The first major thought yielded by Gershom Gorenberg's lengthy essay, "The Missing Mahatma: Searching for a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King in the West Bank," which appears as the cover story in the current Weekly Standard, is, roughly speaking, this: What in the hell is the Israel correspondent for the liberal American Prospect doing writing for the flagship journal of neoconservatism? This unlikely alliance will have many a greybeard progressive inquiring if yet another comrade has defected to the right after repeated muggings (or Grad missile bombings) of reality. But as if to preempt any feverish speculation, Gorenberg reassures readers at his South Jerusalem blog:
The reasons the essay appeared there have everything to do with boring technicalities of publishing schedules and magazine staffing, and nothing to do with politics. Suffice it to say the WS was absolutely respectful of my perspective and writing.
Which is about where the Imperial March procession led by a black helmeted Bill Kristol should give way to a cool realization for progressives. The Weekly Standard has always approached the Arab-Israeli conflict with a level of complexity and sophistication that one won't find in, say, The Nation, or even The New Republic during stormier news cycles. (The prominent Middle East analyst Martin Kramer has always maintained that his skepticism of Arab democracy is what keeps him from buying into the neocon kit and kaboodle; remember this the next time you hear the label affixed to "Likudnik" by some beetle-browed and frenzied contributor to The American Conservative.) It's also important that a writer like Gorenberg receive a high-visibility perch among the brainier members of Obama's loyal opposition. If there is to be any movement toward a two state solution in the Levant, what are the odds that the Wolfowitzes and Perles will not have a say in how it plays out?
Journalistic meta-narratives aside, Gorenberg's essay is wholly rewarding. He starts out by projecting one of his own fantasies of an MLK- or Gandhi-like figure who might emerge from the Occupied Territories to gallantly face down the guns of the IDF and Hamas alike, by means of pacifist civil disobedience. Gorenberg's own imago is man he calls Sheikh Nasser a-Din al-Masri, who will lead a crowd of 20,000 southward from Ramallah in 2012 to try and pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He and his cohort will be dispersed by tear gas canisters and rubber bullets, but they will carry on, undaunted. The fantasy concludes with this parting-of-the-waters moment:
Early on the third morning, a Friday, the Israeli cabinet met. Afterward, the brigade commander got orders to let the march proceed. Trucks arrived with food. Al-Masri's followers lifted him onto a stretcher. At Qalandiya checkpoint, where the road passed through the Israeli security wall around Jerusalem, soldiers stood aside, watching the procession pour into the city. It reached Al-Aqsa in time for the sheikh to speak at noon prayers. News websites reported that the Israeli prime minister would address his nation before Sabbath began at sundown, amid rumors he would offer to meet the wounded sheikh to begin negotiations.
In fact, there is a real-life counterpart to al-Masri, a man of enormous humanity and ambition, but too little charisma and luck, called Mubarak Awad. One American scholar of the region said Awad was the "uniquely influential midwife of a nonviolent revolt," and the depressing events of the last decade or so attest to why he's not a household name. Inspired by unpopular ideas (if only because they are non-Muslim ideas; like many notable defenders of Palestinian self-determination, from Edward Said to Rashid Khalidi, Awad is a Christian), his pilgrim's progress is modest but effective: Awad gains a smallish following, unnerves the PLO, and is ultimately blocked by then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's decision to expel him from his home in East Jerusalem just as the First Intifada kicks off.
The closest historical event to the grand idyll Gorenberg envisions came in the mid-80s:
An old man came asking for help in getting back several acres of his village's land, fenced off by the neighboring Israeli settlement of Tekoa, east of Bethlehem. Awad recalls, "He said, 'You told us that if we are not afraid, anything is possible.' I said, 'Oh my God, did I say that?' " Awad thought of himself as an educator. For someone to act on what he said terrified him. Still, he agreed to lead the villagers in taking down the fence, if they agreed not to bring guns or throw stones and not to run away even if shot at or arrested.
By one account, 300 people showed up, confronting armed settlers. "We refused to run. We turned numb. We were hugging each other," Awad says, recalling the strange ecstasy of the moment. The military governor arrived--and allowed the Palestinians to remove the fence.
The remainder of the essay is devoted to the history (and historiography) of the two intifadas. Gorenberg also examines the competitive arguments of how a national resistance movement should work -- what's the difference between unarmed and non-violent struggles? -- to better understand why a viable one so far hasn't.
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