Naim Ateek: A History of Nonviolence

Naim Ateek had just turned 11 when forces of the Haganah, the pre-Israel Zionist paramilitary organization, occupied his village of Beisan in Palestine. Days later, the villagers were informed that they were to be “evacuated,” forcibly moved off land that Palestine’s Jewish minority now claimed for its own state. Ordered to gather in the village center, the Ateeks took what they could carry, and joined the other frightened families, all clutching heirlooms, photographs, jewelry, and awaiting an uncertain future, away from the homes in and lands on which their families had lived for generations.

It is perhaps surprising then, that even after this experience of forcible dispossession, and even after the shock of the 1967 war, in which thousands more Palestinians were displaced and the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem came under military occupation, even after years of witnessing and enduring brutality at the hands of Israeli soldiers and settlers, Ateek has been a constant advocate of nonviolence as the only course for Palestinian independence. A parish minister to Palestine’s small Christian community since 1966, Ateek founded the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in 1989 for the purpose of developing a theology to help Palestinians cope with and overcome the daily oppression and injustice they continue to endure as a subject population under military occupation.

Though he advocates nonviolence as “the only option, and the only strategy,” Ateek does not shrink from making extremely trenchant criticisms of Israel’s policies. Which is why a late October conference at Boston’s Old South Church, featuring Ateek, was provocatively titled, “The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel.” Underscoring the apartheid parallel, the keynote speaker for the conference was Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape Town and one of the guiding spirits of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

While Tutu was lauded universally for his moral and prophetic voice against the South African government’s policies, he has been denigrated for suggesting a similarity between South African apartheid and the Israeli occupation and colonization of the West Bank. Similarly, despite Ateek’s commitment to nonviolence and reconciliation, he has been denounced as an anti-Semite and a terrorist-sympathizer for insisting that Palestinians have a right to reject and resist a system that severely proscribes all aspects of Palestinian life, while at the same time privileging the rights of Israeli settlers and facilitating their takeover of Palestinian lands, a system which Ateek and the organizers of the North American Friends of Sabeel conference hold is very much like apartheid.Many scholars, including many Israeli scholars, have for years been using the apartheid framework to understand Israel’s policies toward Palestinians in the occupied territories. As UCLA professor Saree Makdisi points out, there are, in fact, “two separate legal and administrative systems, maintained by the regular use of military force, for two populations — settlers and natives — unequally inhabiting the same piece of land.” Furthermore, when people like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu insist that the apartheid comparison is appropriate, one listens.

To read the full article from The American Prospect, click on:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=a_history_of_nonviolence