Jeff Halper, a nominee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, compares Hamas to Mohandas Gandhi with a weak caveat. He writes in the Toronto Star:
Gandhi put it best: “How can one be compelled to accept slavery? I simply refuse to do the master’s bidding. He may torture me, break my bones to atoms and even kill me. He will then have my dead body, not my obedience. Ultimately, therefore, it is I who am the victor …, for he has failed in getting me to do what he wanted done …. The roots of non-co-operation lie not in hatred but in justice.”
This is not to equate Hamas with Gandhi, but merely to point out that non-co-operation, a powerful means of non-violent resistance, arises when the oppressed have no other avenues to achieve their freedom.
The international community, the U.S., Israel and, yes, Fatah, have closed all avenues to the Palestinians. They carry the “blame” for the rise of Hamas. Palestinians have simply said: “To hell with all of you!”
It’s rather hard to take Halper seriously. First of all, he heads the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, which NGO-Monitor describes as “a well-funded blatantly political and ideological one-man NGO, which couches its radical anti-Israel agenda and demonization in the rhetoric of human rights.” And secondly, till now, Halper never indicated any concern for Fatah corruption all the years it ran the PA.
Will Halper ever earn the title, Nobel Peace Laureate? One of the great ironies of Nobel history is that Gandhi never won the prize, while Yasser Arafat did.
