Gazan Follows in Gandhi’s Footsteps

GAZA CITY —  Eyad Sarraj, a well-known psychiatrist and outspoken Gazan activist, has a revolutionary idea that flies in the face of the armed struggle consuming Palestinians these days: Leave the guns and stones at home. Challenge Israeli forces with flowers and candles. The current uprising is simply not working.

In newspaper columns and on his Web site, Sarraj has emerged as a rare voice advocating nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation. Sounding more Gandhian than Gazan, he blames political leaders without vision and religious imams who promote revenge for trapping Palestinians in “a culture of violence,” unable to shed what he sees as the shackles of Israeli repression.

Sarraj maintains that a legitimate struggle for independence and statehood is being undercut by extremist tactics. The violence has backfired, causing Israelis to “recoil” from peace talks and ushering hard-liner Ariel Sharon into power.

This is treacherous talk these days. Especially here, and especially after more than five months of revolt in which more than 400 people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed.

The impoverished, seething Gaza Strip is today full of people who are increasingly bitter, radicalized and militarized. Palestinian militias and Israeli forces shoot it out on a daily basis. Palestinians use mortars and roadside bombs to attack Jewish settlements; Israelis cut down Palestinian orchards and demolish homes.

But Sarraj, a longtime critic of the ruling Palestinian Authority and an iconoclastic champion of human rights, is determined. And a few people are starting to take notice.

“We need a popular movement to break the cycle of violence,” Sarraj said in an interview in his offices at the Gaza Community Mental Health clinic, which he founded. “Our society is conditioned to respond with violence. Violence brings more violence, and will for generations. We need a breakthrough.”

Sarraj said he will name the new movement Justice Now, a clear allusion to Peace Now, Israel’s venerable organization dedicated to peace activism, which is going through rough times after the collapse of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Building a peace movement among Palestinians will strengthen its Israeli counterpart, Sarraj argues.

As farfetched as Sarraj’s proposition may seem, it echoes a shift--still tentative and largely unspoken--in thinking in some Palestinian circles and poses these questions: Exactly where is the uprising, or intifada, going and what is it achieving?

“The intifada here is dead,” Sarraj said. The popular uprising has degenerated into a shooting mini-war; on top of it, Palestinian factions are fighting among themselves and clannish scores are being settled, quite unrelated to any nationalist cause.

“What we need is an urgent call for all forms of shooting and killing to stop,” Sarraj said. “The leaders are not doing it. We need the masses to do it. . . . We need a Palestinian Gandhi.”

Critics see Sarraj as naive at best, a dangerous subversive at worst. “Peace” means “surrender” for many Palestinians.

The Palestinian movement has not had much success with nonviolent resistance. During the first intifada, 1987-93, civil disobedience campaigns such as tax revolts and boycotts of Israeli products were stamped out by Israeli authorities or the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The best-known nonviolence guru, Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian Christian, was deported by Israel in 1988 despite international outcry.

Still, Sarraj soldiers on, hoping to recruit converts to his cause. Revenge, he says, is the corrosive element destroying both Palestinian and Israeli societies, not to mention the prospects for peace between them.

“You slap me, and I slap you,” he said. “You try to kill me, and I will try to kill you. Or, if I can’t, I will wait until your children grow up and then I’ll kill them.”

Sarraj believes that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat does not really want peace with Israel because it would take away the “common enemy” against which public outrage can be directed. Both the Palestinians and the Israelis lack courageous leaders who have the vision to make peace, Sarraj asserts.

“We need to win the hearts of Israel and instead we continue to give a double message--that we can wage peace and war at the same time,” he said. “Israelis cannot trust Palestinians anymore.”

Israelis have been guilty of some of the same doublespeak, he said.

Dressed in a beret and scarf, Sarraj, 55, cuts an odd figure in Gaza. He knows that his mission is quixotic. And he is accustomed to being the thorn in the side of Palestinian and Israeli leadership. He was repeatedly jailed or taken in for questioning, first by Israeli authorities when they controlled Gaza and later by Arafat’s police that took charge in 1994.

He was jailed for 17 days in 1996 for condemning Arafat as a corrupt dictator. Sarraj was released only after intense international pressure--and after jailhouse beatings that left him with a ruptured disk.

In 1991, when Arafat and the Palestinians sided with Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, Sarraj was opposed. Only his psychiatric patients agreed with him then, he joked.

Sarraj unveiled his idea for nonviolent resistance in a newspaper column titled “Bare Chests,” which advocated facing Israeli troops unarmed. He posted it on his Web site, https://www.gcmhp.net. E-mail responses from the curious and interested began trickling in.

Heidi Arraf, a 25-year-old Palestinian American who lives in East Jerusalem, was sorting through her own e-mail at 3 a.m. recently when she came across Sarraj’s column. It struck a chord with Arraf. The young peace activist, who quotes the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has been trying to convince her friends that “the nature of the struggle” must change.

“I wouldn’t tell any Palestinian that he doesn’t have the right to throw stones,” Arraf said. “But this intifada is not going anywhere.”

Still, she said her increasingly angry and frustrated friends find Sarraj’s ideas hard to swallow.

“A lot of people think: Hey, great idea, but it will never work.”