by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 07-06-2003


The fragile ceasefire in the Middle East, with all its dangers and imperfections, is an extraordinary opportunity for the Palestinians to reverse a terrible mistake of their own making. For years now, they have been represented by the glittery-eyed fanatics of jihad. Now there's a slender, perhaps feeble, chance to move the crazies off the stage. Now is the time for the Palestinians to move toward the far more powerful strategy of nonviolence.

That is, they can choose to set aside the bomb and the gun and present their bodies in peaceful confrontation with the Israeli state.

This is not hippy-dippy, 1960s-style wishful thinking. It's not about the right to smoke dope while listening to the Doors. It's about life and death.

The Palestinians have the power to change their world through sheer numbers. The jihadists, with their visions of paradise and willingness to slay the innocent, are only a tiny minority. If the larger population — that is, the peaceful majority - adopted the tactics of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., change would almost certainly come swiftly.

Through mass demonstrations, the jamming of roads and general strikes, they could bring Israeli society to a standstill. For a while, they would face arrest for acts of civil disobedience. But there would be no killing.

Almost certainly, they would find many allies among Israeli Jews, from the traditional Israeli left, from parts of the Labor Party, from dispirited former members of the Peace Now movement.

The rise of a new Palestinian nonviolent movement would allow them to take the moral high ground. Many Israelis would agree with the words of the French philosopher Albert Camus: "I want to love my country, and justice too."

Yes, a Palestinian nonviolent movement would entail great risks for its leaders. They would find dangerous enemies among their own people, particularly those in Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Many of these fanatics don't want peace with Israel, they want to eliminate Israel altogether. In their certainty, they would insist on the right to murder anyone who might thwart that futile dream. They are engaged in a macabre version of identity politics: I kill, therefore I am.

This would not, of course, be new. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 by a religious nut. Years later, so was Egypt's Anwar Sadat. So, too, was Israel's Yitzhak Rabin. Absolute certainty almost always creates corpses.

But the sheer number of Palestinians could - I use the conditional with immense caution here — engulf and isolate the fanatics. No country is like any other, but it must be remembered that the peace process in Northern Ireland was almost certainly the result of exhaustion (or disgust) with the bloody 30-year-old quarrel by sympathizers on both sides.

The Palestinians have - as many Israeli Jews have reminded us — legitimate grievances. In a campaign of civil disobedience, they could push hard for the creation of a functioning Palestinian state, because, as it is now understood on both sides of the equation, the healthy existence of such a state is the only possibility for long-term peace.

They could demand the return of - or payment for - all seized properties, particularly in East Jerusalem. They could demand compensation for personal losses in old wars. They could demand the end of the 242 settlements in the occupied territories and the destruction of the wall now being built through the West Bank. They might not achieve all these goals, but they would get more this way than by the use of guns and bombs.

The American civil rights movement took a decade to achieve its immediate goals - the end of segregation and the right to vote in every part of our country. But in spite of the rhetoric of romantic revolution — all that badly digested Frantz Fanon - it was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision that prevailed.

Could any of this happen in the Middle East?

Nobody yet knows. Certainly, it can't happen without the emergence of an Arab Martin Luther King Jr., a man or woman prepared to die to prevent any further deaths. That person has not emerged, but he or she might exist.

The change in strategy can't happen without a seismic shift in Palestinian society, the end of sick anti-Semitic chants in madrasahs, the end of glib, mindless hatred, the end of that self-pitying culture that blames all personal misery on your opponent.

It can't happen without agreeing that Israel is there to stay.

More and more voices - Arab and Jewish - must be raised to say the same thing: no more corpses in our streets, no more kids killed in pizza parlors and discos, no more destroyed buses on crowded avenues, no more exalting of suicide as a visa for immortality.

Enough people have died for Palestine. Enough people have died for Israel. It's time for all to live - not die - for their countries, their flags, their religious beliefs. And for their children's children.

There is a moment now, a slender shimmer of possibility, that could bring change. If that moment is allowed to slide away into the swamp of lost opportunities, the dying and killing will go on and on.

The burden of change is on the Arabs on both sides of the River Jordan. Intelligent men and women must seize the day.