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By Walid M. Sadi
I had the occasion,during Ramadan, to watch again the epic film on Mahatma Gandhi, the pre-eminent political and spiritual leader of India, and tried to draw some conclusions from his struggle for the independence of his country for possible application to the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence.
Gandhi’s guiding principles in his multifaceted campaign to win independence for his nation were based on civil disobedience and “ahimsa”, meaning total nonviolent struggles. His overall campaign for the liberation and independence of his country involved struggle against poverty, tyranny, women’s enslavement. Above all, Gandhi preached religious and ethnic amity to the multireligious and multiethnic people of India.
His country won independence in 1947, but its leader was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu extremist who believed Gandhi was making too many concessions to the Muslim Indians.
It is still arguable whether India could have attained the same political independence by other means than those advocated by the father of the Indian nation.
Many Indian leaders at the time were pushing Gandhi to abandon his peaceful, nonviolent ways in favour of a violent style founded on armed uprising. Yet Gandhi stuck to his principles and refused violence as a way of liberating his people from the British rule, convinced that nonviolence would achieve faster and better results by eroding and weakening the resistance of the colonial power.
Gandhi thought that an Indian “intifada” would give the British additional ammunition to defeat his people’s efforts to gain freedom and delay the attainment of independence.
Gandhi’s concern about resorting to violence came from his deep-rooted conviction that terrorism would bring forth the wrong kind of leadership for his country, which may end up replacing foreign colonialism with domestic tyranny.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, as indeed most other peoples who waged wars toattain freedom and independence, never seriously contemplated Gandhi’s proven method of achieving independence,and opted instead to armed uprisings that failed to deliver much until now.
The big question now is whether the Palestinians could have fared better in their seven-decade-long struggle for independence had they gone Gandhi’s way. My opinion is that they would have lost less and gained more had their leaderships tried Gandhi’s principle. His style could have served the Palestinian interests much better than the ways that have been pursuing so far.
The proof of this proposition is the undisputed fact that the successive Palestinian leaderships failed miserably in their efforts to deliver their people from enslavement and occupation by violent resistance.
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