Tag Archives: Occupied Palestinian Territories

Who “only understands force”? On the limits of force in politics

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The sudden, rapid and unanticipated collapse of Assad’s Ba’athist regime in Syria a few days ago is an historic episode that demonstrates the limitations of force in politics. A brutal regime that had crushed dissent for decades by using military and police violence, torture, incarceration and mass executions of opponents imploded in a matter of days. Yes, it did so in the face of an armed offensive by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the north of the country whose success soon prompted other armed rebels against the dictatorship to join in, notably the Southern Operations Room which seized control of Damascus. There were some battles on the roads to Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, but the key development was the melting away of the military might available to the regime. Soldiers stripped off their uniforms, abandoned their weapons and blended into the civilian population. The regime’s main ally, the Iranian government, evacuated its personnel because the Syrian government forces had no will to fight. The story here is that the seemingly formidable power of the regime vanished.

It is not surprising that some compared the regime’s collapse to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when German civilians demolished some of that symbol of the Soviet regime. These episodes in which regimes that rely on force and violent repression dissolve seem miraculous. Yet they are apprehensible according to theories of power that grasp that political power and obedience ultimately come from below, from the consent of those who are ruled. In Gene Sharpe’s approach to these theories, which were part of the playbook for the democratic movements of the Arab Spring, the emphasis is on non-violence as the appropriate strategy to bring down repressive regimes.

That was not quite the case in Syria, but the essence of the theory still pertains. Repressive regimes such as Assad’s dictatorship work only so long as the people believe the regime is to be feared and so long as the government’s agents believe that the people are afraid of them. Without the mantel of fear, statues of Assad, like the idols in Abraham’s father Terah’s shop, are just lumps of stone and metal. When the compact of fear fails for significant numbers of people, the repressive emperor has no clothes. The soldiers’ uniforms no longer signify that they command fear from the population, so they take them off and flee, afraid themselves that what they have done to others will be done to them. And hence the latest episode in the long struggle against Assad’s regime was relatively bloodless.

A truck pulls the head from the toppled statue of late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad through the streets of the captured Syrian city of Hama © MUHAMMAD HAJ KADOUR / AFP

Other autocratic regimes in the Arab world would do well to heed the warning about the limitations of violent repression and follow the example of those who have taken some steps towards democratic reform. But there is another regime in the region that relies on force and violent power, one which has never even sought to make itself legitimate in the eyes of its subjects. The Israeli occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has at best offered some crumbs of its own economic prosperity to non-citizen Palestinians under its rule in return for acquiescence. It has never given them any grounds to consent to Israeli rule, to appropriation of land and resources, restrictions on movement, denial of rights, other than fear of the consequences of resistance, whether armed or non-violent.

The apartheid character of the Occupation becomes daily more evident, more nakedly an assertion of alleged Jewish rights and disregard for Palestinian rights. The Occupation regime becomes ever more dependent on bare force. Ironically, it is Israelis who tell each other that “they” (Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims) only understand force, while subjecting Palestinians to rule that will last only as long as occupied and occupier believe that brute force can sustain Occupation. “We will always live by sword,” repeats Netanyahu and as his words are echoed and enacted, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi put it in a recent interview with Ha’aretz, when asked if Israel had a real opportunity to break out of the cycle of bloodletting: “It’s been the Iron Wall since Jabotinsky. Force and more force. You’ve been trying to impose a reality that has sent shock waves throughout the Middle East since the 1920s.”

The Israeli government’s response to the toppling of Assad’s regime has been a massive unleashing of military violence to destroy as much as possible of Syria’s military capacity. Israel has also occupied the demilitarized buffer zone between Israeli and Syrian positions established by the 1974 armistice agreement between the two countries. Other governments are opening channels of communication with the new rulers in Damascus, but the Israeli government assumes that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its partners will use military force against Israel if they have the means or let them fall into the hands of others who will, such as Hezbollah. We don’t have the luxury of others to get to know these people, an Israeli spokesperson tells Channel 4 news, so first we bomb them. He might as well add: we only understand force.

There is no guarantee of if or when force will cease to work as the compact between occupier and occupied. So far in this phase of violence since October 7th 2023, only a few Israelis such as Soul Behar have refused to put on their uniforms. Most are too afraid that what they have done to others will be done to them, a fear which has also been brought from other places where terrible things were done to their ancestors. Palestinians under Occupation have already shown that they are no longer afraid of the force wielded by the occupiers, notably at the start of the First Intifada when most of the resistance to Occupation was non-violent or unarmed. But what if more Israelis begin to see themselves as Palestinians see them, as inflicting force as violent, merciless and devastating as the Assads’ assaults on their own people? And what if more Palestinians who have survived the violence and are subject to Occupation can see that competing with Israeli violence is not a winning strategy? Assad’s regime has fallen because of the limits of force in politics. The Occupation will end for the same reason.

Only the Arabs can save us now

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The results of the Israeli election on November 1st are no less shocking even though they are not surprising. A tipping point was reached and the veneer which sustained an image of Israel as leaning to the right but within the bounds of decency crumbled. In all likelihood, Netanyahu will become the Prime Minister of a government dominated by the far right, his main coalition partner being the Religious Zionists, including a Jewish Power faction led by a disciple of the overtly racist politician Meir Kahane. In its better days the Israeli Knesset literally turned its back on him when he was elected in 1984, then passed a law so he could be banned as a racist. Now his successor Ben Gvir can expect a significant cabinet position, even if he does not get the Ministry for Internal Security which he wants. The ramifications for Palestinian citizens of Israel are alarming, with threats of returning the notorious Border Police to mixed Jewish-Palestinian cities, reviving the military rule under which Palestinian citizens of Israel lived until 1966. The other enemy of the Israeli right, the ‘smolanim’, the Lefties, can also expect much harsher treatment, as will international anti-Occupation activists. LGBTQ+ communities, and more.

But Jewish Power and its Jewish supremacist ideology is not an aberration in Zionist and Israeli politics. I do not mean this in the facile, simplistic sense that ‘Zionism is racism’, but that the undercurrent of racism within Zionism has now become overt and mainstream, winning the support of some 15% of the Israeli population and being embraced, even nurtured, by the Likud. I share the view of other commentators that the only way in which Zionist respectability could be preserved would have been to embrace and nurture those who have most to fear from Jewish supremacism, Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Yes, one of the parties representing them, Ra’am, an Islamist party, did join the so-called ‘government of change’ along with the liberal Zionist Meretz which looks like it has failed to be elected this time, in the unrealized hope of winning material social and economic improvements in the daily lives of its constituency. Its leader Mansour Abbas knew he could not even dream of demanding the political changes advocate by other parties that are voted for mostly by Palestinian citizens. Those changes include: the abolition of the infamous Jewish nation-state law passed in 2018; turning Israel into a state for all its citizens, not only Jews; reining in the military-settler violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; and negotiating peace with the Palestinian Authority. The most that Yair Lapid, leader of centrist Yesh Atid party could manage during the election campaign was to pay some lip service to the two-state solution.

Only the Arabs can save us now. By ‘Arabs’, the common Israeli way of referring to its Palestinian citizens and their compatriots in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I mean the Palestinians, the nation with whom we share the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. By ‘us’ I mean Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora for whom Jewish supremacism is abhorrent. By ‘now’ I mean both this moment but also since the historical point, more than century ago, at which the movement to build a Jewish homeland and refuge for persecuted Jews in the ancestral Land of Israel began. There was always only one option, to share the land with the Palestinian people who lived there, or to live by the sword permanently, insecure, and hated for the injustice perpetrated in order to create a majority Jewish state in the Nakba of 1948, by the military rule until 1966 over the Palestinians allowed to remain in the new state, and by the Occupation since 1967. The only option was in the minor voices of the pre-state Zionist movement, Achad Ha’am, Yehuda Magnes, Martin Buber, who did not equate Zionism with a Jewish nation state. The only option was, and still is, in the Lives in Common of Jews and Palestinians in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron from the nineteenth century onwards, retold by Menahem Klein. The only option was the multitude of civil alliances between Jews and Palestinians signed in 1947-48, uncovered by Ariella Azoulay, as the route to a potential history in which the violent ethnic cleansing from 1947 into the 1950s would not have taken place.

The alliance of anti-racist Jews in Israel and the Diaspora with Palestinians is an alliance with no alternative if the current of Jewish supremacism is to be averted. It is a strategic necessity, the realist option. We do not have to be ‘Arab lovers’ to choose it, but in my experience it is not hard to love Palestinians who are open to sharing the space between the river and the sea. I think back fondly to the many, mostly happy and friendly hours I spent with Mazen, Ghassan, George, Jalal and others in the Rapprochement dialogue group between Beit Sahour and West Jerusalem during the first intifada. I cherish the connection I made with Mohammed, a student from Gaza who had suffered so much at the hands of the Occupation (and the Palestinian Authority) but welcomed the support he found from Jews when he came to study at the University of Nottingham in the UK. I am deeply touched by the words of Souli Khatib, a former Palestinian prisoner of the Israeli Occupation who became a key activist of Combatants for Peace and who has a vision of Palestinian freedom and Jewish belonging to the same land flourishing, as his book title says, In this place together. Because that is where we must be, in this place together with Palestinians, if the victory of Jewish supremacism in these elections is not to become permanent. And when I say, ‘only the Arabs can save us now’, I mean not that they are responsible for our salvation, but that we can only save ourselves in alliance with them.