The fire truck at the edge of the footballpitch was being used to spray water on the gatheringcrowd. It was hot in midday Ramallah, but there werea few vendors from Rukab’s ice cream milling about intraditional clothes. Women were walking down thehillside towards the political rally with pictures ofthe dead. The Palestinians were waving the nationalflag as the loudspeakers were blaring Arabic music inanticipation of Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson.
In theworld’s longest running international relations chessmatch known as the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Dr.Gandhi’s visit left a ripple. He told thePalestinians not to respond to Israeli aggression andto set their own agenda. The night before he hadquoted Napoleon saying, “the general who holds theinitiative wins the war.”
As Dr. Arun Gandhi took to the stage with the Mufti ofJerusalem, a representative from the Greek OrthodoxChurch and others from the Palestinian Authority andhuman rights organizations behind him, the audiencehad reached over 5,000. He came with a message ofnon-violence, as he had done the night before at theAmbassador Hotel in East Jerusalem, and told thecrowd, “Freedom is our birthright.”
The crowd had arrived on buses from the villagesthroughout the West Bank in support of the prisoners’hunger strike for better conditions that was closingin on its second week. Earlier in the month,activists had marched through the West Bank from Jeninto Jerusalem in a Freedom March.
Dr. Gandhi, head of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence in the United States, told the crowd thatin this Holy Land where Moses, Jesus and Mohammedroamed, Jews and Arabs needed to learn to livetogether and that they should learn from South Africaand India.
Gandhi spoke about how his grandfather had beenpoliticized by the 1919 massacre in Amritsar, Indiawhen General Dyer’s British troops fired into aprotesting crowd and killed over 300 people. GeneralDyer had ordered medical personnel not to treat theinjured for 72 hours. Non-British people were orderedby troops to crawl on the sidewalks and were whippedpublicly. Mohandas Gandhi later said, “We cannot doto the British, what they did to us. Let us liberatethem from their colonialism.”
Mahatmi Gandhi had originally been invited toPalestine in 1931 when stories of his non-violentmethods in resisting the British had reached theMiddle East.
Dr. Gandhi told the crowd that they should not protestviolently, that they needed to be better than theiroppressors if they wanted to establish real change. Instead they needed to channel their anger into apopular non-violent struggle that had long termobjectives.
Dr. Gandhi’s visit came as South African law professorJohn Dugard, the special rapporteur for the UnitedNations on the situation of human rights in thePalestinian Territories wrote in a report to the UNGeneral Assembly that there is “an apartheid regime” inthe territories “worse than the one that existed inSouth Africa.”
It was also the week that Israel announced 1,500 newhousing units in West Bank settlements despite all thetalk of the Gaza withdrawal. With the U.S. led Roadmapto Peace dead in its tracks, the facts on the groundshifting towards Israeli expansionism in the West Bankand all the supporting infrastructure that it entails,and over 4,000 dead Palestinians and Israelis since theoutbreak of violence in October 2000, some believethere is a vacuum building in how to respondeffectively to the Occupation.
After the assassination of Hamas leaders Sheikh Yassinand Abdel Rantisi earlier this year, Israel hascontinued to beat down violent forces in theterritories and expand its holdings in Jerusalem andthe West Bank. The ground has shifted so far fromeven the Camp David Accords that Prime Minister ArielSharon and his Likud faction is openly engaged in aland grab with tacit U.S. support.
Despite the recent International Court of Justice decision condemningIsrael’s construction of the Separation Wall, and theSupreme Court’s decision to reroute part of the wallwhich runs through Palestinian territory, there isstill wide-ranging and legitimate evidence to suggestthat Israel has effectively annexed the southern WestBank south of Jerusalem, is expanding its territory inJerusalem and has engaged in further land confiscationthrough methods including home demolitions, takingover territory for bypass roads, new settlementconstruction and infrastructure development to servicethe expansion.
In the name of upholding Israeli security, they havesolidified the Occupation on the ground through theuse of bombs, tanks, bulldozers, movementrestrictions, construction of the Separation Wall andthrough coercive methods of information gathering fromcollaborators.
It came as a surprise to many when AttorneyGeneral Menachem Mazuz, responding to the fallout fromthe International Court of Justice decision on theSeparation Wall, recommended that Israel consideradopting the Fourth Geneva Convention which outlinesresponsibilities under international law for anOccupying power of a civilian population under itscontrol. If Israel proceeded with the AttorneyGeneral’s recommendation, there would be greaterenforcement mechanisms for violations of internationalhuman rights law and humanitarian law.
Israel stillcontends that it is not an Occupying force because theinternational community never officially recognizedEgyptian and Jordanian rule over the Gaza Strip andthe West Bank and as such, is not violating anyinternational agreements it has signed on to.
Dr. Gandhi spoke often of the civil rights movement inthe United States and the Apartheid system in SouthAfrica in the context of the 37-year IsraeliOccupation. Dr. Gandhi’s own father spent 15years in jails in South Africa fighting againstapartheid.
“The first intifada was a better success because itinvolved the whole Palestinian population and itbrought the masses to the streets,” said MohammedAlatar, leader of the U.S. group Palestinians for Peaceand Democracy and one of the organizers of Dr. Gandhi’strip with East Jerusalem principal Terry Boulata andanother Ramallah-based peace group formed after theInternational Court of Justice decision regarding theSeparation Wall at The Hague.
The night before, a person in the audience at theAmbassador Hotel welcomed Dr. Gandhi’s message andsaid, “When you combine the power of popularnon-violent resistance with the enforcement ofinternational law, it can be very effective inbringing about change.”
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