Against a background of escalating violence in Palestine, between the 25th and the 30th of August Dr Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, visited Palestine on a peace mission organised by the Palestinian Campaign for Freedom and Peace. His visit almost coincided with the decision of the International Court of Justice at The Hague against the wall on July 9, 2004, and the issuing of the UN General Assembly resolution which adopted the decision of the ICJ on July 20, 2004.
Gandhi rekindled Palestinians’ memories of the largely non-violent first Intifada and of the first months of the current uprising in which thousands of Palestinians marched daily to demand an end to the occupation and a peaceful solution. The visit and the thoughts it invoked are a reminder of the missed opportunities, the realities on the grounds and the foreseeable possibilities.
In 1987 the popular Palestinian uprising was mainly armed with a growing Palestinian sense of the fairness of their national aspirations based on numerous United Nations resolutions and modelled on the much-admired global struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. Alas, unlike the South African case, the Palestinian confidence in the rightness of their demands and their reliance on international conventions never yielded tangible results.
Palestinian aspirations have been crushed time and again under the heavy weight of Israel’s powerful army, which relied on the Israeli national consensus to strip Palestinians of any moral and legal advantage before entering into any meaningful negotiation, compounded with the failure of the international community to live up to the Palestinian moral and legal challenge under the current global power structure.
By repeatedly firing at Palestinian mass demonstrations and brutally quelling civil disobedience in the Occupied Territories, Israel signalled its response to Palestinian non-violence, and clearly defined and put into practice its rules of engagement.
Gandhi’s visit has generated live debate within the Palestinian community about the courses and the methods of future struggles. However, the significance and the potential of this visit did not receive the attention it should have in the international arena. And in Israel, the giant wall and grandiose army shielded Israelis from the necessity of debating the relevance of the legacy of Gandhi and his grandson.
On the ground this means that, as ever, the largely non-violent Palestinian struggle will fall on deaf ears except when sporadic Palestinian violence follows Israel’s rules of engagement and disrupts the permanent violence imposed by the Israeli occupation in Palestine.
As long as the reach of Gandhi’s message remains limited to the Palestinian side, it has little opportunity to further the cause of peace because the rules of engagement are largely determined by Israel, which has persistently refused to reflect or reevaluate the morality and legality of such rules.
