The Informationist

Gandhi in Gaza

I don’t know precisely what the coverage looks like in the States, but here in Europe CNN International has given ample play to the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. I’m having almost as hard a time figuring out how I feel about the coverage as I am about the event itself. My initial reaction was that the commentators threw out the word “extremist” quite often, and paid too little heed to the actual behavior at stake. Yesterday, though, I did begin to hear mention of “passive resistance” make the scene.

Somehow or another, I get the feeling that CNN is bending over backwards to inject “balance” into an unbalanced situation. For example, I’ve heard a constant refrain about the religious vs. secular nature of the debate within Israel. Now, it is certainly true that most secular Israelis support the withdrawal, that many religious Israelis oppose it, and that the protestors themselves are disproportionately religious. Some, though by no mean all, of the protestors are there because they believe in a divine right to the land. And when the dust settles, Israel will have to look itself in the mirror and decide how to address its own synagogue vs. state issues. So far, so good.

What I find dismaying, though, is the inattention so far to the model that Israel is setting. Its “extremists,” though perhaps extreme in ideology, are not extreme in behavior. They are, with a few minor and unfortunate exceptions, unarmed passive resistors chanting slogans and begging for the police and military to join them. Their behavior is MUCH LESS EXTREME than that of many recent anti-globalization protests, peace marches, and anti-American and anti-Semitic marches around the world. They’re not burning flags or hanging people in effigy. Their greatest long-term threat has been to the political future of the Likud party. The Israeli government has met the protestors with similar restraint--arriving for the most part unarmed and negotiating a few extra hours to allow individuals to stand down with dignity.

Meanwhile, the voices that find injustice buried under every rock have shockingly little sympathy for people being evacuated from their homes for no reason other than a change in government policy. It is hard to imagine ANY other set of circumstances in which an ethnic community being uprooted would evoke such resounding silence from the global “justice” movement. (I defy anyone claiming to belong to this movement to identify towns that are primarily or entirely Muslim, Black, Christian, Arab, or Chinese that warrant wholesale destruction; one example of each will suffice to convince me that such treatment is not reserved only for Jews).

Protest movements around the world should follow the Gaza model.

Governments around the world, when quelling protests, should follow the model that the Israeli government is setting.

We are witnessing people behaving with grace and dignity under very difficult--and very personal--circumstances. If all religious extremists behaved like the “extremists” of Gaza; if all protest movements adopted the behavior of the Gaza protestors; and if all governments behaved like the government of Israel; the world will have taken many strides towards resolving the global tension between God and Caesar.

The spirit of Mahatma Gandhi is alive and well among the Jewish protestors of Gaza. Will the supposed followers of Gandhi ever utter a nice word on their behalf?

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 08/19 at 03:01 AM in Foreign Affairs and the World beyond Our Borders