What Will We Do?

FOR many years now, we've heard American commentators bemoan the violence of the Palestinian national movement. If only Palestinians had learned the lessons of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, we hear, they'd have had their state long ago. Surely no Israeli government would have violently suppressed a non-violent Palestinian movement of national liberation seeking only the universally recognised right of self-determination.

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In any case, if you're among those who have made the argument that Israelis would give Palestinians a state if only the Palestinians would learn to employ Ghandhian tactics of non-violent protest, it appears your moment of truth has arrived. As my colleague writes, what happened on Nakba Day was Israel's "nightmare scenario: masses of Palestinians marching, unarmed, towards the borders of the Jewish state, demanding the redress of their decades-old national grievance." Peter Beinart writes that this represents "Israel's Palestinian Arab Spring": the tactics of mass non-violent protest that brought down the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, and are threatening to bring down those of Libya, Yemen and Syria, are now being used in the Palestinian cause.

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If crowds of tens of thousands of non-violent Palestinian protestors continue to march, and if Israel continues to shoot at them, what will we do?

  Economist

I think I know.

This past weekend, some of the protesters at the Israeli frontiers with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza crossed border fences, whereupon Israel troops opened fire. Twelve people were killed and hundreds injured, all of them Palestinians. And yet, almost universally, news media described the Nakba-related events in terms that suggest the Israeli response was proportional to the Palestinian threat. From CNN, the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor to the San Francisco Chronicle and Salon.com, outlets depicted the events as "clashes." By contrast, when the Syrian government used overwhelming force to suppress dissent, the most common descriptor employed was "crack-down." Journalists, of all people, should know that words matter. Thus they should acknowledge that this difference in word-choice makes a difference.

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While uprisings against repressive regimes in North Africa and other parts of the Middle East have been framed as an "awakening," Palestinian protests have been left out in the cold during the "Arab Spring."

  Trans-Missions

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.