Haaretz October 22, 2015
What Martin Luther King Would Say About the Violence in Israel
The problem isn’t that most Palestinians think violence will improve their
lives. It is that most don’t think non-violence will either.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.681838
Peter Beinart
Every summer between 1964 and 1967, African Americans burned their own cities.
In Harlem in July 1964, an African American mob beat white bystanders. Rioters
threw Molotov cocktails at police cars, injuring at least one officer. In
August 1965 in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, rioters pulled whites
from passing cars. Thirty-four people died, over one thousand were injured. It
took almost 4,000 members of the California National Guard to restore order.
In Cleveland in July 1966, rioters torched a roller-skating rink; an African
American sniper shot up a jeep from the Ohio National Guard. That same month in
Long Island, New York, African Americans yelling “kill those cops” attacked a
meeting aimed at improving “community-police relations” with rocks and Molotov
cocktails. There were 159 riots in 1967 alone. (All this is described in
graphic detail in Rick Perlstein’s extraordinary book, Nixonland).
In September of that year, Martin Luther King addressed the American
Psychological Association. “A profound judgment of today’s riots,” he declared,
“was expressed by Victor Hugo: ‘If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be
committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the
darkness.’”
To be sure, people, even oppressed people, can create their own darkness. The
African Americans who threw bricks through store windows in the mid-1960s were
choosing to express their rage, understandable as it may have been, in violent,
destructive ways. Similarly, the Palestinians who are today stabbing Israeli
Jews are making a choice no decent person should defend. Irrespective of their
government’s policies, ordinary Israeli Jews have the right to walk down the
street without being knifed. And even if you don’t care about the lives of
Israeli Jews, which you should, it’s hard to see how anyone can seriously
argue, after the second intifada, that murdering Israelis helps the Palestinian
cause.
Still, when it comes to our own country, most American Jews acknowledge the
truth in King’s words. Ask most American Jews why African Americans rioted in
the 1960s—or for that matter, rioted in Baltimore earlier this year—and they’ll
likely acknowledge that racism and lack of opportunity played a role. Suggest
to them that the riots were due entirely to anti-white or anti-police
“incitement” by African American leaders and they’ll look at you like you’re
crazy.
Yet that’s exactly the argument the Israeli government is making about
Palestinian violence today. Yes, it was reckless, even hateful, of Mahmoud
Abbas to say last month that, “every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is
pure,” and that Israelis “have no right to desecrate the Al Aqsa mosque with
their dirty feet.” But to believe that “incitement” is the sole reason young
Palestinians are attempting murder requires ignoring the explanations that
Palestinians, including Palestinians dedicated to non-violence, offer
themselves. It requires ignoring the darkness inherent in living as a
second-class citizen, or non-citizen, in the country in which you live.
You have a lot of evidence that you are not a human being,” Fuad Abu Hamed told
The New York Times last week. Abu Hamed is not a radical. He’s a prosperous
businessman who lectures at Hebrew University. But from his home in East
Jerusalem, he can see the Jewish settlements that hem his neighborhood in, and
separate East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Since 1967, according to the United
Nations, Israel has confiscated one-third of East Jerusalem’s land to build
settlements.
Police arresting a man during the Watts riots in Los Angeles, August 12 1965.
Police arresting a man during the Watts riots in Los Angeles, August 12
1965.Credit: Wikimedia Commons
From his home, Abu Hamed can also see the Palestinian neighborhoods cut off
from the rest of Jerusalem by the separation barrier, neighborhoods that
according to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) receive only 55
percent of the World Health Organization’s recommended supply of water. “All
the time as a Palestinian here you feel that they want to take you out of the
city,” Abu Hamed continued. To many Jews, that sounds paranoid. But most
Palestinians in East Jerusalem are residents, not citizens, and the Israeli
government can revoke their residency for a variety of reasons, including just
being away from the city for too long. According to B’tselem, Israel has
revoked the residencies of 14,000 Palestinians since 1967. According to ACRI,
almost forty percent of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem lack proper
permits, permits that are extremely difficult to get. Which means they can be
demolished at any time.
The problem isn’t that most Palestinians think violence will improve their
lives. It is that most don’t think non-violence will either. And for good
reason. Consider the fate of Mubarak Awad. He was born in Jerusalem. In 1983,
he created the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence there. Five
years later, Israel revoked his residency permit, allegedly because he had
spent too long in the United States. Awad, once dubbed the “Palestinian
Gandhi,” now lives in Washington, DC.
Or consider the case of Abdallah Abu Rahma. In 2010, Abu Rahma wrote a letter
about the protests he had helped lead in Bilin, a Palestinian village cut off
from roughly half its land by the separation barrier. “In Bilin,” Rahma wrote,
“we have chosen another way. We have chosen to protest nonviolently together
with Israeli and international supporters. We have chosen to carry a message of
hope and real partnership between Palestinians and Israelis in the face of
oppression and injustice.” Rahma’s wife smuggled the letter out of the jail
where he was serving a year-long sentence for “incitement” and organizing
“illegal demonstrations.” Under Military Order 101, which Israel issued when
it took over the West Bank, an “illegal demonstration” is any gathering of 10
or more Palestinians that involves “a political matter or one liable to be
interpreted as political.”
Or consider the case of Salam Fayyad. Fayyad, who served as the Palestinian
Authority’s Prime Minister from 2007 to 2013, wagered that if Palestinians
eschewed violence, overcame corruption and built the institutions of a
functioning state, they would move closer to getting one. Fayyad’s Palestinian
enemies undermined him. But it was Israel that proved his theory wrong. “In
deeds,” said Fayyad just before leaving office, “Israel never got behind me; in
fact it was quite hostile. The occupation regime is more entrenched, with no
sign it is beginning to relinquish its grip on our life.”
“The risk this situation poses,” Fayyad warned back then, “is of sliding back
to a cycle of violence.” Now that violence has returned. It has returned at a
time when Israel’s prime minister has declared that he will never allow a
Palestinian state, and America’s president has stopped talking about the
Palestinians at all. “It’s not an accident that the violence [first] broke out
last summer two months after the collapse of the Kerry Initiative,” noted
Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann in a recent speech. “Never before in my
memory has there been such a total absence of any sense of hope or political
horizon, so that all of the destabilizing factors in Jerusalem become more
volatile and more dangerous in the absence of a political process.”
Seidemann isn’t excusing Palestinians who commit violence. In 2013, one of them
gashed his head with a rock. He’s drawing a connection between violence and
despair. Stopping the stabbings that currently haunt Israel requires more than
police; it requires hope. It requires confronting the moral darkness that comes
from denying generation after generation of Palestinians the basic rights that
every human being deserves.
In his most recent column, Sayed Kashua quotes a Palestinian parent who puts
the dilemma this way. “If we foment an intifada, our children will be
slaughtered. If we keep silent, Israel will go on feeding us sand.” Martin
Luther King would understand.
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Peter Beinart
Haaretz Columnist
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