This is the third of three posts comprising Part III of a series of posts in which Dr. Ian Hansen shares his thoughts on nonviolence.
See also Part 1a, Part 1b, Part 1c, Part 2a, Part 2b, Part2c, Part3a and Part3b.
At the end of my last post, I raised the issue of nations for which the original relations of domination grew even more entrenched after a nonviolent revolution. This is arguably the case with the Palestinians, as Dr. Wasfi noted in the comment inspiring this series of posts.
The first Palestinian Intifada was, for the most part, somewhere between nonviolent and low technology violent (throwing stones). Needless to say, Israeli soldiers did not restrict themselves to throwing stones when trying to suppress the intifada—so it could at least be called a “less violent” revolution than the means of suppression employed against it. And though the Intifada generated a lot more international sympathy than, say, murdering Olympic athletes in Munich did, it still did not get Palestinians a real state, and the resulting Oslo accords were largely seen as a cruel joke from the Palestinian perspective.
Again, it is difficult to tease out cause and effect here since nonviolence and violence have co-occurred in the Palestinian field of resistance over the decades (and, as Dr. Wasfi said in her comment, this is usually the case in most, if not all, historical mass uprisings). However, in cases where nonviolence has been the primary strategy used by Palestinians–as in the West Bank village of Budrus–it seems that the ability to resist land grabs and other acts of oppression is potentially very reliable. (I highly recommend Julia Bacha’s documentary on the Budrus, previewed at the beginning of this post. It is one of the better films about any nonviolent campaign). I haven’t seen any studies that systematically compare the goal-achieving success of relatively violent and relatively nonviolent acts of resistance village-by-village in Palestine, but this is a low hanging fruit for any sociologist of the region.
Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.