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 From the beginning of Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, through the first Intifada into the early 1990s, there were no suicide bombings. Before the first Intifada, Israel had near quiet in the Occupied Territories. Liberal Israelis were content to use Palestinians as a cheap source of labor, and to visit their occupied towns and cities at weekends to enjoy the superior hummus. Meanwhile, Labor- and Likud-led governments assiduously built the infrastructure of military occupation and colonization with the explicit purpose of making a withdrawal impossible. Yitzhak Laor writes: "a report published on 6 September in the (right-wing) daily Ma'ariv revealed that during the first three weeks of the [second] Intifada -- before the wave of terror attacks against Israelis even began -- the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], according to Army records, fired one million bullets." ("Diary," London Review of Books, 3 October 2002). No people in history, not Indians led by Gandhi, nor South Africans led by Nelson Mandela, ever faced the kind of state violence that Palestinians face without some of them resorting to armed resistance or desperate acts of revenge. And yet today, even though killing is spiraling, and every Palestinian is subject to the intrusive, daily terror of the occupation, only a tiny number of Palestinians take part in counter-violence of any kind, let alone attacks on civilians. Meanwhile, since long before the suicide bomb phenomenon appeared, there has been a long history of non-violent activism by Palestinians defending their land and rights in the face of Israeli violence, but sadly this has been ignored by many of the same critics who now chide the Palestinians for not being more like Gandhi.
 During the first three weeks of the Second Palestinian Intifada, the Israeli army -- according to its own records -- fired one million bullets. [more] thanks to thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse |