Why Don't Zionists Adopt Gandhi's Methods?

Why Don't Zionists Adopt Gandhi's Methods?
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/


I've just been reading a post at Mondoweiss (Why Don't Palestinians
Adopt Gandhi's Methods?), which describes one of the practical
reasons - i.e. Israel's (mis)use of the law enforcement and judicial
system - why Palestinian non-violent resistance has not been
effective in the way that those who lament the lack of a "Palestinian
Gandhi" imply that it should be.

I should start out by saying that personally I am not convinced that
most of the people who lament the lack of a Palestinian Gandhi do so
sincerely. What I mean is, non-violence might well be an effective
means of realizing Palestinian rights, but I do not believe that the
people who criticize Palestinians for not adopting it are necessarily
interested in seeing the Palestinians realize their rights at all. I
don't think for a minute that Israel and its supporters would treat -
or would ever have treated - the Palestinians any better had the
Palestinians gone quietly. Zionism's problem with the Palestinians is
not that they are terrorists.

Zionism's problem with the Palestinians is that they exist. The
Palestinians have to be forcibly displaced, dispossessed and
disenfranchised not because of anything they do, but because that is
the only way to create a Jewish state in a land where there is a pre-
existing indigenous majority population that happens to be
overwhelmingly non-Jewish. Even if every single Palestinian became a
pacifist right now, Zionism would still have no room for them:

Israel would still be colonizing the West Bank, and still
depopulating East Jerusalem of residents who happen to have the wrong
ethnic-religious background. It takes a special kind of nerve to
embark upon a project - Zionism - that can be fulfilled only through
the violent destruction of another people, and then criticize the
people you are destroying for their failure to adopt non-violence.

But even if we suspend our disbelief about Zionism's willingness to
respond to Palestinian non-violence, and assume the very best about
Israel's intentions, it still strikes me as a little odd that any
Zionist would use the moral authority of Mahatma Gandhi as a line of
attack against the Palestinians, seeing as Gandhi himself was very
opposed to Zionism:

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs
to the English or France to the French. …Surely it would be a crime
against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be
restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. The
nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews
wherever they are born and bred.

… I am not defending the Arab excesses.. I wish they had chosen the
way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an
unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the
accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the
Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.

-- The Jews In Palestine, by Mahatma Gandhi; The Harijan, 26 Nov
1938.

From a Zionist perspective, Gandhi apparently has enough moral
authority to be called upon when he criticizes Arab violence, but not
enough to be listened to when he condemns the underlying injustice
against the Palestinians that gives rise to the violence in the first
place.

One of the commenters at Mondoweiss cited a quote from Gandhi,
lamenting Zionism's reliance on terrorism to impose itself on
Palestine.

And that strikes me as the biggest irony of all. Here in the U.S.,
where Zionism is the default perspective for viewing the Middle East,
people look at Palestine's confrontation with Zionism and ask: Why
can't the Palestinians adopt Gandhi's nonviolent methods?
But when Gandhi himself looked at Palestine's confrontation with
Zionism, the question that occurred to him was: Why can't the
Zionists adopt my nonviolent methods?

Photo: Backdropped by a section of Israel's separation barrier,
Israeli troops fire rubber bullets at Palestinian stone throwers, not
seen, during clashes in the West Bank village of Kalandia between
Jerusalem and Ramallah, Friday, Feb 9, 2007. (AP/MUHAMMED MUHEISEN)

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