Understanding Peace Amidst Political Violence

This is a great post above speaks to where we are politically at this moment in time. There’s only one paragraph I have issue with:

The only way forward is peace – and that means negotiations with the people who we’ve seen doing and saying evil things.

If you think Israel continuously saying “let’s bomb our way to peace” is stupid, remember that cuts both ways. I know this will be ill-received but if you’re arguing for more violence, just on the other side, understand that violence is its own excuse, its own exculpation for more violence. 

Israel constantly justifies the violence it does with dire warnings of violence against itself and we know it’s nonsense- it’s also true both ways.

I can’t reiterate enough that Israel is the massive, overpowered, overfunded occupying force and I know this. I also know that calling for more death, more murder instead of peace, peace and peace will just keep giving the rationale for more violence. If your goal is not peace and the restoration of justice, the protection of life and the defeat of radicalism, we do not align.

But it doesnt “cut both ways.” I can’t help but think of the words of Paulo Freire in “Pedagogy of The Oppressed”:

For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call “the oppressed” but — depending on whether they are fellow countrymen or not — “those people” or “the blind and envious masses” or “savages” or “natives” or “subversives”) who are disaffected, who are “violent,” “barbaric,” “wicked,” or “ferocious” when they react to the violence of the oppressors.

Yet it is — paradoxical though it may seem — precisely in the response of the oppressed to the violence of their oppressors that a gesture of love may be found. Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in theexercise of oppression.

and:

Resolution of the oppressor-oppressed contradiction indeed implies the disappearance of the oppressors as a dominant class. However, the
restraints imposed by the former oppressed on their oppressors, so that the latter cannot reassume their former position, do not constitute oppression. An act is oppressive only when it prevents people from being more fully human. Accordingly, these necessary restraints do not in themselves signify that yesterday’s oppressed have become today’s oppressors. Acts which prevent the restoration of the oppressive regime cannot be compared with those which create and maintain it, cannot be compared with those by which a few men and women deny the majority the right to be human.

When we’re talking about “peace” what are we actually talking about? Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the difference between a negative and a positive peace.

But peace is not merely the absence of this tension, but the presence of justice.

Dr King used non-violence as a political tactic in the fight for civil rights. But that is a tactic that has been neutered by the state. The tactics used by the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the USA would be considered illegal today. Boycotting Israel (BDS) is considered anti-Semitic and is illegal in much of the United States. In the United Kingdom the Public Order Bill does much the same thing in terms of protest tactics.

People in the USA peacefully protested the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd and were met with police violence and state intimidation. In Palestine, there was a peaceful movement called “The Great March of Return” and it resulted in:

If someone has their boot on your neck, non-violence isn’t a rational option. Yelling “PEACE, PEACE, PEACE” while underneath the boot doesn’t achieve peace, in the same way that yelling “WATER, WATER, WATER, at a flower doesn’t help it grow.