An explosive, dangerous balance

[Violet_Crumble]

By Meron Benvenisti

It is hard to say who was responsible for fueling the recent uproar over warnings that Palestinian protesters would try to break through the borders and checkpoints of the Gaza Strip. Was it the defense establishment, or perhaps the media? In any case, the hysteria-mongers succeeded all too well, for the mountain became a molehill. The artillery batteries and thousands of Israeli soldiers who stood before a few thousand Palestinian children turned the Israeli response into a fiasco.

Of course, it was impossible to admit afterward that the defense minister and military chiefs had panicked. They spent hours debating how to thwart the danger of a Palestinian march and what would be the appropriate response if the marchers broke through the fence, which apparently they never planned to do. Predictably, army officials claimed later that the massive military preparations prevented the Palestinians from attempting such a clash. The Palestinians, meanwhile, boasted that a mere false warning was enough to exhaust the Israeli army.

The tempest that never was disappeared quickly, but those involved are
convinced that it was merely a practice run for an event that will occur in the near future  because a clash between the Israel Defense Forces and an unarmed Palestinian crowd is inevitable.

This feeling has haunted Israelis since the mid-1950s. The nightmare in which "refugees march in droves to their abandoned homes" has been expressed in quite a few literary works, and it came up as a realistic prediction in the scenarios for which the IDF has prepared several times since 1967. This scenario frightens the army more than a violent conflict with armed Palestinians.

Israelis are used to the Palestinians being either violent or docile;
nonviolent resistance creates a serious dilemma. A forceful response leading to unarmed casualties, among them women and children, will play into the enemy's hands. More than the army fears bad press and international criticism, it is concerned that the solidarity of the Israeli public and its support for the security forces might splinter if parts of the public protest against the excessive use of force and come to doubt the IDF's commitment to its own ethical code, its famous "purity of arms."

The fear that nonviolent protest will take root among the Palestinians has accompanied the conflict for many years, and the response of the Israeli authorities to nonviolent protest has been no less severe than their reaction to violent acts. We can recall the fury with which Mubarak Awad was treated during the 1980s, when he tried to organize a group of Gandhi-style passive protesters.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959550.html