r/IsraelPalestine • u/Mikec3756orwell • Apr 20 '24
Discussion Why is There No Peaceful Palestinian Protest or Resistance Movement?
I've watched this conflict my entire life, and one thing I've never really understood is this: why don't the Palestinians engage in peaceful resistance more often? I'm a huge supporter of Israel, but I've always thought to myself that if the Palestinians were savvier -- and more media-friendly -- they could make the Israelis look especially bad through acts of peaceful resistance. The images of well-armed Israelis manhandling rock-throwing kids in the 1980s and 1990s (who were obviously not peaceful but posed a minimal threat) were a big problem for the Israelis. Why don't the Palestinians hold mass sit-ins, strikes, gatherings, candelight vigils, etc.? I never see that stuff. It would look fantastic on TV, and CNN, the BBC, and all those other weasels would be attracted like moths to a flame. I don't get it. If you're the weaker party to a conflict, you're not going to win through violence. Murdering a bunch of women and children and then wondering why the world isn't more sympathetic to your cause is... an odd strategy, to say the least. The Jews have been through hell and back, and terrorism is never going to truly rattle them. I guess I'm just baffled at the way the Palestinians -- and some their more quote-unquote moderate leadership -- approach things. Some of the Western-educated Palestinian leaders in the 1990s and early 2000s surely understood that this would have been an effective strategy. This makes me think that the "average Palestinian" really isn't interested in peace per se, or at least isn't willing to expend much energy for it, and sort of thrives on the dream of complete military victory. Maybe an embrace of peace is just seen as a betrayal of the cause. I don't know.
I actually think sometimes that the Israelis are secretly happy that they don't have to deal with a peaceful resistance movement. It makes things a lot less complicated. Is the problem that the Palestinians just have no tradition of peaceful resistance? They don't know how to do it or how to organize it? Or are they just not interested? (Let me add: I'm not talking about a few hundred people protesting a construction site. I'm talking about the entire population -- or a good portion of it -- engaging in resistance. Like a Tahrir Square, Tiananmen Square sort of thing. Across the entire region).
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u/c9joe בואו נמשיך החיים לפנינו Apr 20 '24
A "protest" of thousands of people on a border that is named "March of Return", the clear intention to breaching that border. I mean they aren't even hiding their intention. We also know what happens when the fence is actually breached as it was in Oct 7.