghanistan."

The rather shocking and sudden way in which a recent Rolling Stone article brought about the forced resignation of the top U.S. general in Afghanistan has, together with other milestones, churned up some long-ignored questions about what allied forces are doing there in the first place. In recent weeks, the 1,000th U.S. soldier was killed there, as well as the 300th Brit, and the war became officially the longest in American history. More and more, mainstream voices are beginning to question what is now, fully, Obama’s war.

At the New York Review of Books blog, Garry Wills writes that “McChrysal does not matter“; if there’s one take-away from the Rolling Stone piece, it isn’t the general’s insubordinate remarks but that the time has come to, as Wills puts it, “get out!”

The conflict around McChrystal will only matter if it is the occasion of recognizing what a fool’s errand he was sent on. Any military replacement will only repeat his calls for more time, more troops, more recognition of the failed policy of “counter-insurgency” (COIN). Hastings’s real point is signaled early in his Rolling Stone piece:

The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn’t want.

In June 11th’s New York Times, I was struck to see, on the front page, an article about Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s expression of doubt in the very foreign troops propping up his fragile regime, while on the back page columnist Bob Herbert argued that it is probably time for us to leave. Then, two days later, the newspaper reported on a treasure trove of mineral deposits in the country—which, it turns out, isn’t really news at all, but seems to have been re-announced in order to appeal to resource-hungry cynicism in the hopes that it might renew people’s commitment to the war effort.

From McChrystal’s insubordinate remarks to the new-old minerals, there is a campaign afoot to distract the conversation from the basic questions toward which more and more observers are beginning to drift: Are the foreign troops fighting in Afghanistan doing any good? Have they ever? Do we have any idea what they’re really supposed to be doing there in the first place?

The danger is that people will—they already have—become simply resigned to an endless and pointless war because they don’t know any better or feel they have any choice. There is a choice. We have to begin devoting ourselves to developing practical, realistic, nonviolent strategies for how foreign troops can withdraw from Afghanistan with a minimum of cost to the people who live there, as well as for how a political arrangement can be brokered that will finally bring some stability to the region. This is not a utopian, unrealistic proposal. What’s utopian and unrealistic is the combat mission that has been dragging on there, continually firing the coals of radicalism since 2001. Finally the mainstream is beginning to come around to the fact that a non-military resolution—rather than military resignation—is the only sensible way forward.

Though the great Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder died in 1997, new writings of his continue to appear in print. Just released (hat tip to Danny Postel) is a new collection of his work on the connections between pacifism and epistemology—the study of knowledge, of how we know, believe, and understand.

The two subjects might appear to have only a tendentious tie. What does nonviolence have to do with knowledge? For the beginning of an answer, one need go no farther than Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, truth-force. Truth, he taught, is the method and medium of nonviolent force. But then further questions arise. What do we mean by truth, and where does it come from? How do we recognize it?

For the rest of an answer, this book seems like an excellent place to start:

In A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder’s Nonviolent Epistemology, editors Christian Early and Ted Grimsrud gather the scattered writings of Yoder on the theme of the relationship between gospel, peace, and human ways of knowing. In them, they find the beginnings of a pacifist theology of knowledge that rejects strategies of empire while at the same time avoids a self-defeating relativism.

Learn more and order the book at Wipf and Stock Publishers. Also check out another Yoder publication from Baylor University Press this year, Nonviolence: A Brief History.

The New York Times reports:

Under intense international pressure after its commandos killed nine activists aboard an aid flotilla trying to breach its blockade of Gaza last month, Israel on Thursday announced what it called “adjustments” in its policy, promising to ease the entry of civilian goods by land while maintaining its naval blockade.

The announcement, which offered few details, said that the security cabinet had decided to “liberalize the system by which civilian goods enter Gaza” and to expand the inflow of construction materials for civilian projects that are under international supervision.

Israel has still barely budged on the Gaza blockade since the Freedom Flotilla incident, but they are at least beginning to recognize that their legitimacy among the international community in the future depends not on accusing activists of terrorism but on changing their profoundly repressive policies toward Palestinians. To the extent that the actions of the activists have cast light not on themselves and on the Mavi Marmara disaster but on the conditions that are undermining the prospects of peace, they are successful. The more they eschew violent resistance in the future, the more powerful their message will be.

A notice came in from The Metta Center for Nonviolence:

Just a quick update to let you all know that Metta president Dr. Michael Nagler will be doing an interview addressing the flotilla situation, tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 8:30am [Pacific Standard Time] on KPFA radio here in Berkeley. If you are local to the Bay Area, you can tune in to 94.1 FM at 8:30am; or you can also listen live online on KPFA’s site. After broadcast the show will be archived on this page on KPFA’s site. I believe there’ll a call-in component to the interview, so be ready with your questions!

Michael Nagler, a literature professor at Berkeley, is one of the most articulate voices advocating for nonviolence in the United States today. We highly recommend his courses about nonviolence, which are available for free online, as an introductory resource on the subject.

Just days after the violent takeover of the Freedom Flotilla, another Free Gaza boat, the MV Rachel Corrie, has been captured by the Israeli military in international waters. This time, there appears to have been no fighting. Says a Free Gaza Cyprus press release:

Just before 9am GMT this morning, the Israeli military forcibly siezed the Irish-owned humanitarian relief ship, the MV Rachel Corrie, from delivering over 1000 tons of medical and construction supplies to besieged Gaza. For the second time in less then a week, Israeli naval commandos stormed an unarmed aid ship, brutally taking its passengers hostage and towing the ship toward Ashdod port in Southern Israel.  It is not yet known whether any of the Rachel Corrie’s passengers were killed or injured during the attack, but they are believed to be unharmed.

The Corrie carried 11 passengers and 9 crew from 5 different countires, mostly Ireland and Malaysia. The passengers included Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Maguire, Parit Member of the Malaysian Parliament Mohd Nizar Zakaria, and former UN Assistant Secretary General, Denis Halliday.  Nine international human rights workers were killed on Monday when Israeli commandos violently stormed the Turkish aid ship, Mavi Marmara and five other unarmed boats taking supplies to Gaza. Prior to being taken hostage by Israeli forces, Derek Graham, an Irish coordinator with the Free Gaza Movement, stated that: “Despite what happened on the Mavi Marmara earlier this week, we are not afraid.

One thing that strikes me about both this incident and that of the Freedom Flotilla is the evidence of direct involvement by certain governments. The press release continues to explain that, in addition to the individual officials who happened to be aboard, the Malaysian government itself was involved in helping the activists obtain the boat:

The 1200-ton cargo ship was purchased through a special fund set up by former Malaysian Prime Minister and Perdana Global Peace Organisation (PGPO) chairman Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. The ship was named after an American human rights worker, killed in 2003 when she was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer in the Gaza Strip. Its cargo included hundreds of tons of medical equipment and cement, as well as paper from the people of Norway, donated to UN-run schools in Gaza.

Something similar was the case with the Freedom Flotilla. The now-infamous Mavi Marmara, on which the fighting took place earlier this week, appears to have been obtained with the help of Turkish politicians. Reports The New York Times:

The group bought three boats, including the Mavi Marmara, the one that was raided, from a company owned by the Istanbul city government for $1.8 million. The boats carried aid that included building materials — cement, tiles and steel, which Israel bans because it says they could be put to military means — worth about $10 million, members said.

The Turkish government’s sympathy with the operation was immediately clear when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cut short a trip abroad and returned home immediately upon hearing about the disaster.

What should arouse some concern here, in the willingness of governments to aid these activists, is the extent to which their work might be co-opted by the interests of those governments, and to which they might, willingly or unwillingly, be acting as agents in diplomatic games. To the extent that this is the case, the Free Gaza activists become more than fighters for justice; they become political pawns.

Nonviolence means honesty as much as it means laying down arms; it’s no mistake that Gandhi called his strategy “truth-force.” If governments intend to become involved in the struggle against the Gaza blockade, they should do so openly and transparently, not by hiding behind the efforts of activists (the notorious Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba comes to mind). They should make their intentions and involvement clear. And if activists find that they have any reason to be wary of such governments’ involvement, they should take greater pains to distance themselves from it.

Whatever ultimately happened during the Israeli assault of the Freedom Flotilla boats, according to the Free Gaza Movement, one of the flotilla’s organizers, extensive preparations were made to ensure that the participants would be nonviolent. Says a press release published today on Free Gaza’s website:

All ships were thoroughly searched by local port authorities in Greece and Turkey prior to their departure. Additionally, the coalition hired an independent security firm to search the ships and certify that no weapons were on board. All passengers went through nonviolence training and were likewise searched for weapons prior to boarding. The Turkish government, a member-state of the NATO alliance, vetted all the Turkish passengers to insure there was no one with ties to extremist groups. These precautionary steps were deliberately taken to prevent Israeli propaganda officials from ever being able to claim that the Freedom Flotilla posed any ‘security risk’ to Israel.

There was a live satellite feed broadcasting the voyage from the Mavi Marmara, as well as GPS transponders showing the exact location of the flotilla at all times to anyone viewing the coalition website. The intention of the Freedom Flotilla was never to ‘provoke a confrontation,’ but simply to deliver much-needed humanitarian aid to besieged Gaza, and in so doing to draw attention to the brutal Israeli policies that are forcing the Palestinian people into a state of impoverished dependency.

Another boat, the Rachel Corrie, is now headed for Gaza, expected to approach this weekend. For more up-to-the-minute information, video, and passenger manifests, see FreeGaza.org and WitnessGaza.com.

Many of us with sympathies—and therefore blinders—on the side of the Free Gaza Movement’s work have been reluctant to accept the possibility that, indeed, people aboard the Mavi Marmara and other vessels attempting to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip earlier this week were anything but nonviolent as Israeli soldiers descended from helicopters above. The facts of the incident remain very much in question, to be sure, and they will continue to be until a truly international, plausibly objective investigation takes place. While it cannot be taken yet as conclusive, there is some evidence provided by the Israelis that their soldiers met violent resistance before, during, or after their shooting spree that finally killed at least nine activists. This video of the events aboard the Mavi Marmara has been widely circulated:

Meanwhile, reports have begun to emerge from among the blockade-runners, including an Arab-Israeli Knesset member, a German activist, and a Turkish mother who brought her 1-year-old baby aboard. They insist that the Israelis fired on the Mavi Marmara before boarding, that those on board had no weapons short of wooden batons, and that the Israelis seemed intent on sending a bloody message.

But supposing the activists did try to defend themselves violently—how does that affect the ways we think about this incident in terms of nonviolence? As in any situation so tragic, and amidst a wider conflict so volatile, we’re faced with an array of perplexing questions. Encountering such questions is natural and, as much as one can muster, to be welcomed. For it is through them that we begin to grope after a way forward, a better way, one that has learned from the past and hopes for the future.

It is disappointing to think that a brutal assault on the Gaza blockade-breakers was necessary to gain the world’s attention when they have been risking their lives, peacefully, to bring aid to Gazans since August of 2008. Worse, what if the thing that finally put Free Gaza on the front pages was some activists’ attempt to meet the Israeli soldiers’ violence with violence of their own? Before, the Free Gaza Movement’s resolutely nonviolent approach earned them mainly obscurity, but an act of self-defense—resulting in much more violence in reply—may have changed the equation. Suddenly, world leaders are paying notice, and institutions from the United Nations Security Council to The New York Times are issuing statements of support. Egypt is even lifting its side of the Gaza blockade. Has violence, in this case, worked?

In its way, yes, violence works; it destroys people and things, and it certainly draws attention. The crucial challenge of nonviolent resistance, however, is to develop creative tactics that will point eyes and minds not to the bloodshed but to the conditions of injustice. (That’s what Waging Nonviolence is for: to highlight struggles for justice against a mainstream media that would prefer to present a version of the news in which little happens or matters except when violence is involved.)

In the days to come, though, the judgment of the world will depend very much upon the extent to which the activists really did fight back and, in doing, partly justified the soldiers’ onslaught. (Nothing, however, can truly justify the use of such disproportionate force.) To the extent that the activists and their mission were nonviolent, they will earn the moral high ground. Their nonviolence thereby invites Israel to respond not with the violence it is so effective in dispensing, but to join in a common cause of bringing about justice. The fundamentally nonviolent purpose of the Freedom Flotilla—to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza and to break what much of the international community considers an illegal blockade—is already what has aroused the world’s sympathy and put Israel in a very uncomfortable situation, perhaps even more so than during the full-scale invasions of Lebanon and Gaza in the recent years. The fact that many aboard the flotilla were noted peacemakers and people committed to and trained in nonviolence makes their statement all the more powerful. The more insistent the activists are on eschewing violence and putting themselves in harm’s way to do right, the more any injustice at play in the situation will come to light for all to see—and the less any military power can justify aggressive action. Such power becomes undermined without a shot fired.

What is probably most at stake in the questions of violence and nonviolence surrounding this incident is the future character of the pro-Palestinian movement—among the international community of course, but foremost in the Palestinian territories themselves. A BBC report last month suggests that, despite growing interest in nonviolent methods among Palestinians, there is still a lack of willingness to make a comprehensive commitment. (In the days following the attack on the flotilla, there have already been skirmishes with Israeli troops resulting in Palestinian deaths.) Many leaders remain hopeful that acts of violence will help them make progress in securing independence and the kind of society they long for. These voices appear rather representative, speaking after attending a talk in Ramallah by Rajmohan Gandhi, the Mahatma’s grandson:

“I came to promote non-violent resistance,” said Mahmoud Ramahi, secretary general of the Palestinian Legislative Council, and a member of the Islamist movement Hamas.

“We support all types of resistance—non-violent, economic, political and armed resistance,” he said—apparently missing the point of strictly peaceful campaigns.

Hind Awad, 22, a campaigner for an international boycott of Israel, said non-violent methods had historically been a “major tool” of the Palestinians.

“I also think that under international law, armed struggle is just, for people that are living under occupation,” she added.

Yet the Palestine-Israel situation is a case in point of the endlessly cyclical and self-perpetuating nature of violence. From the 1940s onward, the more Palestinians and their Arab neighbors have tried to fight, the more Western-backed Israeli forces have been able to justify sweeping and decisive retaliation, as well as outright preemption. The international community can help break the cycle by exemplifying a kind of resistance that is at once effective and nonviolent. The BBC report tells of Najmadeen al-Husseini, a 62 year-old man who lives under occupation in the West Bank:

In his view, two decades of negotiations have yielded little, yet “military resistance will get us nowhere… what are Kalashnikovs against tanks?”

“If the world supports us, peaceful resistance will get us something back,” he says.

Providing that support will require nonviolent discipline and self-sacrifice, of a kind that demolishes any moral standing held by those who would support injustice with force. If that discipline broke on Monday, all the more reason to restore it for the future. Also needed, meanwhile, are the kinds of creative, courageous, and nonviolent tactics such as the Free Gaza Movement has been using since 2008, as well as ones that can make even more undeniable and unignorable the fact that more fighting is not the answer, justice is.