Dr. Gandhi in the Holy Land

The fire truck at the edge of the football pitch was

being used to spray water on the gathering crowd. It

was hot in midday Ramallah, but there were a few

vendors from Rukab’s ice cream milling about in

traditional clothes. Women were walking down the

hillside towards the political rally with pictures of

the dead. The Palestinians were waving the national

flag as the loudspeakers were blaring Arabic music in

anticipation of Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson.

In the world’s longest running international relations

chess match known as the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,

Dr. Gandhi’s visit left a ripple. He told the

Palestinians not to respond to Israeli aggression and

to set their own agenda. The night before he had

quoted Napoleon saying, 鍍he general who holds the

initiative wins the war.・

As Dr. Arun Gandhi took to the stage with the Mufti of

Jerusalem, a representative from the Greek Orthodox

Church and others from the Palestinian Authority and

human rights organizations behind him, the audience

had reached over 5,000. He came with a message of

non-violence, as he had done the night before at the

Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem, and told the

crowd, 擢reedom is our birthright.・

The crowd had arrived on buses from the villages

throughout the West Bank in support of the prisoners’

hunger strike for better conditions that was closing

in on its second week. Earlier in the month, activists

had marched through the West Bank from Jenin to

Jerusalem in a Freedom March.

Dr. Gandhi, head of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for

Nonviolence in the United States, told the crowd that

in this Holy Land where Moses, Jesus and Mohammed

roamed, Jews and Arabs needed to learn to live

together and that they should learn from South Africa

and India.

Gandhi spoke about how his grandfather had been

politicized by the 1919 massacre in Amritsar, India

when General Dyer’s British troops fired into a

protesting crowd and killed over 300 people. General

Dyer had ordered medical personnel not to treat the

injured for 72 hours. Non-British people were ordered

by troops to crawl on the sidewalks and were whipped

publicly. Mohandas Gandhi later said, 展e cannot do to

the British, what they did to us. Let us liberate them

from their colonialism.・

Mahatmi Gandhi had originally been invited to

Palestine in 1931 when stories of his non-violent

methods in resisting the British had reached the

Middle East.

Dr. Gandhi told the crowd that they should not protest

violently, that they needed to be better than their

oppressors if they wanted to establish real change.

Instead they needed to channel their anger into a

popular non-violent struggle that had long term

objectives.

Dr. Gandhi’s visit came as South African law professor

John Dugard, the special rapporteur for the United

Nations on the situation of human rights in the

Palestinian Territories wrote in a report to the UN

General Assembly that there is 殿n apartheid

regime・in the territories 努orse than the one that

existed in

South Africa.・

It was also the week that Israel announced 1,500 new

housing units in West Bank settlements despite all the

talk of the Gaza withdrawal. With the U.S. led Roadmap

to Peace dead in its tracks, the facts on the ground

shifting towards Israeli expansionism in the West Bank

and all the supporting infrastructure that it entails,

and over 4,000 dead Palestinians and Israelis since

the outbreak of violence in October 2000, some believe

there is a vacuum building in how to respond

effectively to the Occupation.

After the assassination of Hamas leaders Sheikh Yassin

and Abdel Rantisi earlier this year, Israel has

continued to beat down violent forces in the

territories and expand its holdings in Jerusalem and

the West Bank. The ground has shifted so far from even

the Camp David Accords that Prime Minister Ariel

Sharon and his Likud faction is openly engaged in a

land grab with tacit U.S. support.

Despite the recent International Court of Justice

decision condemning Israel’s construction of the

Separation Wall, and the Supreme Court’s decision to

reroute part of the wall which runs through

Palestinian territory, there is still wide-ranging and

legitimate evidence to suggest that Israel has

effectively annexed the southern West Bank south of

Jerusalem, is expanding its territory in Jerusalem and

has engaged in further land confiscation through

methods including home demolitions, taking over

territory for bypass roads, new settlement

construction and infrastructure development to service

the expansion.

In the name of upholding Israeli security, they have

solidified the Occupation on the ground through the

use of bombs, tanks, bulldozers, movement

restrictions, construction of the Separation Wall and

through coercive methods of information gathering from

collaborators.

It came as a surprise to many when Attorney General

Menachem Mazuz, responding to the fallout from the

International Court of Justice decision on the

Separation Wall, recommended that Israel consider

adopting the Fourth Geneva Convention which outlines

responsibilities under international law for an

Occupying power of a civilian population under its

control. If Israel proceeded with the Attorney

General’s recommendation, there would be greater

enforcement mechanisms for violations of international

human rights law and humanitarian law.

Israel still contends that it is not an Occupying

force because the international community never

officially recognized Egyptian and Jordanian rule over

the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and as such, is not

violating any international agreements it has signed

on to.

Dr. Gandhi spoke often of the civil rights movement in

the United States and the Apartheid system in South

Africa in the context of the 37-year Israeli

Occupation. Dr. Gandhi’s own father spent 15 years in

jails in South Africa fighting against apartheid.

典he first intifada was a better success because it

involved the whole Palestinian population and it

brought the masses to the streets,・said Mohammed

Alatar, leader of the U.S. group Palestinians for

Peace and Democracy and one of the organizers of Dr.

Gandhi’s trip with East Jerusalem principal Terry

Boulata and another Ramallah-based peace group formed

after the International Court of Justice decision

regarding the Separation Wall at The Hague.

The night before, a person in the audience at the

Ambassador Hotel welcomed Dr. Gandhi’s message and

said, When you combine the power of popular

non-violent resistance with the enforcement of

international law, it can be very effective in

bringing about change.・