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Refusing to Be Enemies:
Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation
By Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta. Ithaca Press, 2010. 502 pages. $69.95/hardcover.
Reviewed by Robert Dockhorn
Read an excerpt from "Refusing to Be Enemies"In this compilation of essays and interviews with activists who share a commitment to nonviolence, Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta makes no pretense of presenting a full spectrum of views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, this Quaker/Jewish activist lifts up views worthy of attention that are underrepresented in the public discourse. In the process, she finds a vision of the future that she calls "a refreshing and hope-inspiring antidote to the despair that threatens to descend when one is confronted with the day-to-day reality of the region."
Early on in her information gathering, Kaufman-Lacusta noticed that two interview questions—Why did you get involved in anti-occupation activities? Specifically, what brought you to nonviolence?—had varying subtexts. For Israeli activists, the questions referred to their support of the Palestinian nonviolent struggle. For Palestinian activists, the questions focused on their choice of nonviolence rather than other methods of resistance.
Kaufman-Lacusta also realized that the Palestinian nonviolent movement was "virtually unknown," and so she decided to give special attention to it. Therefore, a major portion of Refusing to Be Enemies focuses on Palestinian activists and their understanding of, and commitment to, nonviolence.
The book does not dwell upon the deprivations and injustices of those living under Israeli occupation, but the many hardships that Palestinians endure do surface. The policies of Israel, Kaufman-Lacusta notes, also disadvantage those Palestinians who are Israeli citizens—who make up 20 percent of Israel's population but "by law and planning and zoning restrictions are confined to just 3.5 percent of the land."
Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, sums up the situation sharply by calling Israel an ethnocracy: "a country that belongs to one particular people that is privileged over everyone else." Halper, who was interviewed at length for the book and contributed an essay, has some Quaker-related experience in his past. A Jewish anthropologist who lives in Israel, he led the Middle East Center of Friends World College for several years. In his recent book An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel (2008), Halper describes how a co-faculty member, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, spoke to students during a field trip about her distress over the destruction of a Palestinian village in 1948. When Halper objected to what he labeled her anti-Israeli "tone," Friends World College students called him to task for not adhering evenhandedly to rigorous intellectual standards. This experience, he says, was a turning point in his life. He began to notice "the hidden reality of the 'other side' of the Israeli-Palestinian membrane, that porous, transparent filter that defines and envelopes Jewish space and turns everything 'Arab' into mere background, which separates 'us' from 'them.'"
Nonviolence in Palestine
Much of the nonviolent resistance practiced in Palestine has ancient roots. However, an exclusive commitment to nonviolence (as opposed to pragmatic use of nonviolent techniques) has been slow in coming in the resistance to the Israeli occupation. This was partly rooted in a misperception. In the words of one activist, "A lot of Palestinians think nonviolence is some kind of collaboration with Israel."
Non-acceptance of nonviolence was also the consequence of a low appreciation of its potential. As Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American citizen of Israel associated with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), said: "All the statistics that . . . say that 70 to 80 percent of the Palestinian people support the suicide bombings lead you to believe that the Palestinian community is a very violent community, that they love killing and they teach kids this and glorify it. And it's so opposite the truth, but what [Palestinians] have been led to accept is that we have no other way of fighting."
An early prophet of nonviolence among Palestinians was Mubarak Awad, who also had Quaker connections (he is married to Nancy Nye, former principal of the Friends Girl's School in Ramallah). In 1985, he founded the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence and pioneered such techniques as planting olive trees, urging people not to pay taxes, and encouraging them to consume Palestinian products. He had only a tiny following then, though respect for him among Palestinians has grown with the passage of time. Deported by Israel in 1988, he lives in the United States.
Focus on a West Bank Village
Kaufman-Lacusta looks in depth at a tax strike in the West Bank village of Beit Sahour during the First Intifada (1987–1993), a time of popular activism. This strike was based on the fact that taxes collected by Israelis were not being used to serve the needs of the Palestinian population, but to finance the occupation itself. Elias Rishmawi, a major player in Beit Sahour, said that the villagers "found out that Israel was profiting dramatically from occupying the Palestinian land—from direct taxes, indirect taxes, taxes on the workers inside Israel, taxes on imports, taxes on people leaving the country, using Palestinian land, using Palestinian resources." Palestinians viewed the strike, which they ended in 1994, as a success because a strong and violent reaction from the Israeli government failed to suppress it.
The 1993 Oslo Accords brought a flowering of contact between Palestinian and Israeli activists. But when Palestinians discovered that—if anything—their conditions worsened after Oslo, many doubted the wisdom of these contacts, now seen as "Israeli feel-good programs." A new expression entered the parlance: normalization. Kaufman-Lacusta offers this definition: "Normalization is a derogatory term denoting a relationship between Israelis and Palestinians (usually organizations) carried on as if all were normal between Israel and Palestine, even as the conflict continues." After the breakdown of Camp David talks in 2000 the General Assembly of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations went so far as to call on all Palestinian NGOs to stop all joint programs and activities with Israeli organizations—with the exception of those organizations that explicitly opposed and worked against the occupation.
Limits of Violent Resistance
Beginning in 2000, the Second Intifada was much more chaotic and violent than the first. Kaufman-Lacusta highlights an exception: the experience of the village of Bil'in, which lost a large portion of its land to Israeli settlements and to the separation wall constructed by Israel on the Palestinian side of the 1967 border. Protests in Bil'in, beginning in March 2005, temporarily blocked construction of the wall, and in a few instances actually changed its path. Israeli and international activists came to lend support to the protesters, and Bil'in became "a place for learning firsthand about the issues confronting the villages impacted by the wall and for personally experiencing the roadblocks, teargas, and rubber bullets that are but the tip of the iceberg of the oppression suffered by the villagers."
In the years that followed, the futility of a violent response by Palestinians became increasingly clear. Kaufman-Lacusta reports that the number of Palestinians who support and engage in nonviolent resistance has increased slowly but steadily. She adds that a broader cross-section of people "are now actually calling what they do 'nonviolence' (la'unf, in Arabic)."
Kaufman-Lacusta probes carefully the different interests of Palestinian and Israeli activists and how their activities should not always be conducted jointly. At the same time, she urges Israeli activists to do their part by steering nonviolent activities into Israel proper, in the form of noncooperation with the occupation, both to have a greater effect on the Israeli government and to heighten the awareness of other Israelis of the conditions in the occupied territories. An intriguing suggestion for reaching Israelis was to institute a Hebrew-language Palestinian TV channel; Ibrahim Issa, principal of Hope Flowers School, said that if implemented, it "would answer a real need."
I have barely scratched the surface of what this book offers—a variety of essays, comments from members of a surprisingly large number of organizations involved in nonviolent resistance, very careful documentation, and an excellent index.
Visions of the Future
A crowning achievement of this book is the spectrum it offers of the nonviolent visions of the future. They range from the call by Ali Jedda of the Alternative Information Center for a secular democratic state to Peace Now's call for "two states for two peoples." Kaufman-Lacusta was surprised that a substantial number of Palestinian activists favored some variation of a bi-national federation, with the creation of two states mainly as a "station" on the way to this larger grouping. Palestinian stateswoman Hanan Ashrawi, a graduate of Ramallah Friends School, is among those who foresees two states as a step toward an eventual regional solution with porous borders.
Kaufman-Lacusta's careful and richly documented study also sheds light on what many Palestinians will require in order to commit themselves to a true peace. The goal, says Holy Land Trust's Sami Awad, is for Palestinians "to have the same rights [Israelis] have—exactly—not any more and not any less." Activist Omar Burghouti calls for the embodiment of "our three fundamental rights: the right of return for Palestinian refugees; full equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel; and ending the occupation and colonial rule." And refugee rights activist Muhammed Jaradat insists that Palestinians need the rights of "return, restitution, and compensation."
Jeff Halper sums up the situation crisply: "You can't have an ethnically pure state in the 21st century." He calls for restructuring of land ownership, reconstruction of Zionism, and "reconstruction of the entire meaning of Israel." Those who place hope in this direction of rethinking will find succor in the words of ISM coordinator Saif Abu Keshek: "I think we do have two very similar cultures"; and of Veronica Cohen, a member of the original Jerusalem/Beit Sahour dialogue group, who puts it this way: "We are linked, our fates are linked, and what's bad for [Palestinians] is bad for us, too."
When readiness arises—if the political winds shift—a peaceful solution could come abruptly, even startlingly soon. And if it does, it could in turn affect other active conflicts around the world that involve multiple nationalities within single states or territories. Suheil Salman of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee is one observer who voiced this hope for global as well as local peace; that "occupation will be ended in all the world, not only here."
Nonviolent activism, of course, cannot by itself bring about a resolution of this conflict, but Kaufman-Lacusta's study strengthens my expectation that nonviolence can point the way and promote the will to reach it.
Toward Understanding Nonviolence:
an excerpt from the Foreword to Refusing to Be Enemies
Ursula Franklin
There is genius as well as problematique in the very term nonviolence. Resisting force and changing power structures by ways and means that are defined by what they are not seems to be vague and indecisive at best. However, nonviolent approaches provide, and have provided, some of the most creative, helpful, and lasting social changes, often because the approaches have been situational, site specific, and grown out of practice and have mixed ordinary life skills with extraordinary unconventionality.
Throughout human history, nonviolent conduct is the normal and expected pattern of social interactions; cooperation and recognition of the needs of others are the given and for this very reason, it is the violent response, the abnormal, that is recorded, analyzed and taught.
What, then, do we mean when we speak of nonviolence? At this point, attention to definitions may be helpful.
In terms of the issues addressed in Refusing to be Enemies, "violence" is most usefully defined as "resourcelessness," surprising as it may sound. Yet reliance on one single resource; i.e., the ability to destroy, to inflict harm, is in the final analysis the most telling attribute of violence.
Organized violence—armed force—is frequently the preferred tool of the powerful. It seems so straightforward: nothing more than the translation into daily reality of a threat, "Do as I say, or else . . ." when "or else . . ." means inflicting destruction, harm, and hurt.
While the powerful can command many resources other than force and sophisticated systems of inflicting harm, the oppressed, the powerless, cannot. They may have exhausted the resources within their reach and may therefore fall back on violence from a genuine feeling of being deprived of other resources to address their needs.
Once we recognize violence as resourcelessness—by choice or by perceived necessity—the nature of "nonviolence as resourcefulness" comes into focus. The belief in and the respect for a common human creativity and worth become the resource base from which nonviolent actions can arise. The understanding of nonviolence as resourcefulness thus provides a guide for the mobilization of human and social resources but not a template.
It is my hope that the foregoing thoughts and definitions will illuminate the universal components that link the nonviolent actions documented in this "case book" to past and future nonviolent responses.
Ours is a complex global society, in which unforeseen and unforeseeable instruments of power, control and, interaction are emerging at rapid rates. These new power structures are frequently superimposed on traditional arrangements and habits of political and social conduct. Such new developments, often related to modernization and globalization, are altering individual and collective behaviors and a society's sense of belonging and responsibility.
These new features of our interdependent global world are shaping the nature and the conduct of conflicts. On the one hand, the range, force, and sophistication of violent actions have increased beyond imagination; on the other hand, the same modern technologies have increased the flow of information, of goods and people, obliterating many physical, legal, and emotional boundaries, often the very boundaries that have previously confined the range of organized violence.
New reasons for conflicts, be they military or civilian, commercial or ideological, have arisen as a consequence of the ascendance of technological societies. These conflicts, in turn, are often characterized by very different patterns of conflict resolution and altered notions of territory and boundaries. Yet the ancient notion of "the enemy" has remained part of the modern world's social and political paraphernalia.
As a category, "the enemy" is significantly different from seemingly related social classifications such as "foreigner," "stranger," or persons "from away." Assigning the designation "enemy" to some people goes well beyond emphasizing a distinction between "them" and "us." The enemy label becomes a coordinate that places and defines the holder within the realm of an existing or implied conflict.
As a class, enemies are deemed to be intrinsically hostile to one party in the conflict, regardless of personal conduct or conviction, merely by virtue of their belonging to a particular group. Kenneth Boulding, in Conflict and Defense, defines parties in conflict as "behavioral units." Members of such units—nation-states or clans, organizations, or churches—are assumed to exhibit the same behavior with respect to a conflict that impacts them.
The designation "enemy" is not self-selected; it is bestowed by the opponent. Moving one's adversaries into the enemy class can be politically helpful. To quote Boulding again, "[A] strong enemy is a great unifying force; in the face of a common threat and the overriding common purpose of victory or survival, the diverse ends and conflicting interests of the population fall into the background and are swallowed up into the single, measurable, overriding end of winning the conflict."
Not only can the presence of "enemies" serve as social glue, their presumed evil intent and unbending hostility can become the justification for otherwise unacceptable actions against them. Once one appreciates the deep social roots of the concept of "the enemy," it becomes clear that, for individual citizens, refusing to be enemies is a profoundly political act. This act denies the ruling apparatus of all groups involved in a particular conflict the right to label and assign individuals to a particular behavioral unit.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of this act. It entails the crucial paradigm shift that can break the stranglehold of violence and open the option of nonviolent action. Nonviolence, after all, is not a bag of tricks to be pulled out if or when violent responses are not possible. Nonviolence is a set of collective insights that, by calling on the human potential of victim and perpetrator alike, opens ways to oppose violence and oppression that are different in kind from the blind tit-for-tat of organized violence.
The events recounted and ideas articulated in this book make it clear that nonviolent strategies are not soft or mushy. Their hard political edge is clear and visible. The goal of the interventions is to decrease suffering and to achieve justice, but the changed situations can only be lasting and functional if they assure justice for all. This means that the transformations that specific nonviolent interventions try to achieve must, in the end, yield systemic changes.
Ursula Franklin is a longtime member of the Religious Society of Friends and has served Toronto (Ont.) Meeting and Canadian Yearly Meeting in many capacities. Now a university professor emerita, she was among the very few women members in the Faculty of Engineering of University of Toronto. ©2010 Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta; reprinted with permission.
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Comments
A response from the author of Refusing to be Enemies
The following response by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta appears as a letter in the Forum of the February 2011 issue of Friends Journal:
I’d like to thank Robert Dockhorn for his very positive and helpful review essay on my book, Refusing to be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation, in the November 2010 issue, as well as for his encouragement to submit a few words in response. The first thing I’d like readers of Friends Journal to know is that—in addition to requesting that their local libraries acquire the book—there is another way to avoid the prohibitive price of the $70 hardcover edition. The paperback is due for release in February 2011 and is listed at $24.99 US (down from the original list price of $35, although the UK price remains unchanged at £19.99), which will make it far more accessible. It is already listed on amazon.com, and your local bookseller can order it from Ithaca Press’s North American distributor ISBS in Portland, Oreg.
Regarding the FJ review, I would like to make one correction, clarify a couple of points, and clear up a misunderstanding.
A meaning-altering word substitution was inadvertently introduced in reproducing my capsule definition of “normalization” in the Israeli-Palestinian context. The correct quote is: “Normalization is a derogatory term denoting a relationship between Israelis and Palestinians (usually organizations) carried on as if all were normal between Israel and Palestine, even as the oppression [not “conflict”] continues.” So, the issue isn’t the persistence of the conflict, but of the power imbalance between Israelis and the Palestinians under Israeli rule.
When I did the index for this book, grueling as that work was, I was thankful for having to do it because it helped me uncover several embarrassing errors overlooked in the course of editing and proofreading. I hadn’t expected that reading reviews would have a similar effect. But it’s funny how one sees a quote out of context and says, “Wait a minute, I didn’t say that.” In this case, a computer search of the book’s PDF revealed, as I suspected, that the comment that the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and about 20 percent of the population “by law and planning and zoning restrictions are confined to just 3.5 percent of the land” was in fact Jeff Halper’s comment, not mine. It is part of what was originally a block quote in the main text. In the course of editing, it was relocated to an endnote, and since block quotes don’t have quotation marks, the block blended in with the rest of the text. I missed that change when proof-reading the chapter. Here’s Jeff’s full statement:
"The Palestinians in Israel are 20 percent of the population, but by law and planning and zoning are confined to 3.5 percent of the land of the country. House demolitions go on inside Israel almost as much as the occupied territories. In the last month, two entire Bedouin villages have been demolished in the Negev. There are 150,000 Israeli citizens who are Palestinians who live in what we call unrecognized villages, and they’re under siege. So this is a part of the equation."
I also would like to note that the protests that have “temporarily blocked construction of the wall, and in a few instances actually changed its path” are not limited to Bil’in, although that village’s now five-year nonviolent struggle is an extraordinary example. In fact, similar—if smaller-scale and less well-publicized—nonviolent efforts have been going on in many villages along the route of the wall since 2002. A number are mentioned in the book, including that of Budrus, where daily actions blocking bulldozers led to return of 95 percent of the land slated for expropriation from it and neighboring villages. The film Budrus is currently being shown throughout the world, and the trailer and a schedule of showings may be viewed at www.justvision.org. Similarly, for a close-up of the Bil’in struggle, check out www.bilin-village.org. where you can also take a look at a clip of the also excellent—if somewhat older—film, Bil’in Habibti.
Lastly, despite the overall positive tone of the review, one interpretation of the book gave me pause. It states:
"Kaufman-Lacusta probes carefully the different interests of Palestinian and Israeli activists and how their activities should not always be conducted jointly. At the same time, she urges Israeli activists to do their part by steering nonviolent activities into Israel proper, in the form of noncooperation with the occupation, both to have a greater effect on the Israeli government and to heighten the awareness of other Israelis of the conditions in the occupied territories."
I want to emphasize that this is not quite what I intended to convey, and I apologize if I gave the impression that this was the case. I definitely did not mean to imply that the interests of Palestinian and Israeli activists necessarily differ and that “their activities should not always be conducted jointly.” What I was saying is that working jointly in uni-national organizations seems to work better in many instances than working in joint, bi-national organizations; and, more importantly, that Israelis (and internationals) must be sensitive to the desires and needs of their Palestinian hosts, and neither impose their “help” nor take advantage of their greater access to influence with the authorities.
Likewise, in encouraging Israeli activists to engage more widely in noncooperation with the Israeli authorities inside Israel and work to combat racism and militarism within the borders of the state, I did not mean to suggest that Israeli activists should avoid participation in Palestinian-led nonviolent actions in the West Bank; quite the contrary. These forms of activism are complementary, not an “either-or” choice. In fact, it is precisely those Israelis who stand side by side with Palestinians and see the conditions of their lives firsthand who are best able to “heighten the awareness of other Israelis” of these conditions.
Happily, by the time I wrote the Afterword for the paperback edition last fall, I was able to point to recent progress in both joint struggle and noncooperation inside Israel. (BDS, the Palestinian-led international campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, was the third form of nonviolent resistance dealt with in the Afterword; see http://bdsmovement.net.) In that connection, I especially encourage checking out reports of the ongoing (weekly since January 2010) demonstrations in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem (e.g., www.en.justjlm.org, or just Google “sheikh jarrah”) and the expanding movement of noncooperation initiated in May 2010 by Israeli activist Ilana Hammerman (Google her by name), who concluded a recent article in the prestigious Israeli daily Ha’aretz:
"I am nurturing the hope that the police will recommend that I stand trial. Because then, before they “prosecute me to the full extent of the law,” I will be given an opportunity to tell my story, and to bring up in the courtroom—the most appropriate place of all—my doubts concerning the legality of many of the laws of the State of Israel."
Thus encouraged, I’ve been ending the PowerPoint presentations I’ve been giving at book events since that time by wondering loud—quoting the Afterword:
"Could this be the beginning of the end “of the multi-tiered Israeli system of oppression” that [prominent BDS activist Omar] Barghouti describes? Have the “Israeli Jews with a conscience” that [pacifist Palestinian lawyer] Jonathan Kuttab referred to [see Epilogue section entitled “Joint Struggle in the Occupied Territories—Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea”] begun, at last, to “make a clean break with . . . broader Israeli society” and to act upon their “more thoroughgoing critique of Israeli society,” as he proposed back in 2007? Could this, indeed, be the beginning of the “movement of Israeli nonviolent action, especially multiple forms of noncooperation, inside Israel” that I allude to in my Conclusions as a necessary complement to joint struggle in the occupied territories in the achievement of “a just, viable, and enduring peace” in the region?"
Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta
Burnaby, B.C.
Ordering information for paperback and e-book edition
This is to let you know that Refusing to be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation is now out in Kindle e-book, as well as paperback, editions (ordering info follows below).
If you're curious about reviews, by the way, my publisher has been posting links to them on the Ithaca/ Garnet site as I receive them and send them on. I'm particularly excited about one by Simona Sharoni that's due to appear in the next issue of The Journal of Palestine Studies. It should be on the Ithaca site soon. Also, look for a major write-up by Andrew Stimson in the May/June issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (due out in mid-April).
www.ithacapress.co.uk/epages/es109086.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es1090...
OR http://tinyurl.com/4ecgvxb
e-book (including "delivery"):
Amazon.com: $9.99US: www.amazon.com/Refusing-Enemies-Palestinian-Nonviolent-ebook/dp/B004K6MK...
Amazon.co.uk: 8 pounds 4 pence, including VAT
www.amazon.co.uk/Refusing-Enemies-Palestinian-Nonviolent-Resistance/dp/B...
Paperback - For single copies, Amazon.ca is a good source for Canadians (with a significant reduction in cover price). For multiple copies for resale or course use, in both the US and Canada, prospective bulk purchasers in North America are invited to contact Lenny Gerson at lenny@isbs.com to discuss discount terms.
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