People Power, Not Fire Power

By Muhammad Hallaj

The intifada, since it began a year and a half ago, has relied on "people power" to achieve Palestinian independence. Contrary to repeated expectations of outside observers, it has resisted temptations and provocations to substitute fire power by opening an armed campaign against the Israeli occupiers. With very rare and apparently isolated exceptions, the intifada has avoided resort to lethal force as a method of struggle.

The provocations have been strong and persistent, dearly indicating an Israeli intention to goad the intifada leadership into armed response. The policy of "force, might and blows" announced by Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the spring of 1988, and the recent upsurge in settler vigilantism, both led to predictions of retaliatory Palestinian armed resistance. The distribution in early June of what turned out to be a fake "intifada leaflet" calling for revenge killing of Israelis was the latest attempt to deflect the intifada from its nonlethal course. It was an ominous sign of Israel's determination to provoke a deadly confrontation in the occupied territories.

There are good reasons why the intifada has resisted powerful temptations and provocations to alter its nonviolent means. The people of occupied Palestine know that it is not in their interest to resort to firearms. They are hopelessly outgunned by the Israelis, and to resort to firearms would be to meet the Israelis on a battleground of Israeli choosing. Furthermore, since the choice of nonlethal means of struggle gave the Palestinians the moral high ground, it is not in their interest to surrender it by appealing to arms.

In my view, armed struggle, if it comes, will be the outcome of the intifada's failure rather than its success.

No less important is that the primary political objective of the intifada is not to overwhelm the Israeli occupation forces in order to force their retreat. The objective is to replace de facto annexation with de facto independence, to undermine the occupation not by defeating it militarily but by making it superfluous through establishment of indigenous institutions and processes to enable the Palestinians to bypass mechanisms of control instituted by the occupation. Such objectives are more attainable through a popular insurrection than armed guerrilla action.

Because of all these circumstances, it is not likely that the intifada would abandon the tested nonlethal character it has maintained so far. The analogy with resistance to apartheid in South Africa is not out of place here. There armed resistance has given way to profoundly more effective transformations which are making the maintenance of the apartheid system unenforceable. These include the influx of blacks into and around cities, the mushrooming of black businesses, and the increasing number of black university graduates penetrating the economy.

To a certain extent, expectations that the intifada in Palestine would inevitably change to armed struggle are based on a misconception. There is the expectation among some Palestinians and others that success of the intifada will lead to armed struggle as a more "mature" stage of the uprising.

In my view, armed struggle, if it comes, will be the outcome of the intifada's failure rather than its success. If the intifada falters, armed struggle might become a desperate measure to reignite it, not an inevitable escalation. But as long as the intifada continues to be what it has been all along—a constructive endeavor to empower a disenfranchised society by enhancing its viability and self-reliance—people power will and should continue to be its principal weapon.

Muhammad Hallaj is director of the Palestine Research and Education Center in Fairfax, VA, and editor of its magazine, Palestine Perspectives.