Where is your CVC code?
During his highly publicized speech in Cairo last week, President Obama urged Palestinians to use nonviolence in their struggle for independence.
Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Obama’s nod to nonviolence “one of the most important points that he made.” But many others have had trouble sidestepping the hypocrisy of such words coming from the man in charge of the world’s greatest military power. As Starhawk, a panelist for the Washington Post‘s On Faith blog, pointed out:
For the powerful to demand that the less powerful renounce violence, without making the same demands on themselves or on their allies, is simply to say: “I reserve the weapons of death for myself and my friends.”
The obvious friend is of course Israel, which receives about $3 billion a year from Washington. Right behind them, interestingly enough, is the dictatorship in Egypt, which received $7.8 billion from the U.S. over the past five years. Making matters worse, the Obama administration is requesting a 60 percent cut in funding for pro-democracy groups and initiatives in the country. So even the location of Obama’s speech adds to the hypocrisy of his call for nonviolence, especially considering he made no direct reference to the dictatorship.
While the president may not have a leg to stand on when it comes to espousing nonviolence, he could have at least acknowledged efforts made by Muslims and Arabs to reach a peaceful reconciliation. For one, on the day of his speech in Cairo, CodePink delivered a letter to Obama from Hamas that called for a meeting “on the basis of mutual respect and without preconditions.”
Without mention of this most people are left to assume that Hamas, and by extension all Palestinians, know nothing but violence. As McClatchy Newspapers‘ Jerusalem Bureau Chief Dion Nissenbaum noted, there is “a question long raised in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Where is the Palestinian Mahatma Gandhi?” Nissenbaum then went on to describe the most recent exploration of that question–a rather comprehensive and insightful article in the Weekly Standard–and quote several leading theorists.
Huwaida Arraf, a founder of the International Solidarity Movement that organizes largely non-violent protests of Israeli actions in the West Bank, argues that there are “many Palestinian Gandhis” who have been killed by Israeli soldiers, including Bassem Abu Rahmeh, who was killed when he was hit in the chest by a tear gas cannister fired by an Israeli soldier.
Salil Tripathi of Forbes also touched on this idea, saying that Obama should have mentioned the nonviolent Muslim leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who is known as the “Frontier Gandhi” for raising a nonviolent army of over 100,000 members in the Northwest Frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
A sharper endorsement of non-violence, citing the many standard-bearers, including those from the region, could have planted the seed of an idea. And, maybe, the paradigm would have shifted.
There is still a chance that it may. But it is unlikely to be inspired by an American president.
Obama’s example also undermined his point: African Americans overcame “the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation” through violence as well as nonviolence. His audience would know that.
More from me:
For the record, hilzoy at Obsidian Wings had a different take on this passage from Obama’s speech (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/06/the-cairo-speech-2.html). He praises Obama for “casting violence as a form of weakness.” Obama had said: “It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus.” But Obama, just as well with limited words, claims that violence “does not work.”
Funny, I was thinking of the ISM as I read this piece. Nice to see they got a little mention at the end.
Non-violence works when one of two things are true. One is when the violent have a conscience. Then it bothers them to be killing and hurting innocent non-violent people. The other is when the larger society has a conscience, and they stand up and insist to the violent that the violence must stop.
People like the ISM have been going over to the occupied territories to organize non-violence resistance to the violent Israeli army of occupation. In response, several of these volunteers have been killed or seriously injured by the Israeli army. Rachel Corrie comes to mind, who was deliberately run over by a bulldozer while trying to protect the home of a Palestinian pharmacist from being destroyed by the occupiers. Others have been shot in the head and otherwise seriously injured.
The Israelis respond to non-violence with violence. Ask the Palestinians who go out and try to block the illegal Israeli wall that is stealing large chunks of the occupied territories.
From what we’ve seen so far, the Israelis have no conscience when it comes to killing Palestinians. There seems to be an extremely racist mindset within Israel that has convinced itself that killing any non-Jew who opposes them is something to be celebrated, not regretted.
The second element of non-violence is a free press that covers what is happening, and a world society that abhors what is happening and responds to make it stop. Ghandi and MLK both used such a free press to make the world aware of the violent abuse they were suffering as a result of their non-violent resistance. Ghandi didn’t succeed because the British Army suddenly realized that beating non-violent protesters was wrong. He won because the British public back home saw the press reports and they made it clear to the British government that this was unacceptable. MLK didn’t win because Bull Conner realized that that using firehoses and police dogs and beating down protesters was wrong. MLK won because the rest of America saw this on TV and made it clear that it was wrong.
Today, the major media, at least here in the US, does not report on the violence waged by Israel on non-violent resisters.
And the governments of the world, both in the US and in Europe, have decided to back the Israeli violence. Just look at the world support, at least from governments, for the brutal Israeli attack on Gaza at the turn of the year.
The one bit of good news is that the citizens of the world, at least those who’ve had access to good information about what is really happening, seem to oppose Israeli violence. But the question is, when these citizens are routinely lied to and when they are largely excluded from any voice in how the power of their countries are used, is this enough to make non-violent resistance to the Israelis anything other than an act of masochism.
If Obama was serious, he would tell the Israelis that it is now US policies to put observers on the ground to monitor any non-violent protests.
If Obama was serious, he would tell the Israelis that there would be serious consequences for any act of violence against non-violent protesters.
If Obama was serious, he’d tell Israel that they don’t get to steal the land they occupied by war. That they must stop building their wall, and in the sections where it is completely that they must open it back up to give the Palestinians unrestrained access to their lands. And that while stopping new settlement construction is a logical pre-condition to any talks, any reasonable settlement will recognize that under international law the Israelis are not allowed to steal any of the land that they grabbed via war. This means that the existing settlements are going to need to be dismantled and that land returned to the Palestinians.
And of course, at the same time the US should also monitor and respond to violent attacks by the Palestinians. The US policy should be one to open up the door for non-violent protest against Israel to be effective. But once this door is open, it should also make plain that violent actions of resistance are not acceptable and not tolerated.
A typical Obama speech has lots of fine words that sound wonderful. But, we are starting to see that his policies don’t back up his words. Unless Obama starts taking some of the actions I listed above, that will be the case with this speech as well.
I’ve been fascinated by this co-opting of nonviolence by American political rhetoric, and have written on it before, on the last Gaza conflict, and on MLK day. Elsewhere, I wrote:
Those of us interested in a more genuine commitment to nonviolence should be very attentive to this. We must not allow the legacy of nonviolence to be trivialized by Pentagon-wielding diplomats.