Nation Topics - Peace Activism | The Nation

I offer these brief remarks today as a prayer for our country, with love
of democracy, as a celebration of our country. With love for our country.
With hope for our country.

It just got a little harder to ignore the dissenters in America's War on Terrorism.

In this most emotionally charged of times, I think that many of the moral issues we face are overlaid by an oft-expressed tension between the need for security and the full protections of human rights. It is always expressed as a tension, freedom as opposed to security. It is a false dichotomy but understandable, given how afraid we all are. And so we limit our sights to the need for good policy, good intelligence and strong, democratically inclined, diplomatically gifted leaders.

But I am also a lawyer, and a child of the civil rights era, which was, a bit like these times, a dangerous time, troubled by terrorizing outlaw behavior, a violent time. Yet what guided us, black and white, men and women, minority and majority, through that time was a determined appeal and, ultimately, adherence to principles of morality, justice and law. Dr. King's appeal to a transformative progressive society, to what he referred to as The Beloved Community, was of course an overtly theological argument, grounded in a love of all humanity. But it was also a metaphor, and that metaphor was grounded in a legal case, in a series of legal cases that held steadfastly to notions of fairness, equality and due process of law. The legal and political triumphs of the civil rights era remain a monument to America's best ideals.

Those times too were fraught with passion and grief. There were those who thought that Dr. King's work for racial equality was too radical, too deeply subversive, or unpatriotic. There were those who thought his opposition to American policy in Vietnam merited the response Love it or leave it. Similarly, there are those who have taken George W. Bush's oft-repeated statement--originally a warning to Iraq, as I recall--of "you're either with us or against us" and applied it broadly and inappropriately to men and women of conscience who express their concern that international conventions and norms of human rights be scrupulously applied in the battle against Al Qaeda.

Trust, don't ask, some have said. Say something positive or shut up. I worry a lot about the predominance of flat "either-or" dualisms that by their very syntax eliminate the middle ground so necessary to political debate. Love it or leave it. But Dr. King loved his country, and there was no "or" about it. He did not leave America but worked to impart a legacy that changed it and the world for the better. He appealed to a society that is committed to unity and yet vaunts individual freedom, including the freedom to dissent.

These tensions are often placed like roadblocks: security versus freedom, community versus dissent. That pervasive sense of opposition was a challenge for Americans in Dr. King's time, and it is a challenge for Americans now. And because the United States is a model others copy as well as a global force to be reckoned with, the citizens of the world are, one by one, having to resolve these tensions as well. As Dr. King said, "Civil rights"--or human rights I think he would add in today's global context--"civil rights is an eternal moral issue..."

Whatever the issue, whatever the time, we must resist a mindset that defines those who are "with us" as those who accept all policies as untouchable, all military action as automatically legitimate, all criticism as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Otherwise we consign people who are engaged in the essence of democratic debate to the conceptual dustbin of those who are "against us." You're either on board as a team player or (according to the last few days of the New York Post alone) you're a brainless, overintellectualizing, group-thinking, anarchist, socialist, communist, stalinist, nihilistic, solipsistic, atheistic, politically correct, race-card-playing feminazi crackpot.

I sometimes wonder if we've forgotten who the enemy is.

But it is not unpatriotic to question and argue about our public policy; it's a duty of citizenship. It is not disrespectful to the Republic to ask, when our Defense Secretary says the men held in Guantánamo Bay are receiving better treatment than the Taliban ever gave their prisoners, what that means precisely. That they have not yet been beheaded? Or that the norms of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution are being rigorously observed?

I worry too about the degree to which we keep referring to these enemies as The Evil Ones or The Bad Guys--such odd terms, as though our leaders were speaking to very young children. By this, Al Qaeda is placed in an almost biblical narrative, ready to be smote and cast out. In this model, giving The Evil Ones so mundane a forum as a trial is literally "courting" the devil. While this sort of embedded language has certainly galvanized the people in a time of great crisis, I don't believe it's a useful long-term model for a democratic secular government trying to fight real political foes, particularly stateless enemies who are religious zealots in their own right. This sort of narrative obscures the adult reality that they are enemies, not viruses. They are humans, not demons. They are criminals, not satanic extraterrestrials. They may indeed be our New Age Goebbelses and Goerings, but we did not put Nazi war criminals in cages. We brought them to justice.

Given all this we will need all the thoughtful voices we can get to help our beleaguered leaders figure out a world that is growing more mobile, more diasporic, more riven by racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism (and I mean anti-Semitism in the broad sense of prejudice against all Semitic peoples, including Jews, Arabs and some Asians), religious intolerance, economic disparity and struggles for land. Indeed, recent tensions are such that some are calling this a "clash of civilizations." This too is something we should be wary of. Organized crime syndicates--whether the Ku Klux Klan in the civil rights era or Al Qaeda now--do not a civilization make.

As we move into Black History Month, it is good to remember that Dr. King's message was far more complex than the naïve rosiness to which he's often reduced. He insisted on equal protection even for those we do not like. He insisted on due process of law even for those whom we have reason to fear. And he demanded that we respect the humanity even of those we despise.

"Yes, nonviolence is a noble ideal, but do you really think it would stop a Hitler?" Or a street thug, a dictator, a death squad?

Pacifists are long accustomed to these questions, mostly thrown up by self-proclaimed realists. And they get the put-down message: Nonviolence is a creed only slightly less trifling than hippies sticking flowers in soldiers' gun barrels.

Readers whose minds are open to another view will be rewarded by A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. It is a comprehensive and lucidly written addition to the literature of peace. Its worthiness puts the authors, Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, in the high company of Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston, Michael True of Assumption College and Richard Deats of the Fellowship of Reconciliation--all scholars of mettle who bring before the public the many historical examples where the force of organized, nonviolent resistance defeated oppression.

Ackerman and DuVall, deserving of praise for writing nonideologically when they might easily and self-indulgently not have (and thus lost readers looking for hard reporting rather than soft commentary), use fourteen chapters to document and analyze history-altering reforms created by nonviolent strategies. These include the early 1940s Danish resistance to the Nazis; Solidarity's strikes in the 1980s, which eventually took down the Soviet puppet regime in Poland; the 1980s public demands for free elections that removed the Pinochet junta in Chile; the near-bloodless elimination of the Marcos government in the Philippines; the work of the Palestinian-American Mubarak Awad to rally nonviolent civil resistance against Israeli authorities in the occupied territories; and civil rights workers in Nashville in the 1960s.

These are the better-known examples. Ackerman and DuVall also explore the removal of autocratic governments in El Salvador (in 1944), Mongolia and Eastern Europe. Oddly, the authors omit the story of Le Chambon, the French village that was a leading center for hiding Jews in the early 1940s and whose pacifist citizens successfully faced down the Nazis with weapons of the spirit, not weapons of steel. (That story is told by Philip Hallie in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed.)

Ackerman and DuVall do not portray Awad, King Christian X of Denmark, Gandhi of India, Mkhuseli Jack of South Africa, Reverend James Lawson of Nashville and others as willing martyrs for the cause. Instead, they were hard-thinking political strategists who built bases for citizen support that would not crack when the heat rose and the dogs snarled.

"Nonviolent resistance," the authors write,

becomes a force more powerful than the hand of an oppressor to the extent that it takes away his capacity for control. Embracing nonviolence for its own sake does not produce this force. A strategy for action is needed, and that strategy has to involve attainable goals, movement unity, and robust sanctions that restrict the opponent.... When the regime realizes it can no longer dictate the outcome, the premise and means of its power implode. Then the end is only a matter of time.

Debunking the prevailing image of pacifists as appeasers or well-meaning but addled dreamers who've read one too many biographies of St. Francis, Ackerman and DuVall provide ample details to dispel those errant notions. As portrayed here, organizers of successful collective, nonviolent opposition to oppressors tend to be self-disciplined, practical and dogged--traits commonly held up as military virtues, which is why Gandhi so admired soldiers. The authors write:

Nonviolent action is like violent combat in at least two ways. It does not succeed automatically, and it does not operate mysteriously--it works by identifying an opponent's vulnerabilities and taking away his ability to maintain control. If a regime intends to remain in power indefinitely, it will require extensive, long-term interaction with those it rules--and that creates a dilemma: the broader the regime's system of control, the more vulnerable it is, because it depends on too many actors to ensure that violence against resisters will always work. Once an opposition shows its followers that this weakness exists, it can begin to pry loose the support that the regime requires--its revenue, its foreign investments, or even its military.... Victory is not a function of fate; it is earned.

Tolstoy described pacifists similarly: "For us to struggle, the forces being so unequal, must appear insane. But if we consider our opponent's means of strife and our own, it is not our intention to fight that will seem absurd, but that the thing we mean to fight will still exist. They have millions of money and millions of obedient soldiers; we have only one thing, but that is the most powerful thing in the world--Truth."

Peter Ackerman, formerly a visiting scholar at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and Jack DuVall, who has worked in television and as a political speechwriter, also collaborated, along with producer Steve York, in a three-hour PBS documentary of the same title that played last September. The film quotes a postwar historian summarizing the Danish resistance to the Nazis by strikes, work slowdowns, hiding or helping Jews and not obeying orders to disperse: "Denmark had not won the war but neither had it been defeated or destroyed. Most Danes had not been brutalized, by the Germans or each other. Nonviolent resistance saved the country and contributed more to the Allied victory than Danish arms ever could have done."

A Chilean leader said of the organized resistance against Pinochet in the 1980s and the successful call for fair elections: "We didn't protest with arms. That gave us more power."

Refreshingly, the authors offer compelling observations--almost as sidenotes--about the ineffectiveness of violence. Lech Walesa and Polish strikers taking on the Jaruzelski regime remembered that except for momentary glee nothing was accomplished by Polish workers in 1970 and 1976 when they burned down Communist Party buildings. "In the 20th century's armed liberation movements," Ackerman and DuVall write, "portraits of gunwielding martyrs--the Che Guevaras of the world--were often flaunted as symbols, but none of those struggles produced freedom."

A Force More Powerful will likely stand as a book more powerful than any guts-and-glory war memoirs by generals or gun-toters, or any extollings of military might by one-note historians.

Jerusalem

One of the many casualties of the Palestinian intifada in the occupied territories, now entering its third month, is the alliance between the Palestinian national movement and many members of the Israeli "peace camp." These links were forged in the first intifada between 1987 and 1992, when Israeli peace activists defied army curfews imposed on Palestinian villages and Israel's Peace Now movement called publicly for negotiations with the then-outlawed PLO--a call eventually adopted by the Israeli government in the 1993 Oslo accords.

But the initial response of the Israeli peace camp to the present uprising was "silence, recrimination, even a sense of betrayal," admits Arie Arnon, a leader of Peace Now. As for the Palestinians, they have looked instead for solidarity with the million or so Palestinian citizens of Israel and with the rest of the Arab world.

One reason for the breach has been the increasingly military cast of the conflict. The Israeli Army has sought to quell the revolt since its outbreak on September 28 through blockades on Palestinian Authority-controlled areas and aerial bombardments of Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps. It has also deployed snipers, using live ammunition and sometimes silencers, against what remain overwhelmingly unarmed demonstrations.

In response, Palestinians--especially the cadre from Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement--have resorted to guerrilla warfare, targeting army bases, Jewish settlements and the roads that connect them. These have been joined by attacks on civilians inside Israel proper, with bomb blasts in West Jerusalem on November 2 and the Israeli town of Hadera on November 21, the first claimed by the Islamic Jihad movement.

The character of the war is reflected in the body count. According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, by the end of November 247 Palestinians had been killed by army or settler fire and 9,640 wounded. The Israeli toll was thirty-three, with 230 wounded. Overall, this amounts to 80 percent of the total fatalities from the 1987-92 intifada. The difference is, that revolt lasted almost six years; this one, two months.

But a second reason for the breach between Israeli and Palestinian peace activists is that, to a large swath of the Israeli left, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's Camp David proposals of this past July "were a huge step forward in the direction of peace," says Arnon. Because of this perception many on the Israeli left bought the Israeli government's line--voiced most eloquently by acting Foreign Minister and former peace activist Shlomo Ben-Ami--that Arafat had orchestrated the uprising to evade the "difficult historical decisions" placed before him at the summit.

It was a charge that outraged the Palestinians, including those secular leftist intellectuals who had been the Israeli peace camp's natural allies during the first intifada. But they were not surprised by it. "It was the culmination of a process we had been witnessing for a long time," says Rema Hammami, a Palestinian feminist researcher at Birzeit University in the West Bank.

That process was called Oslo, which the Israeli peace camp embraced as a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. "The Israeli left was preoccupied with defining themselves vis-à-vis the anti-Oslo right," she says. "They never bothered to look at what Oslo meant on the ground for the Palestinians, which was not peace but a new form of Palestinian dispossession."

The clearest instance of that dispossession was Israel's ongoing settlement policies throughout the Oslo era, whether by pro-Oslo Labor or anti-Oslo Likud governments. The scale of colonization has been "amazing," admits Arnon of Peace Now, which has tracked Israel's settlement construction in the occupied territories. According to Peace Now, such construction has increased 52 percent since September 1993, including 17 percent (some 2,830 housing units) during the eighteen-month tenure of Barak's "One Israel" government. The expansion has swelled the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza by 72 percent, from 115,000 in 1993 to 195,000 today and a projected 200,000 by the end of the year. In addition, 180,000 Jewish settlers reside in occupied East Jerusalem, making an overall settler population of 380,000 amid 3.4 million Palestinians.

The settlers live in 145 official settlements and fifty-five unofficial outposts scattered throughout the territories and connected by a web of settlers-only bypass roads, totaling nearly 300 kilometers in length. During periods of quiet, the roads and settlements prevent any contiguous urban or rural development of the 700 Palestinian areas in the West Bank and Gaza. During periods of war--such as now--they effectively become Israel's new military borders in the occupied territories, not only severing Gaza and the West Bank from each other, and both from East Jerusalem, but also each Palestinian conurbation from others within the West Bank and Gaza.

For Palestinians it was these apartheid realities that caused the intifada, far more than the "very generous offers" Barak allegedly made at Camp David. And it was to address them that on November 10 Hammami and more than 120 other Palestinian intellectuals dispatched an "Urgent Statement to the Israeli Public."

As "firm believers in a just and equitable negotiated peace between Palestinians and Israelis," the signatories warned their Israeli peers that the "critical situation that confronts us now" will be "revisited again and again." The only lasting exit is for Israel finally to recognize Palestinian national rights as granted by international law. This would mean Israel's withdrawal from the territories it occupied in the 1967 war, Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem and a "just and lasting resolution of the refugee problem in accordance with relevant UN resolutions."

It is a message that appears at last to be hitting home. On November 17, twenty-four Israeli academics--including the writer Amos Oz and the former army general Shlomo Gazit--called on the Israeli government to "freeze its settlement policy and recognise the border of 4 June 1967 as the basis for the border between Israel and Palestine." And on December 1, Peace Now made perhaps its clearest call yet for the dismantling of the settlements and the "establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel along the 1967 borders."

Arnon admits that the armed dimension of this intifada has brought a "reality check" to the Israeli public. "Above all, it has destroyed perhaps the greatest of all Oslo's illusions: that the historical reality of the Green Line could somehow be erased and a solution could be achieved based on a new division of the West Bank rather than on Israel's withdrawal from it."

But he also believes it essential that a renewed dialogue be attempted between the Israeli peace camp and the Palestinian national movement. This is not only because "the two sides have never been closer in their positions," he says, but because "it is vital for the left to demonstrate to the wider Israeli public that there is still a partner."

Hammami is less sanguine. "How can you have alliances with people who fundamentally misunderstand you?" she asks. "Throughout the Oslo years, the Israeli left acted as though all that was needed for 'peace' was to use Israel's balance of power to impose an agreement on Arafat. It never accepted that there was such a thing as a Palestinian public opinion, a Palestinian national consensus--which is a pretty sad commentary on a constituency that prides itself on its progressive and democratic credentials. We can have shared interests, not political alliances," she concludes.

One of those shared interests appears to lie in restoring the borders of June 4, 1967. There is no longer any alternative, says Arnon, "acceptable to both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples."

The throngs of Vietnamese who hailed Bill Clinton as "the antiwar President" demonstrated that they as a people remember something that we as a people have chosen to forget. It is time to restore our memory of that great antiwar movement by tens of millions of Americans, a movement that began with the first US acts of war in 1945.

Yes, 1945. In September and October of that year, eight troopships were diverted from their task of bringing American troops home from Europe to transport US-armed French soldiers and Foreign Legionnaires from France to recolonize Vietnam. The enlisted seamen on those ships immediately began organized protests. On arriving in Vietnam, the entire crews of the first four troopships met in Saigon and drew up a resolution condemning the US government for using American ships to transport an invasion army "to subjugate the native population" of Vietnam.

The movement kept growing. In 1954, when Vice President Nixon suggested sending American troops to replace the French because "the Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war or govern themselves," thousands of letters and telegrams opposing US intervention deluged the White House. An American Legion division with 78,000 members demanded that "the United States should refrain from dispatching any of its Armed Forces to participate as combatants in the fighting in Indochina or in southeast Asia." On the Senate floor, Senator Ed Johnson of Colorado declared, "I am against sending American GIs into the mud and muck of Indochina on a blood-letting spree to perpetuate colonialism and white man's exploitation in Asia." A Gallup poll revealed that 68 percent of those surveyed were against sending US troops to Indochina. Because of the American people's opposition, the US war had to be waged by four administrations under the cloak of plausible deniability.

We have been depriving ourselves of pride about the finest American behavior during that war. In most wars, a nation dehumanizes and demonizes the people on the other side. Almost the opposite happened during the Vietnam War. Tens of millions of Americans sympathized with the Vietnamese people's suffering, many came to identify with their 2,000-year struggle for independence and some even found them an inspiration for their own lives.

But in the decades since the war's conclusion, American consciousness of the Vietnamese people, with all its potential for healing and redemption, has been systematically obliterated. Ironically, it was after the war that demonization of the Vietnamese began to succeed, thanks in part to the national beatification of POWs and the myth of POWs as martyrs still being tortured by Vietnam. Soon those who had fought against the war became, as a corollary, a despised enemy. They also became the villains in another myth, developed from the 1980s to the present: the spat-upon veteran. As Vietnam veteran and sociologist Jerry Lembcke has shown in The Spitting Image, there is not a shred of evidence of this supposedly widespread phenomenon.

In fact, Vietnam veterans and active-duty soldiers and sailors became the vanguard of the antiwar movement. At home, veterans led the marches and demonstrations, including the 1971 assembly of a half-million protesters headed by a thousand Vietnam veterans, many in wheelchairs and on crutches, who paraded up to a barricade erected to keep them from the Capitol and hurled their Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars and Silver Stars at the government that had bestowed them. In Vietnam, fraggings and mutinies helped compel the withdrawal of most of the ground forces, while rebellions and sabotage put at least five aircraft carriers out of combat. (Who today can believe that 1,500 crew members of the USS Constellation signed a petition demanding that Jane Fonda's antiwar show be allowed to perform on board?)

As the antiwar movement spread even into the intelligence establishment, the American people got access to the most damning truths in the leaked Pentagon Papers. As Senator Mike Gravel noted in 1971, only a person who "has failed to read the Pentagon Papers" could believe we were fighting for "freedom and liberty in Southeast Asia."

But we as a nation have forgotten all that, just as we have forgotten our government's pledge to help rebuild the country it destroyed despite all our opposition.

Although most Israelis, even those who consider themselves members of the left, are blaming Yasir Arafat for escalating the current violence, some are trying to voice a different position. They have organized a number of small protests calling for Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and against the shooting of demonstrators.

In addition, about fifty Israeli scholars and community leaders--Jews and Arabs--have published a petition in Israel's daily Haaretz stating that war must and can be avoided. The petition was initiated by sociologist Baruch Kimmerling. Signers include Ruchama Marton, the founder of the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights; Dalia Kirstein, director of the Center for the Rights of the Individual; and Gila Svirsky, former director of the Israeli and Palestinian feminist group Bat Shalom. Also signing were literary figures David Grossman, Yitschak Laor, Yigal Shwartz and Orly Lubin; economist Arieh Arnon; and three Palestinian citizens of Israel who teach at Ben-Gurion University, Ismael Abu-Saad, Thabet Abu Rass and Ahmad Saadi. The petition demands:

§ An immediate and unilateral Israeli commitment to evacuating the provocative settlements and zones that are to be included in the Palestinian state--including those in the Gaza Strip, Hebron and the Jordan Valley.

§ That Israel accept Palestinian sovereignty over all Arab neighborhoods and mosques inside Jerusalem, while Israel will maintain sovereignty over the Western Wall. The city, within this framework, will be completely open to all residents.

§ That Israel declare a strong commitment to insuring equal rights in every area to all Palestinian and other citizens of the state of Israel, and that it stop shooting at demonstrators.

§ A release and exchange of all prisoners on all sides.

We believe that only the acceptance of this package and the immediate cessation of all violence by all populations on all sides can serve as the basis for rebuilding trust among Jews, Palestinians and the Arab world.

Peace Action (www.peace-action.org), the largest grassroots peace group in the United States, has made stopping NMD and reducing nuclear weapons its top

It is now ten years since the Berlin wall crumbled, but the question of how and why the cold war was concluded still lingers.