Passive route to peace is alien to Arafat

Yasser Arafat continued his defiant pledge to become a martyr in the cause of Palestine last night. Trapped in his office with candles for light and little food his only protection from an Israeli bullet was a thin well-meaning line of peace activists acting as human shields.

The fact that the veteran guerrilla leader has not been captured and exiled, or killed, owes more to the efforts of foreign, and at least one Israeli, activists than the efforts of his bodyguards or the "restraint" of Ariel Sharon's military machine. It is probably too late for the Palestinian leader to learn any lessons from a group of hippies two generations younger than he is.

But as Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Qalkilya, Salfeet and other Palestinian towns have been swallowed up by the Israeli army and scores of Palestinians killed, it is clear that whatever strategy of violence Mr Arafat had for the liberation of his homeland it has not worked. So, why did he never try non-violence?

By now it is clear that the Israeli armed forces have no idea how to deal with passive resistance. Since Sharon ordered his troops into the West Bank a little over a week ago, about a dozen peace campaigners, including one Briton, have been wounded by his troops using live ammunition for crowd dispersal. Only yesterday a group of foreigners and Israelis were clubbed and tear gassed as they tried to bring supplies to the besieged city of Ramallah. These scenes have made the Israelis look brutal and stupid.

Non-violent protest was tried in March last year. But groups of "shebab", local thugs believed to be under the command of Mr Arafat's Fatah organisation, could not resist chucking rocks at Israeli troops on the road to Bir Zeit University. Protesters lead by Hannan Ashrawi, the Palestinian's most effective spokesperson, attempted to clear a road block. The result was rubber bullets and tear gas.

Three decades of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have fuelled a "culture of the gun", said Eyad Serraj, a leading Palestinian human rights activist and chief psychiatrist at Gaza's Mental Health Community Centre.

He said: "If a child sees his father forced to strip and humiliated every day at Israeli checkpoints then he is bound to ask: 'Where is your gun?'. With every generation, violence looks more and more like the only solution."

But this is only part of the explanation as to why "mass action", so successful in South Africa, where mine workers could bring the country to a standstill, and in India where Mahatma Gandhi defied the British Empire, has never taken root among the Palestinians.

A leading Palestinian academic said: "Arafat never liked the idea of non-violence because he could not control it. Mass action, lying in the street and taking a beating, requires huge numbers of people. It is a very democratic means of fighting oppression and very empowering. When you combine the two, autocratic leaders, even of the oppressed, feel threatened and in danger of accountability."

It was also tried in 1992 in the mainly Christian Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jala, where locals remember bitterly that pressure from Arafat's Fatah was the main reason they gave up a strike against payment of local taxes.

After the 11 September atrocities last year Bassem Eid, a veteran human rights campaigner, renewed calls for non-violence. He wrote: "I believe that the violent path chosen by Palestinians in the al-Aqsa intifada has failed. This violence achieved little beyond an overwhelming Israeli military response, and the Palestinians, who have no means to win a military victory, pay a very high price in the confrontation. The use of firearms by Palestinians clouds the issue and provides the Israelis and their foreign sympathisers with a means of justifying the disproportionat e 'response' of the Israeli military.

"Non-violent resistance is the best possible means of ending the current deadlock - one that requires as much bravery and heroism as any armed operation."

But non-violence never got off the ground. "It's difficult to conceive that at his age and with his experience, Arafat will suddenly turn to non-violent action," said Dr Serraj, who last year wrote to Mr Arafat proposing that he adopt the slogan: "We don't need guns, we need freedom."

Mr Arafat didn't reply. Now that the Israelis and Palestinians are in a state of war, the voices once raised for nonviolence have been muted or silenced.

Mr Eid said yesterday: "I'm sitting at home on my hands while the Palestinian people don't have any water or bread and tens of people are being killed every day. This is not the time to talk about peace and non-violence."

The solution? "Foreign intervention. We've been calling for peacekeepers for months," said Dr Ashrawi.

Mr Eid added: "Only by separating the two sides can there be any hope for the beginning of a nonviolent age."