Santa Clara University

A Dialog of Faith

Question I : Resistance to Occupation

For over half a century, ever-increasing areas of land in which a majority of Palestinians live have been occupied by Israeli settlers, some for religious reasons, others for reasons of state security, still others because of government subsidies for inexpensive housing.

How does your religion view civil resistance to oppression or occupation? Can armed struggle be justified on moral and religious grounds? Who or what should be the targets of such resistance?

Our Muslim participants make the case for resistance. "Islam holds a positive view of civil resistance to occupation," writes Feisal Abdul Rauf, founder and CEO of the American Sufi Muslim Association (ASMA Society) and Imam of Masjid Al-Farah, a mosque in Manhattan, New York. "Armed struggle can be justified on moral or religious grounds, [although] combatants should be the only targets of such resistance."

Mustapha Hogga, Ph.D., coordinator of the Islamic Culture and Arts Research Center of Al Alkawayn University in Morocco adds, "A Muslim has to defend his home, his family, and the right to practice his religion. His defensive action should not target old people, women, and children."

Felix Pomeranz, Ph.D., professor emeritus at Florida International University distinguishes the term "civil resistance" as a reference to movements that are "essentially non-military, an important distinction, one wrought with controversy. Certain Palestinian movements have both ‘civilian’ and quasi-military operations. The guidance as to ‘fighting’ injustices generally refers to Islamic governments. Civil resistance to such governments tends to be reflected by prayers, petitions to the ruler, or by public defenders, such as those comprising the shura."

Zeesahan Hasan, founder of the LiberalIslam.net Web site makes the strongest case for armed resistance. " Although Islamic texts can certainly be interpreted to promote a pacifist or non-violent perspective, the Qur'an is also quite clear that violent resistance against oppression can be moral. The Israeli occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza is undeniably oppressive to the predominantly Palestinian population. … Armed resistance against this military occupation is a morally acceptable option, (and) Israeli military personnel would certainly be legitimate targets."

Additionally, he states "…the heavily armed and right-wing Jewish settlers who have progressively taken over large areas of the occupied Palestinian territories are directly complicit in the Israeli policy of seizing land in the West Bank and Gaza through promoting settlements as immovable facts on the ground, which precludes the possibility of real Palestinian statehood. This policy violates the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit annexation of conquered land, as well as U.N. resolutions, which advocated a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. If the settlers are complicit with the army in oppressing and denying land and rights to the Palestinians, they could also be legitimate targets.

"However, the general Israeli civilian population outside of the occupied Palestinian territories is not participating in the illegal settlement activity, the grabbing of Palestinian land, or the oppressive division of the West Bank and Gaza into Bantustan-like cantons. So the civilian population of Israel is not a morally legitimate target for any kind of violence."

Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir, research director at the Business Ethics Center of Jerusalem and senior lecturer in economics and business ethics rejects armed struggle and questions civil resistance. "The Jewish people are well accustomed to oppression and occupation," he writes. "After establishing an independent polity over three thousand years ago, the Jews experienced the conquests of the Babylonians (Nebuchadnezzar and destruction of the first Temple – 6th century BCE), Persians (Cyrus, soon after), Greeks (Alexander the Great - fourth century BCE), and Romans (first century BCE).

"The response favored by the Jewish sages has been remarkably consistent: armed struggle to prevent incursion and occupation is legitimized according to more or less universal principles of just war and prudence. However, once occupation is established, armed struggle is favored only when the occupiers directly threaten our religious observance and communal existence, not in order to re-establish sovereignty.

"The main mission of the Jewish people is to study, teach, and fulfill the Torah; sovereignty can be an aid in this mission, but it is not to be sought when it becomes an obstacle, because of the violence involved or for other reasons." In short, Meir concludes, "armed struggle against occupation is favored on moral and religious grounds when the occupying power makes it practically impossible for us to pursue our religion and our communal way of life – not as a means to attain sovereignty."

Most of the Christian respondents accept a non-violent approach to resistance based on just war doctrine.

"The teaching of the Gospels and the rest of the Christian New Testament would seem to provide no possibility of violent resistance to injustice," writes Thomas Michel, S.J., secretary for inter-religious dialog of the Society of Jesus in Rome. "Whether in Jesus' reproof to Peter, (Those who live by the sword will die by the sword), or the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount (Do not resist an evildoer.), or in the teaching of Paul and the other authors of the epistles, or in the vision of the Apocalypse, violent resistance to injustice appears to be incompatible with a Christian way of life. However, most of the [early Christian] churches saw the example and teaching of Jesus … as ideals to be respected as individual choices, but not as the bases for societal response to injustice and oppression."

However, Raymond Helmich, S.J. , Catholic instructor in conflict resolution at Boston College’s department of theology writes that "the New Testament tradition is not directly pacifist, but functioned first in a world in which Christians, for their first several centuries, were marginal people, most of them without direct power over public policy or responsibility for the security either of states or of oppressed peoples."

To accommodate the need to use force on behalf of a society or state, the Catholic Church used the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine to refine conditions under which an armed struggle may be just. The use of force may be permissible "as a last resort when all else had been tried and failed, when violent action was taken solely against the perpetrators of wrongdoing and those not involved remained inviolate, when the responses had some hope of correcting the injustice rather than being simply expressions of anger, when the violent reaction was sanctioned by a legitimate authority rather than being undertaken by individuals or groups acting on their own," explains Thomas Michel, S.J.

Salah Abou-Jaoude, S.J., director of the Institute of Islamic-Christian Studies at Saint Joseph’s University in Beirut, Lebanon, notes the interpretative nature of these conditions, and it leads him to recognize the primordial right of self-defense. "Every side in a conflict can interpret its cause to be just and pretend that it serves the construction of real peace. Each side can accuse the other [of being] the aggressor. Similar questions could be posed with regard to the military means employed during a conflict and the designation of legitimate targets. Accordingly, objective examination of every situation of conflict appears to be requisite if we are to avoid an over-simple understanding of the Church’s teachings."

"These observations have a particular significance for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Salah Abou-Jaoude, S.J., continues, "which is intimately related to sacred places [and] religious texts, as well as to regional and international political factors. This confusion between ‘sacred’ and ‘temporal’ poses a serious question as to how to define what is ‘justice,’ before it poses the question as to how to defend that ‘justice.’"

"It is difficult indeed to explain that conflict without recalling first the Zionist ideology and its dream of the ‘Promised Land’; the Balfour Declaration in 1917; the U.N. decisions, especially those of 1947, which have never been implemented, concerning the partition of Palestine; the successive wars between Arab countries and Israel and their consequences.

"…For over half a century, injustice towards Palestinians has [continued]. For instance, on 30 October 1991, when, for the first time, Arabs and Israelis met at Madrid with the aim of finding a just and lasting peace at the Middle East, the Israeli government succeeded in receiving financial aid from the U.S.A., with the purpose of settling 380,000 Soviet Jews who arrived in the ‘Promised Land’ in 1989. Is this a strictly humanitarian matter that has nothing to do with the Middle East conflict, as pretends the Israeli government? Do the Jewish of the Diaspora (exiled for 1853 years) have the right to return to their homeland, promised by God to Abraham? On the other hand, what about the Palestinians who see their lands being confiscated in order to build settlements? And what about the Palestinians exiled for 56 years? Have not they the right to regain their properties in Palestine?

"Justice is the first foundation of peace. But who can say what is ‘justice’ in this conflict? The only possible answer remains the resolutions of the U.N., namely 242 and 338. And as long as there are no efficient initiatives aimed at the realization of these resolutions, Palestinians have the right to defend their properties by force against Israeli settlers."

Dr. Clyde Dodder, senior minister of the First Congregational Church of Palo Alto disagrees, and notes the power of non-violence. "Martin Luther King Jr.'s adoption of Gandhi’s techniques in [the United States] during the 1960s was an eye-opening event," he writes. "It gave people back the feeling that … intimidation and brute force do not always have to win."

Thomas Michel, S.J., asks: "has every alternative to violent reaction been tried and failed? It must seem so to Palestinians living in camps now into the third generation. Negotiations drag on and fail, or a temporary agreement is reached and broken by one side or the other, and all the while Palestinians continue to lose more land, and more lives are lost."

However, Michel continues, " the recourse to negotiation, mediation, civil disobedience, and non-violent resistance has not been exhausted. Pacifism does not mean acquiescence to injustice, but it does demand tremendous reserves of discipline, patience, and commitment to the cause of justice. I believe that the kind of discipline shown by Gandhi and … Martin Luther King [is] more effective as a means to achieving true justice in the long run.

"In short, I can appreciate the anger of Palestinians towards those who have committed injustices against them, but I cannot support their actions of violent response which, while understandable, I see as misguided and self-defeating.

"So while it is true that attacks against military targets in the West Bank and Gaza do not constitute terror, … they do constitute perfidy—breach of an explicit agreement."

Raymond Helmich, S.J., recognizes reluctantly that sometimes there seems to be "no non-violent alternative. …In the Palestinian case," he writes, "I've dealt directly with Arafat … ever since 1985, … equally [being] in contact with … Israeli Prime Ministers and American administrations. It was my conviction from the first that violent Palestinian resistance to occupation was without any real prospect of success. PLO armed action amounted only to pin-pricks, which always provided the rationale for massive Israeli retaliation and consequently harmed the cause of the Palestinians. At the same time, Arafat was being told—by Israelis, Americans, King Hussein of Jordan, all the Europeans, and many others—that he must renounce any right to the use of force. I recognized, and told him, that if he were to accept that proposition, he would be renouncing something that was the just right of his people. He would consequently no longer be their legitimate leader.

"My proposition then was for a moratorium on any use of force. Normally, when a party to conflict declares a moratorium, there is a terminal date after which they will come out shooting again. But there was a declared peace initiative in progress at that time, which the Palestinians had no intention of abandoning, so my proposal was that the moratorium should last as long as the peace initiative itself.

"By late 1987 the first intifada began, and demonstrated to Arafat and the PLO the advantages of a non-violent resistance movement. I know people (the late Faisal Husseini and Sari Nusseibeh) who were actively engaged in seeking such a movement at the time, though I think it actually took off pretty spontaneously and surprised the leadership of the PLO. That intifada [only approximated non-violence], but the contrast of stone throwing, mostly by children, and the violent response of the Israeli army, shooting them down [and] breaking their bones, gave the world, and the Israeli public, a view of who had the moral high ground.

"The intifada had a second major characteristic: it was not a protest against the State of Israel or the legitimacy of its society, but only against occupation. It was therefore an actual affirmation of Palestinian readiness to live, in a state of their own, alongside the Israeli state, in peace. That made it possible for the extensive peace forces in the Israeli public to accept the intifada and identify themselves with its purposes.

"This was so great a success that for the next few years the resident Palestinian population living under occupation had control of the agenda in the Middle East. The Israelis, who were able to defeat militarily anything that all the Arab nations together could bring against them, were completely stymied by the intifada. Everything that happened in … the Middle East … was a direct reaction to the initiative the Palestinians had taken in their intifada. Those reactions were most painful, but it was exhilarating, and a successful way to seek justice, to have that initiative firmly in hand. Like Ghandi's non-violent activists, the Palestinians suffered intensely, but were winning. People who had had no control or influence over what happened to them, but were simply those to whom things happened by the agency of others, now had control.

"I found it disastrous that the intifada was abandoned at some point after Madrid and Oslo. People were reduced once more to having things happen to them without their control. For the next several years I found myself telling Arafat that he needed an intifada. Without the mobilized action of his people he was so reduced in power that he was not a serious negotiating partner to the Israelis. However, a renewed intifada must be rigorously non-violent, without even stones, as every resort to violence would serve to discredit the Palestinian resistance.

"The one real accomplishment of Oslo, for all the detail of agreement that was [absent] there, was that the two peoples, who had for so many years been unable to recognize one another's legitimacy …did formally and publicly… recognize their mutual legitimacy as peoples. That was an enormous accomplishment. …For years, I believed it was unassailable. Netanyahu, for his three years as Prime Minister, made it the principal objective of his policy to rescind that recognition. He was unable to do so, however much he delayed the process of pursuing the negotiations. The moral commitment of the two peoples was too strong for him.

"That left me falsely believing that that mutual recognition was indestructible. The violence of the last several years has shown that this accomplishment is vulnerable after all. Both peoples, at this stage, are seriously questioning the legitimacy of the other.

"As violence is practiced now, it is coming principally from the rejectionists of either side, who want no peace with the other and work consciously for the wholesale destruction of their enemies. This is true of the major religious rejectionists on the Palestinian side, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and some secular groups of less importance. (It is not true of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, whose campaign, for all its violence, is not against Israel, but against occupation.)

"On the Israelis side, the rejectionists are heavily entrenched in government itself, which uses all its firepower in an effort to do as much harm as possible to the Palestinians as a people and all the institutions of their society. They have reduced the very extensive peace forces in Israeli society to simple impotence for the time being. The only Israeli violence that is not the direct responsibility of government itself is that exercised by the rampaging settler movement, whose terrorism is very much like that of the Palestinian rejectionists but is complacently tolerated by government. The existence of Palestinian violence not motivated by this urge simply to destroy the other people is explained by the degree of despair to which the Palestinians have been reduced by this official Israeli government action. None of this can be accepted as moral on religious grounds."

Rabbi Asher Meir responds to these positions by arguing that some of the ethical conclusions are not really applicable to the actual situation. "Some responses imply that the settlements are in ‘occupied’ land, and that the settlers occupy Palestinian territory. One response even seemed to imply that the citizens of these peaceful civilian communities should be considered participants in the conflict!

"It is much more accurate to state that these towns are in disputed territory. The status of the West Bank and Gaza as disputed territory is not due to any act of the Israeli government, but rather to the fact that the Palestinian leadership itself has never recognized the 1967 borders of the state of Israel. They consider the entire area disputed, and have never agreed … to full Israeli sovereignty in the 1967 borders, with Palestinian sovereignty everywhere beyond the ‘green line.’

"The original partition plan of 1947 was accepted by Israel but rejected by the Arab leadership, which attacked and thus chose to have the borders determined by conflict. Israel gained much territory in the ensuing War of Independence; today there is not a single country in the world that recognizes the 1947 borders, since they were never agreed to by both sides. This situation repeated itself in 1967, except that in this instance the captured land was not annexed; thus it remains disputed. (I would like to add that considerable areas of settlement are erected on land that actually belongs to Israelis, having been legally purchased before 1948.)

"Whatever scenario we envision for the future of these communities, I think that these insights have profound significance for the current ethical status of the settlements and their residents.

"International humanitarian organizations also recognize the residents of the settlements as non-combatants and view attacks on them as crimes against humanity.

"I think that the main ethical point to be made here is that whatever our religions say about the appropriate arena and targets for armed struggle, they must certainly agree that once an agreement is made to put conflict aside and engage in negotiations, armed struggle is no longer justified. The Palestinian leadership was aware of the existence of settlements and troops, but nonetheless signed an agreement obligating them to cease violent struggle and resolve the conflict peacefully through negotiation. So while it is true that attacks against military targets in the West Bank and Gaza do not constitute terror, … they do constitute perfidy—breach of an explicit agreement."