Non-Hierarchical Revolution: Grassroots Politics in the First Palestinian Intifada (original) (raw)
Related papers
Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement
2011
Why do some national movements use violent protest and others nonviolent protest? Wendy Pearlman shows that much of the answer lies inside movements themselves. Nonviolent protest requires coordination and restraint, which only a cohesive movement can provide. When, by contrast, a movement is fragmented, factional competition generates new incentives for violence and authority structures are too weak to constrain escalation. Pearlman reveals these patterns across nearly one hundred years in the Palestinian national movement, with comparisons to South Africa and Northern Ireland. To those who ask why there is no Palestinian Gandhi, Pearlman demonstrates that nonviolence is not simply a matter of leadership. Nor is violence attributable only to religion, emotions, or stark instrumentality. Instead, a movement's organizational structure mediates the strategies that it employs. By taking readers on a journey from civil disobedience to suicide bombings, this book offers fresh insight into the dynamics of conflict and mobilization.
The democratizing qualities of the Palestinian village Bil'in's civil resistance campaign
Journal of Political Power, 2023
his paper deals with the quality of civil resistance and, in particular, the democratizing qualities of various civil resistance practices. There is a great amount of research on civil resistance and its capacities to foster social change, and in particular its impact on increased democracy. However, we still have an empirical bias in this research since these studies mainly focus on mass-mobilized breaking resistance. This paper provides an analysis of various civil resistance practices’ democratizing qualities based on a case study – namely the Palestinian village Bil’in’s campaign against the Israeli plans to build a ‘security barrier’‚ through the village’s farmlands. The process of the campaign began in 2002 and lasted until the Supreme Court of Israel’s decision from 2007 to re-route the building of the ‘security barrier’ away from the farmland from was implemented in 2011. Based on a ‘process tracing’ (PT) methodology, an analysis of, primarily, interviews that were made with Bil’in activists and proxy activists (mainly Israelis) is presented, where the tracing underlying mechanisms could explain why the campaign had an impact on democracy. Theoretically, the paper applies the concept of ‘democratizing qualities’ (Munck 2016), as well as the analytical toolbox that is labelled the ABC of civil resistance. The paper will conclude with a presentation of potential causal mechanisms that may explain why the civil resistance campaign impacted on democracy. The guiding overarching research question is: In what ways can different practices of civil resistance have democratizing qualities?
Palestinian Women of the Intifada: the Women’s Committees, 1987-1988
This study situates the Palestinian women’s committees within the initial year of Intifada, 1987-1988, to show that women’s committees were politically active yet were an inherent creation due to class issues. It became evident that these unofficial women’s popular organizations were a development of the 1970s. Furthermore, this study argues that the women’s committees were affected by issues of class, politics and gender; after all, their creation was due to the charitable societies exclusivity to upper and upper-middle class women, while gendered differences in tactics of women and women’s committees during the Intifada in comparison to the Shabbiba (youth movement) was merely a construction of the PLO and other mainstream leadership of the Palestinians. Neither of these two types of women’s organizations sought to better the position of women in society during the Intifada, even though the Palestinian women’s committees allowed for a more diverse membership. Additionally, gendered language existed outside of these women’s organizations in the leaflets of the mainstream leadership, such as the PLO, that situated women as motherly protectors rather than active participants who were often as reactive as their male counterparts to the Israeli occupiers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Lastly, these women activists within the women’s worker committees “unified” under the Higher Women’s Committee which was plagued by internal political alignments, implicating a lack in unity.
Palestinian Popular Struggle: Unarmed and Participatory
Routledge, 2019
Palestinian Popular Struggle challenges conventional thinking about political action and organization. It offers an alternative to the seemingly failed tracks of armed struggle and diplomatic negotiations. A discourse of rights and global justice helps bridge national and religious divides, drawing Jewish Israelis and diverse supporters from around the world to participate in direct-action campaigns on the ground in the West Bank. The movement has some important achievements and continues to offer innovative approaches to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This book summarizes Palestinian traditions of popular struggle and presents original field research from the West Bank, drawing on several months of participant observation, over twenty-five hours of recorded interviews with Palestinian activists, and more than 200 questionnaires gaging public perceptions about the strategies of the popular committees. One of the book’s major case studies is the village of Nabi Saleh, which recently became well known when one of its activists, a sixteen-year- old girl named Ahed Tamimi, was imprisoned for slapping Israeli soldiers outside her family home. The book offers insight into new waves of Palestinian popular protest, from the 2017 prayer protests in Jerusalem to the 2018 march of return in Gaza. Palestinian Popular Struggle is a valuable resource for researchers and students interested in War and Conflict Studies, Politics and the Middle East.
2015
Advocates for Palestinian rights who operate outside the Fatah-Hamas binary have emerged as a third political tendency in recent years. Palestinian and international activists have advanced an alternative framework through which to act on the Palestine question. Their campaigns, consisting of education, advocacy and direct action, have managed to advance a rights-based understanding of the Palestinian plight. One area that global Palestine activism has not delved into is that of offering a critique of Palestinian armed resistance, as practiced primarily by groups in Gaza. Drawing on the public positions of prominent Palestinian commentators and on media statements made by organizations within the movement, as well as my own participation in Palestine advocacy, I propose that activists have largely evaded a critique of the armed strategy. This paper explores possible reasons for this and argues that activists should engage on this issue. I explicate why this is a legitimate, necessar...
In understanding the decline of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the analysis of its political agency allows the identification of a pattern of policy fluctuation that recurs throughout several critical phases of its trajectory. In this regard, the First Intifada is a case in point. The new geographical setting, the strong network of affiliated organizations and the more favourable balance of power with Fatah represented a major opportunity for the PFLP to revive its political initiative and increase its political weight. However, the PFLP was unable to grasp this opportunity due to its inconsistencies in confronting the main challenges posed by the Intifada, namely Fatah’s diplomatic agenda, the relations with the PFLP’s branch in the Territories, the fragmentation of the Palestinian Left and the rise of the Islamist movement. Resorting to a systematic study of the PFLP’s official publications and to interviews with former and current militants, this article identifies the pattern of policy fluctuation that transformed the First Intifada into a turning point in its weakening process. This pattern acquires further relevance since it illustrates the basic poles of tensions behind the fluctuation of the PFLP’s political conduct throughout the following decades.
This dissertation advances the literature on civil resistance by proposing an alternative way of thinking about action and organization, and by contributing a new case study of Palestinian struggle in the occupied West Bank. Civil resistance, also known as civil disobedience, nonviolent action, and people power, is about challenging unjust and oppressive regimes through the strategic use of nonviolent methods, including demonstrations, marches, boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, protest camps, and many others (Sharp 2005; Chenoweth and Stephan 2011; Schock 2015). This study employs an approach that minimizes analytical (as well as normative) expectations of perfectly nonviolent forms of struggle (Celikates 2015), and I link this modified pragmatic action model to an organizational principle that has generally been overlooked or discounted in the research literature. On the whole, civil-resistance studies has focused on forms of action to the detriment of exploring forms of organization, or has relegated organization to a subset of action. My research clarifies a participatory approach to organization that is community based, sometimes known as the committee or council system (Arendt 1963). It is radically democratic, yet not necessarily confined to purely horizontal forms of organization. Rather, the model allows, and requires with increasing scale, upward delegation to decision-making and other task-contingent bodies. I argue that without a theoretical framework for apprehending systems of networked and tiered popular governance, Palestinian civil resistance has been insufficiently understood. The dissertation examines Palestinian cases through this framework, linking the conjunction of unarmed action and participatory organization to high-points of Palestinian struggle. Among the cases is a small civil-society movement in the West Bank that began around 2009 striving to launch a global popular resistance. My research suggests that civil-resistance theorists consider the non-dominative element of organization as they do the non-dominative element of action, that just as violent resistance strategies can counter the logic of people power, so too can centralized organization. Yet this logic does not require that participatory organization be perfectly horizontal any more than civil resistance must be perfectly nonviolent.