Violent Resistance
Read the below excerpt from Khalidi (p. 180) on the analysis Pakistani intellectual Eqbal Ahmad did on the (f)utility of the use of violence as an anti-colonial strategy in the context of Israeli Palestine. Then discuss this query with your small group: Do you agree with Eqbal Ahmad’s analysis, and what are its implications for non-violent resistance?
… on political rather than moral or legal grounds, [Eqbal Ahmad] questioned whether armed struggle was the right course of action against the PLO’s particular adversary, Israel. He argued that given the course of Jewish history, especially in the twentieth century, the use of force only strengthened a preexisting and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it unified Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism, and bolstered the support of external actors. This was in distinction to Algeria, where the FLN’s use of violence (including women using “baskets to carry bombs, which have taken so many innocent lives” in the accusatory words of a French interrogator in the 1966 Gillo Pontecorvo film The Battle of Algiers) ultimately succeeded in dividing French society and eroding its support for the colonial project. Ahmad’s critique was profound and devastating, and not welcomed by the PLO’s leaders, who still publicly proclaimed a devotion to armed struggle even as they were moving away from it in practice.