Palestinian intellectual Iyad Sarraj, whose calls for a "peaceful intifada" have gone unheeded for months, now hopes to become a leading voice following the truce with Israel agreed after the US terror attacks.
In December 2000, as the various Palestinian movements were choosing the path of armed struggle, this psychiatrist who founded the Gaza Community Mental Health Program in 1990 started to call for a non-violent uprising.
He admits that his suggestion triggered "a lot of opposition".
"People believe you have to fight, to spill blood ... to avenge humiliation and defeat," says Sarraj, who criticizes what he describes as a "tribal mentality" within the Palestinians.
"They [the Palestinian people] see giving up arms as if they are giving up their rights," he adds.
According to Sarraj, the shockwave of the spectacular airborne onslaught on New York and Washington, which forced a fragile truce agreement on Israel and the Palestinians, could lead the intifada to return to its true origins and do away with practices such as the assassination of "collaborators" with the Jewish state.
Sarraj says that the "cease-fire on all fronts" declared on September 18 by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is the "first real chance" of finding a way out of the spiral of violence, and also of shaking off some of the prejudice of Palestinian public opinion, which had so far considered him as a marginal figure.
"Unlike the first intifada [1987-1993], this one is completely armed," he says, rejecting the idea that Palestinians had no choice but to spread death to the other camp, after having lost so many "martyrs".
"Even if you kill 1,000 Israelis, so what? Is our aim to kill and die, or to win?" Sarraj asks angrily. "I don't think violence brings us closer to our goal."
"The moment that we started to shoot was a tragic mistake," he says, explaining that the "Israeli peace camp has been shattered by Palestinian bullets."
Sarraj argues that it was this violence which carried the hard-liner Ariel Sharon to a crushing victory in the February election for Israeli prime minister.
"Our strongest support should be Jews in America and the peace camp in Israel because they want to rescue Israel," he says.
"It takes the actions of people going out to challenge the Israeli troops without even stones," says Sarraj.
He proposes "conferences, sit-ins, demonstrations, surrounding [Jewish] settlements, meeting soldiers who refuse to serve in the army of occupation," and various such isolated initiatives," some of which have taken place, mainly in the West Bank.
"If we blocked by human bodies -- American, Israeli and Palestinian -- the road to one settlement, it would expose the situation to the world," suggests Sarraj, an advocate of a "human intifada."
"Especially with Sharon in power the contrast will become so clear to the whole world," he insists. "Everybody knows what the end will be: there will be a Palestinian state."
"People go from a state of helplessness to asking for revenge, sometimes in the same sitting," says the psychiatrist.
"As Muslims we are obliged to Jihad [holy war], but struggle doesn't exclude non-violent struggle.
"The biggest jihad is the one within yourself," says Sarraj, a refugee from Beersheba in southern Israel who experienced the trauma of being uprooted on the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 when he was only four -- GAZA CITY (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
