Waiting for Gandhi
On Sunday evenings I catch up on my New York Times OP/Ed page. Nicholas Kristof has been traveling in Israel and the West Bank for a couple of weeks. His column this week notes that his family is traveling with him. His kids had the experience of being tear gassed by IDF troops and had stones thrown at them by Palestinian youth. Here are a few paragraphs of his post from July 9, 2010.
Waiting for Gandhi
Nicholas Kristof | The New York Times | July 9, 2010Despite being stoned and tear-gassed on this trip, I find a reed of hope here. It’s that some Palestinians are dabbling in a strategy of nonviolent resistance that just might be a game-changer.
The organizers hail the methods of Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., recognizing that nonviolent resistance could be a more powerful tool to achieve a Palestinian state than rockets and missiles. Bilin is one of several West Bank villages experimenting with these methods, so I followed protesters here as they marched to the Israeli security fence.
Israeli security forces knew how to deal with bombers but were flummoxed by peaceful Palestinian women. Even when beaten and fired on with rubber bullets, the women persevered. Finally, Israel gave up. It rerouted the security fence to bypass nearly all of Budrus.