The Two Men Israeli Authorities Fear Most: On a Collision Course

"The PLO has a non-violent weapon...to change the balance of forces. This power comes from within each Palestinian, from strength rather than from weakness. Individuals can use this power by actively supporting those Israelis who call for negotiations with the PLO and stand for self-determination of both Palestinians and Jews."—Mubarak Awad, 1987.

The two men Israeli authorities fear most have much in common: Both are American citizens. Authorities in the countries of their birth wish they would stay away. Each may play the decisive role in the West Bank and Gaza. And they are on a collision course.

One is Brooklyn-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, who styles himself "the Israeli whom American Jews fear most, because I tell the truth about what Israel must do to remain a Jewish state." He preaches his "truth" to Israel's unhappy underclass—unskilled, uneducated, unemployed Jews who left Casablanca, Sanaa, Baghdad, and other African and Asian cities over the past 40 years for an illusory promised land. Kahane's message: There will be no work, no dignity and no role for Israel's "Jewish Arabs," until the Muslim and Christian Arabs are driven out by fire and sword.

In the US, Kahane found the Jewish Defense League, a Kosher Ku Klux Klan that terrorized Arab and Soviet diplomats and their families in New York, and whose even more violent offshoot organizations have been fingered by the FBI as suspects in bombings and murders in various parts of the United States.

Sensible American Jews breathed a sigh of relief when Kahane emigrated to Israel. There, however, he founded Kach, a political party drawn straight from Mein Kampf, which substitutes Arabs for Jews as national scapegoats. Kach caught on, and Kahane already sits in the Israeli Knesset. Israelis who describe him as an insignificant aberration in the Zionist state ignore the fact that in the last Israeli election Kahane's party received the same percentage of the popular vote that Adolf Hitler's National Socialists received just one election before the vote that catapulted them to power in Germany.

To stop Kahane from raising funds in the United States to finance his hate campaign in Israel, the State Department tried to lift his American passport after he was elected to the Knesset. He took the US government to court and won. So he remains the Israeli feared by American Jews who deplore the way the wind is blowing in Israel, and funded by American Jews who don't.

If American-born Rabbi Meir Kahane personifies the beast in us all, Palestinian-born Mubarak Awad may personify the saint, or at least the qualities that enabled Jeanne d'Arc to walk with dignity to the stake and calmly commend her soul to God through the flames.

Born in East Jerusalem 44 years ago, Awad traveled to the United States to study psychology. He married an American citizen and watched with mounting concern as his people, victims of one of the most blatant muggings in modern history, were gradually transformed in US public opinion from "refugees" to "terrorists." He hopes to apply what he has learned in the US about non-violent political action to undo some of the damage.

"While the extremists have tended to create the PLO's image in the Western world, with detailed media coverage of hijackings and hostage-taking," he explains, "the moderates have kept the PLO image alive in the Arab world."

The question he poses is, who can save whatever the Palestinians have left? Without changes in public opinion, he feels, it won't be the world community of nations that, under US pressure, voted to divide Palestine between its Jewish inhabitants on the one hand and its Muslim and Christian Arab inhabitants on the other, and then allowed Israel to seize some of the Palestinian Arab share in 1948 and the remainder in 1967. Nor will it be the other Arab states, who were unable to reverse either of those debacles. In Awad's opinion, only the Palestinians can save themselves.

Those living abroad, beyond the reach of a harsh military occupation, must provide the political leadership through the Palestine Liberation Organization, Awad believes. But he believes with equal conviction that the PLO military option is no longer valid, if it ever was.

"The war in Lebanon affected every Palestinian," Awad wrote in the Sept. 6, 1987 issue of the Jerusalem newspaper Al-Fajr. "The Israeli invasion of Lebanon severely reduced the PLO military forces and scattered them throughout the Middle East. But it also liberated Palestinians living under occupation psychologically, and caused a shift in our consciousness from a sense of helplessness and need for external protection to a realization of the dignity of our own struggle," Awad wrote.

"Palestinians in the occupied territories now increasingly turn away from the armed struggle option or from expecting our brothers in exile to fight on our behalf, because we now know our real source of strength has been inside us all the time. It has become crystal clear to Palestinians that Israel, with all its might, may try to destroy the PLO time and again, but can never and will never destroy our dream of Palestinian nationalism."

No theoretician in an ivory tower, Mubarak Awad returned to East Jerusalem to put his beliefs into practice two years ago, armed only with an American passport, funding from Palestinian-Americans teaching at US universities, and a handbook published in California entitled "Non-Violent Resistance: A Strategy for the Occupied Territories."

The struggle to save their nation, Awad believes, must be carried out by the Palestinians who remain on their land, and non-violence is the only means remaining to them. Non-violence liberated India and Pakistan from the British Empire. It finally obtained civil rights for American Blacks after the bloodiest war in American history failed to do so. And, practiced in US streets, it ended a war in the jungles of Vietnam.

In East Jerusalem, Mubarak Awad founded the Palestinian Center for the Study of Non-Violence, which employs 13 people. In the summer 1984 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies, he prepared his followers for the worst:

"Non-violent struggle is a total and serious struggle, nothing short of a real war. There is no assurance that the enemy will be non-violent. On the contrary, there are great sacrifices we should expect in the non-violent struggle. Martyrs and wounded will fall, and Palestinians will suffer personal losses in terms of their interests, jobs, and possessions. Non-violent struggle is a real war, not an easy alternative."

Recently he told a New York Times reporter: "If people want to work with me they have to accept my demands: No throwing of stones, no running away. All people must be willing to go to jail and must agree not to be afraid, even when confronted by Israeli soldiers with guns."

These actions, he has explained, are aimed first at the human side of Israeli soldiers, who up to now have not shrunk from slaughter of Arabs, so long as it could be justified in terms of defense of their own people. They may, however, eventually balk at killing and brutalizing Arabs who are only resisting dispossession from their own lands, and who do not threaten the lives or the lands of the Israelis.

If Israelis continue the killing after they are no longer personally threatened, Awad believes, then they will eventually be isolated in world opinion. And, he argues: "Israel does not possess the internal resources which will enable it to bear international isolation for a long time, as is the case with the racist government of South Africa."

By now, Awad's theories have had their field tests. Mixed groups of Arab and Israeli followers have blocked bulldozers seeking to build roads and fences to cut off Arab villages from their lands. Last January, when Israeli bulldozers uprooted 50-year-old Arab-owned olive trees so that Israeli authorities could confiscate the groves as "unused lands," 150 of Awad's Israeli, Palestinian and foreign associates joined the Arab owners in planting 500 new seedlings. They also were able to trace the stolen trees and inform the world press that some olive trees transplanted to an Israeli memorial to Martin Luther King had, in fact, been bulldozed and hauled away from West Bank Arab owners.

Initial results seemed discouraging. For example, to date Mrs. Martin Luther King has never publicly protested the fact that part of an Israeli memorial to her husband was created from stolen trees. Arabs and Israelis agreed to spare newly-planted olive trees after some of Awad's volunteers literally shielded the seedlings with their bodies. Then, after dark, the authorities returned and uprooted the trees again.

Apparently, however, the non-violent confrontations also have taken their toll on Israeli officials. Awad was informed in late September that his residence permit will not be renewed. Whatever other results non-violent confrontations have had, they have frightened the Israeli government into taking action against this US citizen. That should alert his fellow Americans to the fact that it is Arab non-violence rather than Arab violence, and Arab moderates rather than Arab extremists, that the incumbent Israeli government fears most.

Whatever happens next to Mubarak Awad personally, he has made his point. In the September 17 Al-Fajr he wrote:

"The notion of self-determination for the Palestinians, in the minds of the Israeli and American governments, is equated with the belief that Palestinian self-determination can only lead to the end of Israel. The campaign to propagate this fallacy has effectively stifled new initiatives from moderates. But fresh initiatives can never come to fruition as long as Israel demands, as a prelude to serious negotiation, that Palestinians recognize Israel and its borders, when Israel itself refuses to define its borders. This pre-condition, unprecedented in modern history, is clearly designed to prevent such negotiations from every taking place, and so far has succeeded admirably. Meanwhile, Israel continues to confiscate more and more Palestinian land, to build new settlements and expand old ones...

"Even moderate Palestinians cannot justify recognizing the right of Jews to a state in Palestine when Israel refuses to recognize the Palestinian state, or even that Palestinians exist...But to abandon moderation is to give in to extremism...Only by continuing to appeal to people's sense of morality and justice and hope can Palestine, as a political entity, be created."

Perhaps, as Americans examine the contrasting credos of their two country-men in the Holy Land—Brooklyn-born Jewish extremist Meir Kahane and Jerusalem-born Palestinian moderate Mubarak Awad—the day may be hastened when Christians, Jews and Muslims everywhere acknowledge that the battle is no longer between Israelis and Palestinians, but rather between extremists and moderates within both the Israeli and the Arab camps. When that truth is understood by leaders in America, peace will be established by moderates in the Holy Land.—Richard Curtiss