The Worm in the Apple of the Zionist Project

In the mid-1980's, an Israeli journalist by the name of Yoram Binur took an assignment in which he posed for six months as a Palestinian laborer in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. A committed Zionist, he suddenly found himself on the receiving end of the bigoted cruelties with which his fellow Israelis routinely treat Palestinians. The following reflections on sumud are excerpted from his essay, "Palestinian Like Me."

"Before one can speak of the intifada, as the Palestinians call the current uprising, one must first understand how the Palestinians have coped with life under the Israeli occupation up to this point. The key concept in this respect is sumud, which means "sticking with it," "staying put," "holding fast" to one's objectives and to the land--in a word, survival. Sumud is an attitude, a philosophy, and a way of life. It maintains that one must carry on in a normal and undisturbed fashion, as much as possible. Compared with organized civil disobedience, or passive resistance as preached by Gandhi, sumud is a more basic form of resistance growing out of the idea that merely to exist, to survive, and to remain on one's land is an act of defiance--especially when deportation is the one thing Palestinians fear most.

Although sumud is essentially passive by nature, it has a more active aspect, consisting of gestures that underscore the difference between surviving under difficult conditions and accepting them..."

Binur recounted conversations he had with Palestinian workers who described for him the subtle means by which they attempted to undermine the productivity of their occupiers: the very "weapons of the weak" that Jim Scott has chronicled in his scholarship and that are described in slave histories of the antebellum American south.

Those who undertake occupation and a position of dominance over other human beings--on whatever basis (be it racial, religious, ideological or statist)--can only succeed (short of mass deportations and/or extermination) if the occupied and dominated accept their assigned roles, i.e., adopt a stance that Etienne de la Boetie (d. 1563) rightly named "the politics of obedience" and the "discourse of voluntary servitude." To do so, however, is to accept de-humanization. Some human beings can be counted upon to do so, but many cannot. But even if the many could be depended upon for such compliance, the occupiers and dominant ought to consider the effect upon themselves and upon the society they wish to create of reducing others in their midst to such a condition.

This is the worm in the apple of the Zionist project--planted, as it is, in the Palestinian olive grove.