Summary
The Palestinian writer whose essay “How Obsession with ‘Non-Violence’ Harms the Palestinian Cause” Falk engages at length, and largely accepts, in “The Pros and Cons of Solidarity with the Palestinian Struggle” (Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, PDF p.155-157).
Details
- As Falk introduces her: a recent graduate of Birzeit University who was born in Cardiff, Wales, and has lived in England and the United States as well as Palestine, writing with high credibility on who should decide the forms of Palestinian resistance (PDF p.155).
- Her burden as Falk gives it: it is for the Palestinians, and only the Palestinians, to decide on the forms and nature of their resistance; allies who worship at the altar of Palestinian nonviolence cede to the West the authority to determine what forms of Palestinian struggle are acceptable, a hypocrisy Falk summarises as “nonviolence for your struggle, violence for ours” (PDF p.155).
- She laments, in Falk’s reading, that Palestinians are not yet mobilising their own masses to shape their own destiny, so that deferring to Western canons of struggle is dooming Palestinians to apathy and despair (PDF p.156).
- Falk records his own correction in response: he acknowledges his carelessness in taking positive note of the shift to nonviolent resistance as unwittingly paternalistic, while noting that she neglects the courage and mobilising impact of the prison hunger strikes and that she does not acknowledge two universal values — that no outsider may tell the oppressed how to behave, and that no violence against an innocent child or civilian bystander is morally acceptable or legally permissible (PDF p.155-157).
- Earlier in Falk, Alsaafin is the intermediary for a quotation from Hana Shalabi’s sister Zahra: “I don’t want to immortalize her, I just want her to live.” (PDF p.106)
Related pages
Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, Global Solidarity, Legitimacy struggle, Hunger Strikes, Hana Shalabi