Mondoweiss: ‘NYT’ distorts history of nonviolent resistance

Mondoweiss: ‘NYT’ distorts history of nonviolent resistance

by Alex Kane

On the front page of the New York Times today, there is a large photo of West Bank Palestinians planting trees, "part of a new, nonviolent approach to assert their land claims," as Times correspondent Ethan Bronner says. While it’s good that the Times is covering nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation, it’s an article rife with omissions, mischaracterizations and distortions, all par for the course from the Times when it comes to Israel/Palestine. Let’s take this opportunity to remind people about the history of nonviolence in the Palestinian movement, a history that has been systematically shut out of mainstream discourse.

The photo caption, and the title of the piece, which is "Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance," give a preview of the direction the article heads in. In Bronner’s reporting, we’re told that the Palestinians are simply "trying" this "new" way to resist, when in fact Palestinians have been nonviolently resisting Zionist colonization even before the State of Israel was founded, and well after. The 1936-1939 revolt against British colonial rule and Zionist colonization began with a "six-month general strike" that involved "work-stoppages and boycotts of the British-and Zionist-controlled parts of the economy" and was the "largest anticolonial strike of its kind until that point in history, and perhaps the longest ever," as Rashid Khalidi writes on page 106 in The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. The revolt did have an armed component, though, that followed the general strike.

Continued. . .