We Write What We Like

From Hamas’ point of view, therefore, a complete absence of “rough terrain” and a catastrophic change in support patterns of an unfavourable nature confirm common sense that the chances of a successful military response are close to zero. Hamas strategists need to make major adjustments in thinking and refocus on the elements of the negotiating/resistance strategy outlined below. Any change of policy will obviously be viewed as a change in tactics not principle or weakness. Fatah, on the other hand, needs to change its current sycophantic approach to negotiations with Israel and to buttress any talks with nonviolent resistance. The revamped strategy will not materialise unless these tectonic shifts in attitude are quickly realised and then only against a background of a newly forged unity. In this view of the Palestinian resistance as a sequential two-phase process, initially military and then nonviolent, the bottom line is that the military phase is over, its objectives already achieved……a comprehensive twin-track strategy including a nonviolent arm must be put in place straightway.

The tactical and strategic aspects of nonviolent resistance have been elaborated in great detail over several decades now and one need not reiterate its basic philosophy here suffice to say that by and large the choice is not a simplistic one between a military and nonviolent approach. Any given approach must be based on the context. Nonviolent strategies have worked most effectively pushing against an open door. In my view, there may well have to be an initial military phase as was the case of Palestinian resistance until the tipping point is reached when nonviolent strategies take over. It is not really the remit of this article to outline the overall tactics for the Palestinians; that is best left to the Palestinians themselves but it is perhaps useful to itemise some of the basic elements required.

Key point 3

Any negotiations must be coupled with a campaign of nonviolent resistance Activities within the Occupied Territories

PIPA polls indicate 70% of both Israelis and Palestinians want to move beyond the current cycle of violence. 64% Israelis thought that use of force by the IDF actually increased Palestinian violence and another 25% thought it had no effect. A slight majority of Palestinians thought that nonviolent strategies could be at least as effective as violence and if conducted on a large scale this majority increased to 70%. About 50% Palestinians indicated they would be willing to engage in such large-scale nonviolent activities. Interestingly, 65% Israelis thought that the IDF should “show restraint” in dealing with nonviolent demonstrations by Palestinians. So here we have a high level of support for Palestinians to engage in large scale nonviolent resistance and a parallel Israeli view that such an approach should not be suppressed by use of force.

We can glean some insights into the strengths and weaknesses of Palestinian resistance by examining the historical evidence. Clearly, the imposition of the Mandate caught developing Palestinian nationalism on the hop, exacerbated, as many studies have shown, by the restraining hand of the Notables at that time. Nevertheless, a pattern begins to emerge. At both ends of the 1920s, first we see acts of resistance, secondly, the inevitable British clampdown and thirdly, but importantly, concessions of sorts. In other words, resistance “works”. In the Military Administration, just prior to the Mandate, there was indeed much talk about the impracticalities of the Mandate. After the 1929 riots, the High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor even thought of amending the Mandate itself, although the Arab Executive failed to press home the advantage in negotiations. On the whole, throughout the 1920s, resistance was unfortunately not sustained at a sufficiently high level, not even during Balfour’s visit in 1925, and it effectively bumped along the bottom, during which time Jewish immigration rose sharply reaching a figure of nearly 60,000 between 1924-26. It could be said that this period of immigration, in particular, was a major stepping stone towards the creation of a Jewish state. Again, there was no major follow up to the Arab Rebellion of 1936-39 despite the fact that the British began to backtrack as revealed by the findings of the Woodhead Commission, the proceedings at the St James Conference and the 1939 White Paper.

With hindsight, we can bemoan these lost opportunities unfairly perhaps. But, in today’s context with a truly vigorous Palestinian nationalism enjoying widespread international support, some very simplistic, self-evident issues need to be addressed. Any future nonviolent resistance campaign must be based on the “numbers” game. Piecemeal activities in the low hundreds or early thousands are not going to make any long-term impact because Israel has no difficulty in maintaining control. One needs to organise events involving hundreds of thousands of people. A good model would be the awesome meetings organised by Daniel O’Connell in 19th Century Ireland. O’Connell held a series of 40 or more fantastic meetings across Ireland including the famous ‘Monster Meeting’ at Tara in 1843 attended by hundreds of thousands of people culminating in a public banquet. Meticulous planning and organisation was the order of the day making it possible to hold these enormous meetings without violent incidents. He was the master of showmanship and inspirational themes for his meetings. The whole set up was funded by rich and poor alike; poor folk contributing their famous penny/month, the Catholic Rent. Everyone got involved, even the local dogs and cats. Peaceful meetings of such enormous size at that time were unheard of in other parts of Europe. Added impact was provided by choosing sites of national political and historical significance.

Gandhi’s activities against the Salt Act (which imposed a heavy tax and a government monopoly) rank almost as high as the O’Connell meetings in terms of impact. Gandhi, we can recall, set out with disciples on a 26-day march to the sea to commit civil disobedience by making salt. This was the signal for mass nonviolent revolt throughout the country. As the movement progressed, there were mass meetings, huge parades, seditious speeches, a boycott of foreign cloth, and picketing of liquor shops and opium dens. Students left government schools. The national flag was hoisted. There were social boycotts of government employees, short strikes (hartals), and resignations by government employees and members of the Legislative Assembly and Councils. Government departments were boycotted, as were foreign insurance firms and the postal and telegraph services. Many refused to pay taxes. Some renounced titles. There were nonviolent raids and seizures of government-held salt, and so on. A hundred thousand folk participated at times.

A third example is Latin America. Latin American elites had a tradition of robust forcefulness against arbitrary usurpation of power dating back to the riots (tumultos) of colonial times. The civic strike was the preferred weapon and from 1931 to 1961 eleven Latin American presidents left office in the wake of civic strikes; a phenomenal achievement. Civic strikes were either used as a form of mass protest, such as those leading to the shutdown of Managua, Nicaragua following the assassination of newspaper publisher Joaquin Chamorro in 1978, or as support for military movements against established governments, as in Venezuela in 1958 and Cuba in 1959.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in the last decades of the 20th Century again provides a powerful demonstration of the power of mass demonstrations and huge crowds both within the Soviet Union and East Europe. Crowds on the whole did not resort to violence, thus effectively staying the hand of the respective governments. To give some idea of the size of crowds in East Germany, on Oct 8th, 1989 in Dresden there was a mass demonstration of about 30,000 people rising to 50,000 in Leipzig the next day. By late October, crowd numbers had soared to about 300,000 reaching the 500,000 mark by November.

The concept of ‘Monster Meetings’ held at key sites such as highways and checkpoints traversing the Occupied Territories, settlements, the Wall, the Offices of the Civil Commissioner’s, Mekorot Offices, IDF facilities etc in the full glare of international publicity and sustained on a regular basis must be an obligatory component in any strategy for the Occupied Territories. Regular network analysis of Israeli infrastructure in the Occupied Territories including all major institutions and individuals, industrial, military and political must be set up and truly vulnerable components of that network identified and targeted for maximum effect and minimal effort. Methods are available now for analysing networks to identify network components of especial importance for maintaining network integrity. Many complex systems can be represented in the form of networks comprising nodes interconnected by links where often only a relatively small proportion of the components are vital to its function with the vast majority not that critical. Thus, for example in telecommunication networks, most individual exchanges can be removed without affecting the function of the system. The reason for this is that there are frequently many alternative routes around any removed or dysfunctional element in a complex system, and so prevent system collapse. In other words, networks generally speaking are robust to random attack but exquisitely susceptible to targeted attack. It is important to realise that apart from visualising and enhancing one’s understanding of any given network, a holistic approach can throw up susceptibilities of a network that mere enumeration of the individual components cannot. Armed with such a programme, nonviolent strategists could intelligently select the most vulnerable, yet more subtle, components in the Occupation infrastructure. That is key and central to any truly effective strategy. It is absolutely no use whatsoever targeting redundant parts of any network; the target must comprise critical components. Such a network is simple to set up; even simple networks of 30-50 components reveal unsuspecting vulnerabilities not evident on casual inspection.

All these possible modalities could be easily integrated into the current widespread and heroic activities of local Palestinians, Israelis and international activists into an awesome spectacle of human dignity; a truly holistic approach.

International Activities

Studies of public opinion polls conducted in the USA since the end of WWII have shown a low degree of interest in international affairs except when issues of concern arise such as the U2 pilot scare, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and 9/11. After the crises had subsided, interest dropped again to pre-crisis levels except in the case of 9/11. In protracted crises, concern reaches high levels if the cost appears too high i.e. number of soldiers killed or wounded. One can see that this is rather a reactive response to events normally considered remote from domestic life, peaking only in periods of crisis and then subsiding. Recent studies have quantified the effect of US domestic public opinion on foreign policy and have shown that business organisations are the most influential, followed by think-tanks, labour and, lastly, public opinion. The conclusion seems to be that domestic public opinion is not a dominant determinant of foreign policy but can assume greater importance in high salience issues. It explains also the mismatch that can occur between US foreign policy and the views of US citizens. That is the key from the Palestinians’ point of view. It does suggest the rather counter-intuitive notion that maximum effort should be targeted at the US business community and think-tanks rather than US public opinion. Trying to influence American public opinion could be construed as a waste of time but not if the Palestinians themselves become a “salient” issue in America and that can only occur if a more comprehensive campaign can be conducted in the USA. A quantum-type leap in the scope and nature of activities in other countries particularly within the EU is thus an urgent priority.

International opinion is an intriguing creature. It circles up there somewhere, like vultures, a mere speck, it might seem in the distant sky, only to swoop down in a trice on unsuspecting shoulders. There is a plethora of suggestive, anecdotal evidence, but little definitive evidence as to its effectiveness in modulating any countries’ foreign policy. On the other hand, the general consensus is that the reverse process operates with gusto at the governmental level in the USA at least, where a multitude of organizations track international opinion with relentless perspicacity, using a variety of survey research tools including public opinion polls, many “gossip points” such as embassies and minute analysis of the press and media. This is all very reminiscent of how PhDs use MDs as specimen stalkers in clinical medicine. All the data is collated, interpreted and fed into the decision-making process. To influence this international opinion-US axis, one needs to be street-wise, figure out the nodes and links along the axis and have a dedicated team ready to counter any incipient decision-making en route as it were. This is a kind of reverse engineering strategy and should ideally be coupled with the idea of making more use of polls to subserve the Palestinian cause. Palestinians should now take the lead in setting up more of their own polls not only in Palestine but in Israel and the West generally. Information is relatively unimportant; it’s what one does with it that counts. Poll information would serve two main purposes. On the one hand, a constant flow or series of Palestinian polls, highlighting Palestinian views on a whole gamut of issues as they arise pari passu during negotiations or with respect to Israeli and US actions generally, would ensure that the international community gets an immediate feedback from the Palestinians themselves. And more importantly, polls conducted in Israel, for example, could be useful in actual negotiations with the Israelis exactly as the Americans did in negotiating withdrawal of their forces in and relinquishing various military bases to the Philippines. The Philippine Government was prone to block some American suggestions by claiming their “public” would find them unacceptable but prior American polls conducted in the Philippines on the subject of base closures enabled the American negotiators to have a very good idea in advance what the Philippine people would accept or reject and pushed their agenda accordingly; a very effective ploy in negotiations. The approach should be, paraphrasing a well-known aphorism, ‘don’t think of those in front of you, think of those behind them”.

Capitalising on International Law

There is a growing momentum nowadays to utilise various aspects of international law with respect to Israeli activities in the Occupied Territories. For instance, the International Criminal Court (ICC) provides several ways of exerting pressure on Israeli individuals and officials employed by the Israeli government in the Occupied Territories which could have a profound outcome on the Occupation itself. But it does require cooperation on the part of neighbouring Arab Countries, in particular Syria. Palestinian contacts, formal and informal, within the Syrian government would be absolutely critical in some of the options outlined here. The remit of the ICC is to exercise its jurisdiction over persons for the most serious crimes of international concern. It complements national criminal jurisdiction. Not all nations have signed up to the ICC and are not therefore what is termed as ‘state parties’. The fact that Israel is not a ‘state party’ does not however exempt its citizens from ICC jurisdiction in certain specified instances. With respect to the Occupation of the Golan Heights, the chances that jurisdiction could be exerted over Israeli individuals operating therein might seem remote indeed since both states, Syria and Israel are not ‘state parties’. However, the Rome Statute of the ICC makes two critical points in this connection. Firstly, Article 12 (2) indicates that only one of the states involved in any given case need be a signed up ‘state party’ i.e. not both of them. Secondly, Article 12 (3) states quite clearly that non-party States ‘may, by declaration lodged with the Registrar, accept the exercise of jurisdiction with respect to the crime in question’. This means that Syria could temporarily become a ‘state party’, in which case jurisdiction can be applied as summarised in Article 12 (2). Israeli citizens in the Golan Heights, committing serious criminal acts then become susceptible to ICC jurisdiction. Once, Syria becomes a temporary ‘state party’, it would, in the first instance, formally need to try and exert jurisdiction over Israeli individuals within its territory in its own national courts. But, by demonstrating that it was unable to pursue Israeli individuals i.e. the circumstances physically prevent it from bringing these individuals to Syrian national Courts, then of course the ICC could step in and initiate proceedings itself. The downside to this ploy is the general feeling that Syria would not agree to this option since the Office of Prosecutor at the ICC would be obliged to look for criminal evidence in the totality of its geographical remit in Syria. Presumably, therefore, his intervention would make Syria itself vulnerable and “exposed” as well as Israel. I am not convinced by this interpretation since it is clear that the events in the Golan Heights have no relevance to events within the rest of Syria. My view is that this purported extended role of the Prosecutor would relate only to the totality of crimes, Israeli and non-Israeli, evident in the Golan Heights per se. Golan Heights are after all the relevant territory not downtown Damascus. The implications of this option are simply enormous since the threat of criminal convictions of Israeli personnel in any one part of the Occupied Territories, in this case the Golan Heights, would send shock waves throughout the vast community of Israeli officials and IDF personnel employed in the Occupied Territories. It would drastically curtail Israeli participation in all of the Occupied Territories including of course, Palestine. A major effort in this area is well nigh obligatory and should be pursued with the utmost urgency as a vital part in the strategy of nonviolence.

Finally, the State of Palestine itself, although not formally a state party, could attempt to ratify the ICC treaty by depositing an instrument of accession . In view of the more flexible criteria for state recognition, steadily evolving over the last two decades, the attempt itself would prompt an avalanche of legal opinion and overdrive as to the status of Palestine. The ICC has no mechanism for deciding who is and who is not a state and interested international lawyers should take a more heroic role in mounting a campaign both of Palestinian State Recognition and for its accession to the ICC.

Summary

The Palestinian resistance movement achieved phenomenal military success in forcing Israel into negotiation and talks at Oslo but then got knocked down by its own Aunt Sallies at Oslo and thereafter. What is needed now is a “clean break”; a completely revamped coordinated two-track strategy spearheaded by new-style negotiations and sustained by a high-profile, nonviolent resistance campaign, of quite a different order than hitherto, with clearly specified aims and pathways as discussed above. But aims and pathways are the key as the Cheshire Cat reminded us all long ago:

“Would you tell me please which way I ought to go from here”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to”

“I don’t much care where……….”

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go”

“….so long as I get somewhere”

“Oh, you’re sure to do that….if you only walk long enough”

Notes

Hard copy colour versions available on request. I have not formally referenced the text in this document but the following websites and key references will enable you to follow up various items of interest. Others are easily googled.

1. Professor J D Fearon’s studies on outcomes in various insurgencies can be found on http://www.stanford.edu/~jfearon/  

2. Curiously, there is little published data on how international opinion can impact on foreign policy decisions in the USA and other states; a good area for future research.

3. The website for data on PIPA polls is www.pipa.org  

4. There is an enormous literature on network analysis in relation to vulnerable network components/nodes easily accessible through regular googling.

5. Background data for the Box is available on file at Oswestry.

6. E-mail me with comments and suggestions.