T

he vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaged in Gandhian nonviolent resistance. (Rachel Corrie, 2003; 2008)

If Barrack Obama and other influential Western leaders were exposed to two videos — the first showing a bleeding and paralyzed Palestinian infant and the next a paralyzed and bleeding Israeli child — what would their reaction be?

On a plain humanist basis, they surely will say that both deserve equal medical and psychological treatment. But politically, or more precisely for security and economic reasons, leaders will think twice before acting upon the same
philosophy.

Through this double-standard, conscience is mediated by circumstance. “For the sake of our closest ally,” a Western leader might say, “we will do whatever it takes.” What that means is that “the other” can be sacrificed and humanism thrown in the trash.

We cannot unequally support one side and blame the other. The innocent Israelis have a powerful martial force to provide them with more than enough firepower in a catastrophically long war.

What do the Palestinians have, other than the remnants of petrodollars from the rich Arab countries, sympathy from true humanists and the prayers of the Palestinian diaspora?

Yet, we are not proposing “a counsel of despair”, marketing Palestinians’ suffering to get sympathy or help.

This is a challenge to show the injustice in Palestine, where even a tiny piece of a vast land is not to be granted to its natives because of a tragic historical opera.

Dubious interpretation of a holy book is justification to occupy a land, bit by bit, after a masterpiece of imperial alchemy more than a half of century ago.

This is not an anti-Israel or anti-America appeal to make people rise against a legal, political sovereignty. It is a questioning. What actually makes a nation deserve land and independence?

Charity from the powerful? Inheritance from ancestors? Superpower decrees?

Now, with the ideology of war cemented for generations in the minds of Palestinians through their unimaginably painful experiences, how can we fairly interpret their acts? When killing is accepted as an honor, can we not now see that there is more of problem than just classically defined terrorism — one-size-fits-all orientalism and anti-Semitism by Hamas or other
militant groups?

How many more generations of Palestinians will internalize the ideology that Israelis and their allies are enemies who must be hated and killed?

Can the world not now think more positively and the wounded infants and children given a land blessed by amnesia of what happened to their native soil and ancestors?

Palestinians using guns and missiles to defend themselves and attack their oppressors are oblivious to non-violent intifada as their best choice.

Rachel Corrie was right: Mahatma Gandhi’s path to liberate India was incomparable. Choosing that path would have made the world look at Palestine with a different perspective.

Nuclear weapons allegedly produced by Iran or promises from other countries to provide armaments will never match the power of developed Western countries. Besides, believing “violence” to be the utmost vehicle for true independence will only multiply wounds and casualties. Nationalism, or more precisely patriotism, should be more contextual.

If living in a diaspora is a better choice, and since the world has become a borderless global village, why should this alternative not be taken? A few euros for tax and other costs of living in a foreign country is nothing compared to the future of children living under showers of bullets.

To my Indonesian fellows, humanism is surely much better than blind religious sentiment as the reason to offer aid. The ideal jihad is to build hospitals and schools, not donate rupiah for weapons or sacrifice lives for shallow ideology.

It has been more than a year since I hung a Rachel Corrie’s poem on the wall of the school where I work to inspire sixth graders to write in English. She was a fifth grader when she wrote, “I am here for other children; I am here because I care; I am here because children everywhere are suffering…”

Most Palestinian children now depend on charity since their parents cannot cultivate the land. They have been molded by the powerful to live like beggars in dark bunkers, not because they lack dignity, but because they were born without the power to choose their own destiny.

The writer is a researcher at the Paramadina Foundation and the Ciputat School for Democratic Islam.