Where is the palestinian gandhi

Without the land, there is no story, and that is partly why Emad made this film, to put Palestine, as he explains, on the map of the world. That too has placed Gaza on the world stage. For the past 12 months, Gazans have been demonstrating for an end to the blockade as well as their legal right of return.

Nearly unarmed Palestinians have been murdered and thousands more maimed and injured by Israeli snipers since the protests began. Nevertheless, these demonstrations have demonstrated Palestinian sumoud resilience , and also their desire to celebrate traditions, culture and history.

By sharing songs, traditional dances, and meals, they keep alive the memories of their homeland. In the Gandhi Peace Award was given to Omar Barghouti, who then dedicated the award to all political prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli jails. Nevertheless, Palestinians are assuming their rightful place at the center of their struggle.

Moreover, movements like the Return March are grassroots campaigns in which every person is a leader with no need for a Mandela to guide them. The question then becomes not where are the Palestinian Gandhis, but where is the recognition of their voice. Vakoch, Ed.

It is almost always present, whether the discussion pertains to the Israeli wars and siege on Gaza, […]. The report, issued by the Special Coordinator for the […]. The Palestine Chronicle mission is to educate, raise awareness, empower, confront bias, misinformation, and, ultimately, tell the truth about Palestine. Support us now and make our mission possible. Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube. Amid every cycle of violence and revenge in Israel over the past 60 years came the cry: "Where's the Palestinian Gandhi?

The answer has been blown away in the smoke and rubble of Gaza, where the idea of nonviolent protest seems as quaint as Peter, Paul and Mary.

The Palestinians who preached nonviolence and led peaceful marches, boycotts, mass sit-downs and the like are mostly dead, in jail, marginalized or in exile. Mubarak Awad is one of the latter. Israel kicked him out in Five years earlier, he had opened the doors of the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in Jerusalem, with the goal of fomenting mass resistance to the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

Do not pay taxes, he lectured. Consume only local goods, like the Indians who followed Gandhi's movement against British colonial rule. Engage only in peaceful protest. Plant olive trees on land coveted by Jewish settlers. Above all, do not pick up the gun. March, and sit down, like civil rights protesters in the American South in the s.

Take the beatings, clog up Israeli jails. It started to take, here and there, even though the leaders of the PLO and Hamas disdained it. Today, now beefy and white-haired at 71, with his TV flickering images of Hamas and Israel trading bombs and rockets, Awad insists he is optimistic about the prospects for a nonviolent protest movement in his homeland.

I mean, you are talking to a very hopeful person," he said, ticking off negotiated resolutions to what once seemed implacably violent conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa. That's the long view, but Awad's optimism is flagging under the weight of the current Gaza conflict, and he maintains that things could get worse. The Israelis will say they got the weapons in Gaza, but then [the militants] might go to chemical weapons, or might go to [radiological] weapons—or something worse.

These death weapons are getting easy to get and easy to make in the laboratory. So people will engage in worse things to kill each other. Many Palestinian youths no longer worry about dying, Awad says, egged on by Hamas and even more extreme elements dispatched to Gaza and the occupied West Bank by the so-called Islamic State IS , the neck-chopping fundamentalists who have taken over large swaths of Syria and Iraq.

Extremist cash is greasing the path to martyrdom, Awad explains. A great number of those kids have no jobs, they don't go to school, and they are on drugs. So some people are falling under the sway of the IS, and they are willing to kill anybody—Christians, Muslims, Jews, anybody blocking their way. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, matters have always been much worse, since all forms of nonviolent Palestinian resistance were banned right after the War.

Political meetings, raising flags or other national symbols, publishing or distributing articles or pictures with political connotations, or even singing or listening to nationalist songs — not to mention organizing strikes and demonstrations — were illegal until and some are still illegal in Area C.

Any attempt to protest in one of these ways was inevitably met with violence. Just three months after the War, the Palestinians successfully launched a widespread school strike in the West Bank; teachers refused to show up for work, children took to the streets to protest the occupation, and many shopkeepers did not open their stores. In response to these acts of civil disobedience, Israel enforced severe police-style measures, ranging from nightly curfews and other restrictions of movement to cutting off telephone lines, detaining leaders, and increasing the harassment of the population.

Moreover, during the First Intifada, the Palestinians adopted massive civil disobedience strategies, including merchant strikes, boycotting Israeli goods, a tax revolt, and daily protests against the occupying forces. Israel responded by imposing curfews, restricting freedom of movement and mass incarcerations to name only some of the violent measures.

Between and , for example, the secret services interrogated more than 23, Palestinians, one out of every people living in the West Bank and Gaza. We now know that many of them were tortured.

What acts of nonviolent resistance are actually open to us? Would you walk peacefully towards the fence?