Nonviolence, Part II

Some Historical Notes"

by Ray Helmick, S.J.

In 19th-century Ireland the idea grew, among activists for Irish independence, that politics got you nowhere. Every political effort to overcome British control of the country had come to grief, and no other means remained, it seemed, but violent resistance. From this came Irish Republicanism's traditionally exclusive reliance on physical force.

What the Republicans failed to recognize was that their every violent uprising had just as spectacularly come to grief. Yet in the mid-19th century Daniel O'Connell had provided the world one of its first lessons in the effectiveness of organized non-violent resistance. The peaceful mass demonstrations he mobilized frightened the British power-holders more than any of the violent uprisings they had ever faced in Ireland. They made it their task to get O'Connell himself so alarmed at his own success that he called off what would have been the largest of his massive rallies, at Clontarf in 1843. The steam went out of his movement and Irish resistance lost track, for the next century and a half, of the near-success it had achieved by this novel strategy. O'Connell's struggle, largely forgotten in Ireland, became instead a model for the work of Gandhi in the 20th century.

This experience was repeated when, in 1987, the first Palestinian intifada, with its relative non-violence (stones, no guns or bombs, facing the full power of modern armed forces), had such tremendous success. Government again recognized its effectiveness and made its suppression a major objective. The powerful peace forces in Israel found they could support and endorse this Palestinian effort, seeing that their protest was not against Israel but simply against occupation. That made it in fact an actual recognition and acceptance of Israel, affirmed by the protesting population as a whole. They made their bid to live peacefully alongside Israel in a state of their own.

Palestinian fortunes, and Israel's opportunities for peace, declined when this popular mobilization was abandoned as part of the Oslo arrangements. Oslo achieved something unheard of before, that these two peoples freely and formally acknowledged one another's legitimacy as peoples endowed with rights, a recognition that had eluded them for the many decades of their conflict. That should have provided the basis for negotiating the end of their quarrel. But the abandonment of their popular mobilization left Palestinians powerless, over the Oslo years, to negotiate effectively. Their growing frustration, as they saw increasing loss of their territory, their homes, their freedom, their economy, all they had during the Oslo years led eventually to the violence, from both sides, of the second intifada, which came to threaten even that mutual recognition of one another by the peoples that had been the significant achievement of Oslo.

This actual history of the Middle East conflict in recent years gives us the clearest demonstration we could seek of the values of mobilized non-violent action in addressing the realities of the present.

Read Part 1 of this overview: Healing the Spirit with "Soul Force" by Julie Oxenberg