By Robert Hirschfield

"IT IS MY dream that one day Israelis and Palestinians in their thousands will pull down this wall that separates them."

The words were those of Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma Gandhi, addressing Palestinian and Israeli demonstrators last August at Israel's apartheid wall at Abu Dis.

The action was organized by Palestinians for Peace and Democracy, a small group of Palestinian Gandhians who asked Gandhi to join them. It was the first trip ever to the West Bank for the 70-year-old founder of the MK Gandhi Institute For Nonviolence. He was appalled at the way Palestinians were bottled up by the settlements, the checkpoints, the wall.

"Qalqilya, for instance, is completely surrounded by the wall," he told the Washington Report. "Farmers living along the wall are cut off from their lands. In a way it's even worse than the Bantustans were in South Africa. There, at least, where farmers had land, there were no walls to keep them from it."

Palestinians asked Gandhi, as the grandson of the man who led India's liberation struggle against the British, for advice about their own liberation struggle. That began a dialogue between friends about Gandhian nonviolence-a useful but difficult dialogue, as Gandhi and the Palestinians tended to have different interpretations of the meaning of nonviolence.

The Palestinian view perhaps can best be summarized by Hasan Abu Nimah , a Jordanian Palestinian, in an article in the March 30, 2005 Jordan Times. Abu Nimah quoted the late PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat as saying to Arab ambassadors at the European Parliament meeting of 1988: "From the first day of the intifada we took a decision not to use guns, and we are committed to that."

Abu Nimah went on to say: "At the 1993 Oslo accords, Arafat renounced violence once again, and made a commitment to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to resolve disputes solely by peaceful means. There were many such declarations."

None, Abu Nimah pointed out, brought the Palestinians nearer to a peaceful settlement, as Israel, instead of reciprocating, "interpreted the Palestinian commitment as a renunciation of even the basic right to self-defense."

Gandhi responded to Abu Nimah's words, which he had heard often before, with words the Palestinians had heard often before from him.

"Palestinians think that so long as they are not using weapons they are practicing nonviolence," he said. "They think they can throw stones at Israeli soldiers and curse them, and that's okay. But true nonviolence means not showing anger, not provoking the Israelis. The objective of Gandhian nonviolence is to appeal to the opponents' compassion, understanding and good sense. The belief in nonviolent action is that the opponent has a conscience, and if we appeal to his conscience, we can awaken it."

Gandhi was asked by this reporter if ahimsa (nonviolence), the spiritual core of his grandfather's campaign, with its roots in Indian soil, can be transported to the West Bank and Gaza. He was confident it could.

"All religions talk about nonviolence, love, respect," he noted. "True, the Western family of religions, for economic reasons, have tended to be more competitive, more violent than religions in the East. But ahimsa can be applied wherever there is conflict."

Contrary to media images, instances of nonviolence long have been a component of Palestinian resistance. In the mid-1980s, the Palestinian psychologist and Gandhian, Dr. Mubarak Awad, arrived from the U.S., and led small, nonviolent actions on the West Bank. At one, in the village of Qattanah, where Israelis from the Nature Preservation Society were uprooting olive trees, Awad had Palestinian farmers plant new ones under Israeli noses. The farmers were instructed: no stone-throwing, no bringing farm implements that might be mistaken for weapons, no running away, no resisting arrest. The Israeli soldiers on the scene left without making arrests.

In 1988, at Beit Sahour, Palestinians tried to practice economic self-sufficiency-backyard gardening was encouraged, a dairy farm was set up-so as not to have to buy Israeli products. Beit Sahour residents also refused to pay taxes. The Israelis responded by confiscating $2 million worth of valuables, including furniture, from the tax resisters.

The battle over the wall has led many Palestinian women to engage in nonviolent resistance. (Lucy Nusseibeh, head of Middle East Nonviolence and Democracy, writes that Palestinian women have been employing nonviolent tactics since the days of the British Mandate.) In Budrus, for example, in western Ramallah, women and girls have thrown their bodies between Israeli bulldozers and their trees. Many have wound up being brutally beaten by Israeli soldiers.

The question was put to Gandhi: Wouldn't such brutality discourage the Palestinian leadership from resorting to nonviolence? Speaking from the Indian experience, he replied that it is only natural that the nonviolence of the oppressed often will be met by the violence of the oppressor.

"Small numbers of women can be easily suppressed," he explained. "To counter that, Palestinians must confront the Israelis in large numbers. I asked Arafat and the other leaders why they don't lead 500,000 refugees, men, women and children, in a prayerful, peaceful march from Amman to Palestine. Could the Israelis shoot down 500,000 innocent people and live with their conscience? Would the world sit back and watch this genocide?"

Palestinian leaders were understandably fearful of a bloodbath. Mohammed Alatar, director of Palestinians For Peace And Democracy, found Gandhi's idea unrealistic. But he did agree with the main point, that massive nonviolent resistance is the best hope the Palestinians have for liberation, given the hopelessly inadequate military option.

"My reading of the situation," Gandhi said, "is that Israel has astutely read the minds of the Palestinians and knows exactly what buttons to press to make them react the way it wants them to. Israel has succeeded in projecting Palestinians to the world as terrorists who are bringing violence to the doorsteps of innocent people."

A nonviolent uprising would do away with that perception. But would it do away with the occupation? As a tactic, nonviolence is not without risk, as it has never before been tried on a large scale in that part of the world. The tactics that have been tried-hit-and-run shootings, bombings-remind Arun Gandhi of another part of the world.

"The Irish used these tactics for more than a hundred years," he pointed out, "and even now they are not at peace with each other."

________________________________

Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based free-lance journalist.

This article was published in the July 2005 edition of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.