Peaceful Palestinian protests are a nightmare for Israel
March 30, Friday, was an important day for Palestinians. It was ‘Land Day’ which marks the date in 1976, when six Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed by Israeli security forces. Now future generations of Palestinians may well also remember Friday, March 30, 2018, as “Bloody Friday.” On this day, near the fence that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel, 18 Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. It was the highest Palestinian death toll since the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, when more than 2,000 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians.
For observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, indeed for anyone even remotely acquainted with it in recent years, this latest bloodshed might seem depressingly common — just another tragic episode of what is often characterised as a cycle of violence.
But what happened in Gaza this year, in fact, is quite different from what many people might assume. While the violence has dominated the news headlines, it is not the only big story from that day.
The deaths of 18 Palestinians should not distract all attention away from the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians had gathered at six different places near the border between Gaza and Israel in peaceful protest.
They were protesting Israel’s ongoing blockade of the small crowded coastal enclave now in its 12th year. They were calling attention to the resulting humanitarian crisis in Gaza. And they were demanding that Palestinian refugees and their descendants be allowed to return to their former homes and reclaim their lands in Israel.
An estimated 35,000 Palestinians participated in this protest, including many families who stayed in several large tent encampments that had been set up hundreds of meters from the border fence. The vast majority of the protesters were unarmed and nonviolent. Only a relatively small number of them – mainly young men – hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers and rolled burning tires toward them. Just a few approached the fence and tried to damage or breach it.
Although it was not completely peaceful, this mostly nonviolent mass protest by Gazans is just the beginning of a six-week campaign of nonviolent popular protests that organisers have called the “Great March of Return.” The campaign will culminate on May 15, which Palestinians commemorate as Nakba Day. The Nakba, meaning catastrophe in Arabic, refers to Israel’s founding in 1948 and the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians that accompanied it.
Palestinians have a long history of nonviolent popular protests, so there is nothing really new about the current campaign in Gaza. What is new, however, and potentially very significant, is the involvement of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007.
Israel, the United States and the European Union all classify Hamas as a terrorist organisation. There’s good reason for that, given Hamas’ track record of indiscriminate violence against Israelis, including dozens of suicide bombings during the second intifada and the launching of thousands of rockets into Israel since then.
Hamas shows no signs of abandoning its armed struggle against Israel. Its new “policy document,” issued last year, still emphasises “armed resistance.” But Hamas’ willingness to endorse and actively promote the “Great March of Return” campaign initiated by independent Palestinian activists in Gaza, suggests that it might be shifting its tactics away from relying upon violence, since that has proven to be disastrous for Gazans and ineffective for Hamas.
Instead of firing rockets (that Israel’s Iron Dome system can intercept), or using underground tunnels to ambush and capture Israeli soldiers or carry out terror attacks (which Israel’s new anti-tunnel system can now detect and destroy), Hamas has, at least for now, apparently embraced mass protests as a relatively peaceful means to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza and, it hopes, delegitimise Israel in the eyes of the world.
This allows Hamas to avoid a costly and destructive war with Israel. If Hamas can continue to mobilise tens of thousands of Palestinians to protest against Israel on a weekly basis, then it can ensure that the blockade of Gaza receives much more attention in international media.
Hamas’ willingness to actively promote the Great March of Return campaign suggests that it might be shifting its tactics away from relying upon violence
For Israel, Hamas’ new tactic represents a completely different challenge. There is no high-tech Israeli answer to masses of unarmed Palestinian protesters congregating at Israel’s border fence or even trying to swarm over it. Israeli soldiers are ill prepared and ill-equipped for this kind of confrontation, as last Friday’s killings arguably demonstrated. Mass demonstrations and marches by Palestinians are, in short, if nothing else, a public relations nightmare for Israel. No wonder, then, that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh declared after last Friday: “We wish to tell the world that the March of Return was peaceful and civilised, and women, youths, children and elderly participated in it.”
The fact that this was not entirely true is beside the point. What matters more is how the world perceives the protest, and whether more of these popular protests, on a similar scale or larger, will take place over the coming weeks. —The Conversation
Dov Waxman is professor of political science, international affairs, and Israel studies, and the Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural
Studies at Northeastern University