After today’s bloodshed in Jerusalem, has the Palestinian cause advanced?
Violence today shows that Israel's policy of terror, land theft, collective punishment & mass murder of children can never bring "security."
— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) November 18, 2014
If you want to end violence, work to end Israeli apartheid, conquest and occupation over millions of Palestinians. Anything else is futile.
— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) November 18, 2014
I'm saying things as they are. We've had enough of the game of condemning this, condemning that, while the structure of apartheid is ignored
— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) November 18, 2014
I agree with Ali Abunimah — condemnations of violence have become a hollow political ritual.
On the other hand, what is accomplished by the cold rationalism of someone like the Palestinian politician, Mustafa Barghouti, who is a proponent of non-violent resistance? He said today’s violence was “a normal reaction to the Israeli oppression.”
Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas spokesman, went further and wrote: “The new operation is heroic and a natural reaction to Zionist criminality against our people and our holy places. We have the full right to revenge for the blood of our martyrs in all possible means.”
There’s a problem with arguing that whatever any Palestinian does is a reaction to Israeli oppression, because this gives all the power to the Israelis. It treats Palestinians as pure victims, capable of doing little more than rattle the chains that hold them down.
Yet oppressive as occupation indeed is, it does not strip individuals of freewill and for that reason it’s possible to look at what Odai Abed Abu Jamal and Ghassan Muhammad Abu Jamal did today and conclude that they made a bad choice.
No doubt there are many who react to violence against Israelis such as that which occurred today and think that it pales in comparison with Israel’s periodic assaults on Gaza, along with the day-to-day violence committed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank that gets ignored by the media.
If you want to end violence, support peaceful, popular strategies for fighting Israeli apartheid: #BDS.
— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) November 18, 2014
OK. But the success of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, depends on its ability to widen its support, which is to say, its ability to win support from people who are not committed political activists.
Today’s attack will not have helped BDS.
On the contrary, the dubious accomplishment of the Jamal cousins, even though they belong to the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is that in the eyes of many Western observers the hatchet-wielding Palestinians must look like members of ISIS. And since they happen not to have been Islamists, the popular perception that violence runs in the blood of men across the Middle East will have been further reinforced.
Major political advances always require the fostering of solidarity around a political consensus. It’s not enough to know what you are fighting against. You have to know what you are fighting for.
As easy as it is to attribute today’s killings to Israeli oppression, I suspect that they can be seen as the product of a movement that currently lacks any clear sense of direction.
