I think Norman Finkelstein basically has it right. As long ago as 2005 or 2006 I heard him suggest in a public talk that Gandhian nonviolence might be a fruitful avenue for Palestinians to take. Unlike Gitlin, though, he hedged this suggestion with the appropriate qualifiers: that he wasn't the one whose rights and life were on the line, that he didn't know enough about the internal political processes of the Palestinian national movement, that nonviolence was no magic bullet, etc.
Then Norman went and did what is a very Norman thing. He started to read the collected works of Gandhi. If anyone has ever seen the standard 90-volume edition of Gandhi's works, s/he will know how daunting a task that is. And while reading Gandhi, Norman came to the conclusion that Gandhi's first priority was to resist injustice, with nonviolence resistance being preferred to violent resistance. However, Norman concluded, Gandhi clearly prefers violent resistance to injustice to "nonviolent" acquiescence to injustice. That explains the Durban speech that Patrick Bond reported on.
I was once a pretty down-the-line Gandhian. My training as a political organizer came from the War Resisters' League, I spent time in jail for civil disobedience, etc. But during that time, I knew nothing at all about India, and the Gandhi I thought I knew something about was little more complicated than Attenborough's Gandhi. It wasn't until I went to grad school and actually started to learn something not tied to my own moral projections that I discovered (a) that Gandhi was a much more complicated figure - for better and worse - than I had imagined, and (b) that India's independence movement was far more than the Salt March writ large.
So I'm more than a little allergic to anyone telling the Palestinians (or anyone else) "you should just be like Gandhi." When someone says that, all of the following are almost certainly true: (a) the person speaking knows little about Gandhi or India (b) the person speaking knows little about the attempts of the Palestinians (or whomever) to use nonviolent resistance (c) the person speaking has little commitment to ending the oppression of Palestinians (or whomever), and a high degree of commitment to a maintaining his/her elevated level of moral self-regard (d) the person speaking feels no need to produce evidence that nonviolence is effective
So when someone pops up and says "even if Gitlin is a pompous ass, he's right" and produces no evidence that he's right, I really think that person should sign his/her post "Ipse Dixit".
----- Original Message ----- From: // ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Cc: Sent: Thursday, June 9, 2011 1:08 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Todd Gitlin: the most pompous ass ever?
On Jun 9, 2011, at 1:45 PM, Angelus Novus wrote:
> ravi wrote:
>
>> BTW, Israel has been occupying Palestine from the 1940s (and perhaps
>> all the way back to 1917), yes, not 1967?
>
>
> The above is Blut und Boden ideology.
>
My head spins at the way you guys drop names!
> Everybody on the planet should be able to live wherever the fuck they want. The problem is not some alleged external "occupation" of Palestine by Jews of land to which Palestinian Arabs are presumed to have some organic, eternal claim.
>
> The problem is that the state of Israel denies Palestinian Arabs the ability to live where they want, without having to deal with murder by soliders or checkpoint harassment.
Ergo, the word “occupation” (note the lack of use of the term “external” or “Jews”). If Wren und Martin disagree, use some other word that works for you. But please… really... let’s not try to dress up simple differences with high theory while at the same time singing the praise of the likes of Meera Nanda.
—ravi
___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk