Hussain Abdul-Hussain: As Non-Violence Takes Root, So May a Palestinian State

Finally. I've been arguing for sometime that the Palestinians should adopt non-violent, civil disobedience to achieve their goal of creating their own State. Hopefully they will finally get the message:

Palestinians, hard-headed realists that they are, have never much bought the idea of non-violence. The state of Israel was partly born out of violence and has been sustained mainly through violence. Turning the other cheek to people whose anatomical focus was your knees - and keeping you on them - never seemed especially wise, let alone effective.

This might now be changing. The "growing non-violent movement among Palestinians is simultaneously emerging spontaneously from the grassroots and being encouraged by the leadership," Ziad Asali, the president of the American Task Force for Palestine (ATFP), wrote recently in the Guardian newspaper in the UK.

The question is why after so much suffering and the spilling of so much blood, non-violence seems to be catching on. One answer is simply that it has taken Palestinians this long to recognise the futility of using violence against a population determined after the Holocaust to never be so victimised by violence again.