Mary E. King
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
Reviews of A Quiet Revolution
The Dallas Morning News
October 14, 2007
'A Quiet Revolution': Nonviolence in the first Palestinian intifada
CURRENT EVENTS: New book reminds us that Palestinian intifadas have roots in
nonviolence
By EMILY L. HAUSER / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
elhauser@hotmail.com
Say the word "Palestinian," and most Americans don't picture a complex society. Instead, they see
media-hyped images of terrorism: angry young men, suicide bombings.
And so the notion that the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, was predicated on nonviolence will
come as a surprise to many.
With A Quiet Revolution, author Mary King attempts to rectify the record of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict through an exhaustively detailed history of the development, and ultimate unraveling, of "a
remarkably coherent nonviolent mobilization to end a military occupation."
The first intifada was launched, pall mall and with abrupt urgency, in December 1987, when a
traffic accident killed four Palestinians at an Israeli military checkpoint. The accident was
perceived as deliberate, and after 20 years of oppressive occupation, Palestinian society exploded
with rage.
What is notable is that the explosion was largely unarmed. Though large arms caches existed, the
preferred weapon of protesters (from 1987 through early 1990) was the stone. A cadre of
intellectuals immersed in the methods of nonviolent resistance (and associated with, but not led
by, the official PLO in Tunis) shaped and led the revolt as Palestinian society undertook to
disengage from its occupier through noncooperation and civil disobedience, "manifesting a belief
that [they could] ... create the compromises required to live side by side with Israel."
We forget, but at the time, the idea that Palestinians would accept a two-state compromise was
unfathomable to most Westerners.
But while her emphasis is on the history behind these developments and their execution, Ms. King
is careful to point out that most of it was lost on the Israelis.
While many came to understand the occupation's abhorrent nature, few considered the throwing
of stones (and concrete blocks and Molotov Cocktails) nonviolent. These actions dominated the
international perception of the intifada, and few knew of the tax revolts, commercial strikes and
popular committees established by a society facing the iron-fist techniques of Israel's military.
Ms. King also portrays those many Israelis dedicated to finding a just solution, and she rightly
credits the first intifada with the cognitive shift that now allows "the imagining of Israeli-
Palestinian solidarity in which what is forgotten" is as important as what is remembered.
But she also makes clear Israel's refusal to recognize the new reality and the possibilities it
presented, as well the PLO's refusal to adequately support the proponents of nonviolence. These
attitudes, along with the tragic mixing of true nonviolence with methods perceived as murderous,
led to the eventual collapse of peaceful efforts to reconfigure Palestinian rights and a return to the
grossly unbalanced power struggle between occupier and occupied.
"Retrospectively, the first intifada represented a missed historical opportunity for ...
transformation of the relationships for both peoples," Ms. King writes – and virtually any news
report from the region today confirms the enormity of the loss.
Emily L. Hauser is an American-Israeli journalist who reported for the foreign press out of Israel
for most of the 1990s.
-------------------------
Publishers Weekly
4 June 2007
* Starred review
A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance.
Mary Elizabeth King. Nation Books, $16.95 paper (480p)
ISBN 978-1-56025-802-5
A scholar of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, King contends that the first Palestinian
intifada (1987-1993) was explicitly peaceful from its inception. Stating that “[h]istory is often the
narrative of wars, and military historians enjoy prestige, whereas the chronicling of how societies
have achieved major accomplishments through nonviolent resistance is scant by comparison,” she
draws on a wealth of documentary and statistical evidence to demonstrate that the Palestinians
exercised remarkable restraint during the first years of the intifada. Tying together the threads of
civil society, political mobilization and social change, she delivers a fascinating account of a nation
in transition. In the occupied “territories,” she argues, the Israeli military brutally repressed the
“wedging open of nongovernmental political space and development of
institutions not under official purview” and deepened the Palestinians’ desire for change. The
closure of the educational institutions in the West Bank in 1988, for example, caused teachers and
professors to return to their home villages, where they were quickly able to politicize uneducated
people. . . . [H]er book is essential reading for anyone interested in Mideastern peace.
-------------------------
The Guardian
November 16, 2007
The Palestinian path to peace does not go via Annapolis
World opinion is still on the side of the people of the occupied territories. But as long as they are
divided, talks are futile
Jonathan Steele
Friday November 16, 2007
The Guardian (London) p. 37
As the United States-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, approaches, the
key question is what follows when it fails. Fiasco is looming, so what do the Palestinians do next?
In their decades-long bid for justice, they have already tried everything.
The "armed struggle" of the 1970s, with its publicity-seeking aircraft hijackings, won global
attention but no major concessions. The suicide bombings of the 1990s hardened Israeli attitudes
and lost the Palestinian struggle much of its legitimacy. The Qassam rockets which continue to be
fired from Gaza inflict damage and occasional death, but bring disproportionate retribution from
the Israeli airforce.
Taking the political path has been only marginally more productive. When the Palestinian
leadership in the 1980s made the historic compromise of accepting Israel's implantation on 78% of
pre-1948 "mandate Palestine", they were rewarded with no equivalent Israeli recognition that
Palestinians should control the remaining land.
There was a flicker of optimism in the dying months of the Clinton administration, when a peace
deal was almost brokered between Yasser Arafat and the Ehud Barak government. Although it
failed, the mood among most Israelis and Palestinians favoured a two-state solution. The line was:
"Everyone knows what the outlines of a peace deal are. It just needs political decisions at the top."
But Ariel Sharon's government put paid to that, and the Israeli definition of what constitutes a
viable Palestinian state has continued to diminish.
Today no major party is willing to contemplate a reasonable concept of Palestinian independence.
Instead, the ancient settlement project of Zionist dreams moves forward unabated, with the
outrage of the ever-expanding wall and the annexation of east Jerusalem and its hinterland.
According to the latest figures, Palestinians only control 54% of the West Bank. The rest has been
taken by Israeli settlements. Meanwhile 570 closures - concrete blocks, mounds of earth and
checkpoints - divide the remaining Palestinian land into mini-enclaves of anger and indignity.
Attempting to convince successive US administrations that pressure needs to be put on Israel has
also not worked for the Palestinians. Even Bill Clinton confined himself to sweet-talking. He never
wielded any muscle, let alone hinted at sanctions for Israel's serial non-compliance with UN
resolutions.
To expect anything tougher from George Bush is futile. Indeed, it is hard to fathom what his
people are up to by proposing the Annapolis meeting. The president shows no real energy or
engagement on the issue, compared with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or even his father. Does he
seriously think he can get an agreement, and have one foreign policy success after the disaster of
Iraq? Even if Mahmoud Abbas were to sign a meaningful piece of paper at Annapolis, the
Palestinian president lacks the moral or political authority of Arafat. He is more likely to be
denounced than praised by most Palestinians.
Efforts to send a message to Washington and Israel through the ballot box have also yielded the
Palestinians no benefits. When voters elected Hamas two years ago in the hope of showing the
world their frustration, the Israeli and US response was first to punish them and then to try to split
them by pampering the defeated Fatah movement diplomatically and giving it arms. Had Fatah
been rewarded with substantial Israeli concessions on lifting roadblocks and releasing prisoners,
undermining Hamas might have worked. The opposite has happened. If Abbas thinks he can win
new elections on the basis of an Annapolis deal, he will be disappointed. Everything suggests
Palestinian voters would give Hamas more support in the West Bank than they have already.
So what options do the Palestinians have? Could non-violent resistance on a mass scale make a
difference, as it did in the intifada, which started 20 years ago next month? Mary King's new
study, A Quiet Revolution, provides a timely reminder of what they achieved through courageous
and disciplined mobilisation. A former activist of the US civil rights movement and now a
professor of peace and conflict studies, she explains how Palestinians [sought to shake off] the
Israeli military occupation through a sustained campaign of boycotts and defiance. The template
was South Africans' mass democratic movement against apartheid. Of course, like Pretoria, the
Israeli government highlighted the occasional Molotov cocktails and sporadic stone-throwing to
demonise the entire movement as violent, but the core of the protests was unarmed civil
disobedience.
The first intifada was more impressive than the much-touted "colour revolutions" of recent years,
or even of the east European uprisings of 1989, with the exception of Solidarity in Poland. It did
not receive US or other foreign government funding. It was not an affair of a few days against a
weak and divided regime. It required months of brave activity and the endurance of mass arrests
and heavy repression from opponents like defence minister Yitzhak "break their bones" Rabin
who, unlike the crumbling Communist elites of 1989 or the administrations of Milosevic,
Shevardnadze, and Kuchma, had no compunction in repeatedly using force.
Palestinian success in getting the Israelis to abandon their military administration of the land seized
in 1967 and accept the Oslo arrangements for Palestinian self-rule did not, alas, lead to peace or a
final settlement. Most Palestinians now deride Oslo. But it was a victory, and a key stage in their
struggle.
Should non-violent resistance be revived on a large scale? What would the focus be? Mass sit-ins
at the major roadblocks with crowds pushing through? Marches to the sites where the wall is
going up? Or should the target of popular protest first be the Palestinians' own elites? In recent
months nothing has been more damaging to the Palestinian cause than the violence between Fatah
and Hamas, egged on by the Israeli government, the Bush administration and a supine European
Union.
The central requirement for any new Palestinian initiative is Palestinian unity. Don't let opponents
divide you. Resist international flattery. Ignore the instinct for revenge. The jury of international
public opinion is still on the side of the Palestinians' demand for justice. It may not have achieved
as much as it could have, but it matters, and needs to be preserved.
-------------------------
Review by historian Avi Shlaim of St Antony's College, Oxford
The first intifada involved a real revolution in Palestinian political thinking. This is a profound and
perceptive account of the intellectual roots of that ‘quiet revolution’ by a leading expert on non-
violent resistance. Mary King places the Palestinian struggle for independence in the broader
philosophical context of civil disobedience and non-violent action, going back to the teaching of
Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The result is an original and illuminating study, rich in
insights about the past and lessons for the future.
-------------------------
USA Today
December 18, 2007
Linkage of two conflicts key to peace in Mideast, by DeWayne Wickham
October 14, 2007
'A Quiet Revolution': Nonviolence in the first Palestinian intifada
CURRENT EVENTS: New book reminds us that Palestinian intifadas have roots in
nonviolence
By EMILY L. HAUSER / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
elhauser@hotmail.com
Say the word "Palestinian," and most Americans don't picture a complex society. Instead, they see
media-hyped images of terrorism: angry young men, suicide bombings.
And so the notion that the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, was predicated on nonviolence will
come as a surprise to many.
With A Quiet Revolution, author Mary King attempts to rectify the record of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict through an exhaustively detailed history of the development, and ultimate unraveling, of "a
remarkably coherent nonviolent mobilization to end a military occupation."
The first intifada was launched, pall mall and with abrupt urgency, in December 1987, when a
traffic accident killed four Palestinians at an Israeli military checkpoint. The accident was
perceived as deliberate, and after 20 years of oppressive occupation, Palestinian society exploded
with rage.
What is notable is that the explosion was largely unarmed. Though large arms caches existed, the
preferred weapon of protesters (from 1987 through early 1990) was the stone. A cadre of
intellectuals immersed in the methods of nonviolent resistance (and associated with, but not led
by, the official PLO in Tunis) shaped and led the revolt as Palestinian society undertook to
disengage from its occupier through noncooperation and civil disobedience, "manifesting a belief
that [they could] ... create the compromises required to live side by side with Israel."
We forget, but at the time, the idea that Palestinians would accept a two-state compromise was
unfathomable to most Westerners.
But while her emphasis is on the history behind these developments and their execution, Ms. King
is careful to point out that most of it was lost on the Israelis.
While many came to understand the occupation's abhorrent nature, few considered the throwing
of stones (and concrete blocks and Molotov Cocktails) nonviolent. These actions dominated the
international perception of the intifada, and few knew of the tax revolts, commercial strikes and
popular committees established by a society facing the iron-fist techniques of Israel's military.
Ms. King also portrays those many Israelis dedicated to finding a just solution, and she rightly
credits the first intifada with the cognitive shift that now allows "the imagining of Israeli-
Palestinian solidarity in which what is forgotten" is as important as what is remembered.
But she also makes clear Israel's refusal to recognize the new reality and the possibilities it
presented, as well the PLO's refusal to adequately support the proponents of nonviolence. These
attitudes, along with the tragic mixing of true nonviolence with methods perceived as murderous,
led to the eventual collapse of peaceful efforts to reconfigure Palestinian rights and a return to the
grossly unbalanced power struggle between occupier and occupied.
"Retrospectively, the first intifada represented a missed historical opportunity for ...
transformation of the relationships for both peoples," Ms. King writes – and virtually any news
report from the region today confirms the enormity of the loss.
Emily L. Hauser is an American-Israeli journalist who reported for the foreign press out of Israel
for most of the 1990s.
-------------------------
Publishers Weekly
4 June 2007
* Starred review
A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance.
Mary Elizabeth King. Nation Books, $16.95 paper (480p)
ISBN 978-1-56025-802-5
A scholar of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, King contends that the first Palestinian
intifada (1987-1993) was explicitly peaceful from its inception. Stating that “[h]istory is often the
narrative of wars, and military historians enjoy prestige, whereas the chronicling of how societies
have achieved major accomplishments through nonviolent resistance is scant by comparison,” she
draws on a wealth of documentary and statistical evidence to demonstrate that the Palestinians
exercised remarkable restraint during the first years of the intifada. Tying together the threads of
civil society, political mobilization and social change, she delivers a fascinating account of a nation
in transition. In the occupied “territories,” she argues, the Israeli military brutally repressed the
“wedging open of nongovernmental political space and development of
institutions not under official purview” and deepened the Palestinians’ desire for change. The
closure of the educational institutions in the West Bank in 1988, for example, caused teachers and
professors to return to their home villages, where they were quickly able to politicize uneducated
people. . . . [H]er book is essential reading for anyone interested in Mideastern peace.
-------------------------
The Guardian
November 16, 2007
The Palestinian path to peace does not go via Annapolis
World opinion is still on the side of the people of the occupied territories. But as long as they are
divided, talks are futile
Jonathan Steele
Friday November 16, 2007
The Guardian (London) p. 37
As the United States-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, approaches, the
key question is what follows when it fails. Fiasco is looming, so what do the Palestinians do next?
In their decades-long bid for justice, they have already tried everything.
The "armed struggle" of the 1970s, with its publicity-seeking aircraft hijackings, won global
attention but no major concessions. The suicide bombings of the 1990s hardened Israeli attitudes
and lost the Palestinian struggle much of its legitimacy. The Qassam rockets which continue to be
fired from Gaza inflict damage and occasional death, but bring disproportionate retribution from
the Israeli airforce.
Taking the political path has been only marginally more productive. When the Palestinian
leadership in the 1980s made the historic compromise of accepting Israel's implantation on 78% of
pre-1948 "mandate Palestine", they were rewarded with no equivalent Israeli recognition that
Palestinians should control the remaining land.
There was a flicker of optimism in the dying months of the Clinton administration, when a peace
deal was almost brokered between Yasser Arafat and the Ehud Barak government. Although it
failed, the mood among most Israelis and Palestinians favoured a two-state solution. The line was:
"Everyone knows what the outlines of a peace deal are. It just needs political decisions at the top."
But Ariel Sharon's government put paid to that, and the Israeli definition of what constitutes a
viable Palestinian state has continued to diminish.
Today no major party is willing to contemplate a reasonable concept of Palestinian independence.
Instead, the ancient settlement project of Zionist dreams moves forward unabated, with the
outrage of the ever-expanding wall and the annexation of east Jerusalem and its hinterland.
According to the latest figures, Palestinians only control 54% of the West Bank. The rest has been
taken by Israeli settlements. Meanwhile 570 closures - concrete blocks, mounds of earth and
checkpoints - divide the remaining Palestinian land into mini-enclaves of anger and indignity.
Attempting to convince successive US administrations that pressure needs to be put on Israel has
also not worked for the Palestinians. Even Bill Clinton confined himself to sweet-talking. He never
wielded any muscle, let alone hinted at sanctions for Israel's serial non-compliance with UN
resolutions.
To expect anything tougher from George Bush is futile. Indeed, it is hard to fathom what his
people are up to by proposing the Annapolis meeting. The president shows no real energy or
engagement on the issue, compared with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or even his father. Does he
seriously think he can get an agreement, and have one foreign policy success after the disaster of
Iraq? Even if Mahmoud Abbas were to sign a meaningful piece of paper at Annapolis, the
Palestinian president lacks the moral or political authority of Arafat. He is more likely to be
denounced than praised by most Palestinians.
Efforts to send a message to Washington and Israel through the ballot box have also yielded the
Palestinians no benefits. When voters elected Hamas two years ago in the hope of showing the
world their frustration, the Israeli and US response was first to punish them and then to try to split
them by pampering the defeated Fatah movement diplomatically and giving it arms. Had Fatah
been rewarded with substantial Israeli concessions on lifting roadblocks and releasing prisoners,
undermining Hamas might have worked. The opposite has happened. If Abbas thinks he can win
new elections on the basis of an Annapolis deal, he will be disappointed. Everything suggests
Palestinian voters would give Hamas more support in the West Bank than they have already.
So what options do the Palestinians have? Could non-violent resistance on a mass scale make a
difference, as it did in the intifada, which started 20 years ago next month? Mary King's new
study, A Quiet Revolution, provides a timely reminder of what they achieved through courageous
and disciplined mobilisation. A former activist of the US civil rights movement and now a
professor of peace and conflict studies, she explains how Palestinians [sought to shake off] the
Israeli military occupation through a sustained campaign of boycotts and defiance. The template
was South Africans' mass democratic movement against apartheid. Of course, like Pretoria, the
Israeli government highlighted the occasional Molotov cocktails and sporadic stone-throwing to
demonise the entire movement as violent, but the core of the protests was unarmed civil
disobedience.
The first intifada was more impressive than the much-touted "colour revolutions" of recent years,
or even of the east European uprisings of 1989, with the exception of Solidarity in Poland. It did
not receive US or other foreign government funding. It was not an affair of a few days against a
weak and divided regime. It required months of brave activity and the endurance of mass arrests
and heavy repression from opponents like defence minister Yitzhak "break their bones" Rabin
who, unlike the crumbling Communist elites of 1989 or the administrations of Milosevic,
Shevardnadze, and Kuchma, had no compunction in repeatedly using force.
Palestinian success in getting the Israelis to abandon their military administration of the land seized
in 1967 and accept the Oslo arrangements for Palestinian self-rule did not, alas, lead to peace or a
final settlement. Most Palestinians now deride Oslo. But it was a victory, and a key stage in their
struggle.
Should non-violent resistance be revived on a large scale? What would the focus be? Mass sit-ins
at the major roadblocks with crowds pushing through? Marches to the sites where the wall is
going up? Or should the target of popular protest first be the Palestinians' own elites? In recent
months nothing has been more damaging to the Palestinian cause than the violence between Fatah
and Hamas, egged on by the Israeli government, the Bush administration and a supine European
Union.
The central requirement for any new Palestinian initiative is Palestinian unity. Don't let opponents
divide you. Resist international flattery. Ignore the instinct for revenge. The jury of international
public opinion is still on the side of the Palestinians' demand for justice. It may not have achieved
as much as it could have, but it matters, and needs to be preserved.
-------------------------
Review by historian Avi Shlaim of St Antony's College, Oxford
The first intifada involved a real revolution in Palestinian political thinking. This is a profound and
perceptive account of the intellectual roots of that ‘quiet revolution’ by a leading expert on non-
violent resistance. Mary King places the Palestinian struggle for independence in the broader
philosophical context of civil disobedience and non-violent action, going back to the teaching of
Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The result is an original and illuminating study, rich in
insights about the past and lessons for the future.
-------------------------
USA Today
December 18, 2007
Linkage of two conflicts key to peace in Mideast, by DeWayne Wickham
| All rights reserved. |
