Helena Cobban analyzes non-violent mass actions in Gaza and Lebanon.
This is one of the many things I love about nonviolent mass action: It involves all members of society, not just the guys! Indeed, to be effective, it really needs to do so.
Back in 2006, I wrote quite a bit about the increasingly important political role being played by Hamas's well-organized networks of women supporters. That became evident both in the very successful parliamentary election campaign that Hamas mounted in January of that year, and also in some of the new style of nonviolent mass public actions that we saw from the Hamas-organized women later in the year. See, e.g., these two JWN posts from November 2006: 1 and 2.
Too many people in the west-- and certainly, nearly the whole of the western MSM-- have taken at face value the accusations from Israel and the Bush administration about Hamas (and Hizbullah) being only terrorist organizations. But that view completely misunderstands, or willfully ignores, the deep roots both organizations have struck among their respective constituencies-- roots have been nurtured and sustained through many long years of actions in various fields of nonviolent activity, including a lot of social work and electoral/political organizing. But then, something new happened, it seems to me, when people involved in those kinds of fairly private nonviolent activities take their nonviolent organizing into the mass, open, public sphere and these actions demonstrated that they can have a huge, transformatory effect on the political scene.
One example from Lebanon was the partly organized, partly "spontaneous" mass return of south Lebanese villagers to their villages in the border zone in May 2000. The puppet-run "security zone" that the Israelis had previously maintained there just crumbled overnight.
Another example from Lebanon was the very similar-- partly organized, partly "spontaneous"-- mass return of south Lebanon's people to their homes, villages, and towns, on August 14, 2006, the very day the ceasefire went into effect. That human wave of people completely swept away any hopes the Israelis may have had that they and the UN could somehow "prevent" Hizbullah's people from re-establishing themselves in southern Lebanon-- because at that point, nearly all the people who returned were Hizbullah. And, as Ze'ev Schiff (RIP) noted at the time, possession of the battlefield at the time the shooting stops is the very definition of victory. (The IDF had sent in a ground force in those last 60 hours of the war-- after the completion of the negotiations for the ceasefire, indeed-- precisely with the aim of trying to control as much of the South Lebanon battlefield as possible by the time the ceasefire went into effect. At the purely military level, however, their plans went sorely awry; and on August 13 and 14 the surviving soldiers from their badly mauled invasion force slunk back south across the border in considerable disarray, holding onto no land at all.)
Hizbullah's women have also, certainly, been seen in quite a number of the party's public demonstrations and marches, some of them organized into disciplined and slightly militaristic-looking cohorts, and some not.
Hamas women, however, seem to have been developing an even more distinctive and potentially effective role for themselves. They have run in-- and in six cases, won-- parliamentary elections. And on numerous occasions over the years they have organized all-women demonstrations with a very pointed political intent. Most recently, on January 22, more than 1,000 Hamas-organized women from Gaza swarmed across the Rafah crossing into Egypt in an action designed to publicize the plight of their families as Israel tightened the screws of its siege of the Strip-- and also, perhaps, to test the reactions of the Egyptian security forces prior to the big bust-out across the border that was being planned for the following night.
I wrote about non-violence and Gaza in November 2006. I was pretty angry that day because Israel had shot down a group of Palestinian women protesting in the street. They were "protecting" military fighters holed up in a mosque so by Israeli reasoning, they were legitimate targets, although unarmed.
Note that Cobban refers to a non-violent action in Lebanon in 2000 - this was Arnoun. Woops, I didn't have my dates correct and wasn't reading carefully.
Another non-violent action in South Lebanon was the liberation of the village of Arnoun by a group of Lebanese students in early 1999. My mother was teaching at the American University of Beirut then - many of her students skipped class to go liberate this border village from Israeli and proxy occupiers. She wrote about it at the time and the piece still stands on the internet - the link is to her article.
