Max Sawicky wrote:
>
>
> Military victory of Palestine through armed struggle is clearly a fantasy,
You are romanticizing armed struggle. (Both armchair adherents of armed struggle and its critics tend to such romanticization.) In one of the (seemingly) few clear examples of triumphant "armed struggle," the Chinese Revolution, the victory came not so much through defeating the enemy in high noon style as in persuading most of the enemy troops to come over to the other side.
And a seemingly clear case of non-violent struggle (the Iranian Revolution) was a miliary victory as well, since the Shah's generals had become convinced that the troops would not obey a command to fire.
I don't know the source of Pound's lines (or their empirical accuracy) but they do catch the essence of almost all insurrectionary armed struggle, which does not involve much shooting:
And when it broke, there was the crowd there,
And the cossacks, just as always before,
But one thing, the cossacks said:
"Pojalouista,"
And that got round in the crowd,
And then a lieutenant of infantry
Ordered them to fire into the crowd,
in the square at the end of the Nevsky,
In front of the Moscow station,
And they wouldn't,
And he pulled his sword on a student for laughing,
And killed him,
And a cossack rode out of his squad
On the other side of the square
And cut down the lieutenant of infantry
And that was the revolution...
as soon as they named it.
(Canto XVI)
No one can predict in advance what will make troops refuse to fight; usually it is a long and complicated combination of "non-violent" and "violent" activities, some planned, some spontaneous, some such that no one (including the agents) knows whether they are planned or spontaneous.
The trouble with pure "non-violence" is that it requires a degree of iron discipline in the non-violent" troops that is not possible with a large citizen army but only with an elite corps. Hence "pure" non-violent struggle is inherently anti-political and anti-democratic. (As, of course, is "pure armed struggle".)
Actual struggle, revolutionary or what have you, is just too damn complex and messy to be reduced to some such formula as "non-violence" or "armed struggle."
Carrol
> but that is not the same thing as equating the violence on each side.
> The Israeli point about moral equivalence is right; it's just that their
> violence is what ranks lower in relative terms.
>
> Praising armed struggle in this context is simply encouraging people
> to self-destruction. Doubtless they need little encouragement in any
> event. If the PLO made some miraculous turn to Gandhi-style CD,
> the IDF would start shooting them anyway. But I don't think they could
> get away with that indefinitely. Imagine if all the Palestinian martyrs
> died
> as innocents, or in non-violent resistance?
> I don't think the current state of afffairs could last, but I could be
> wrong.
> Certainly the Palestinian cause would be no worse off.
>
> The Tony Judt piece in NYR points out that bloody armed conflict has not
> precluded settlement in other instances, so the use of arms by the PA
> et al. on this account would not preclude a settlement either, although
> it does not seem to increase its likelihood.
>
> mbs