Enjoy? Or something?  Cross-posted from Mon­doweiss. Here is Taylor flailing in response. It is sad.

At Mon­doweiss and elsewhere, a dis­cus­sion about “violence” versus “non-violence” has been taking place over the past month-or-so, since the massacre aboard the Mavi Marmara, reveal­ingly joined recently by Nicholas Kristof. In the face of empirical and ethical decon­struc­tions of the argument for “prin­ci­pled” non-violence for Pales­tini­ans and the total abne­ga­tion of force by sol­i­dar­ity activists, Matthew Taylor has offered a lengthy rejoinder re-stating his case for the moral, ethical, and pragmatic efficacy of Pales­tin­ian non-violence. Taylor begins by defining “violence,” goes on to re-assert the utility of Gandhi, accuses me of mis-understanding Gandhi, condemns Pales­tin­ian violence, and moves on to a How-To Guide for the Pales­tin­ian Resistance.

Here’s Taylor defining “non-violence”:

Non­vi­o­lence is a powerful method to harmonize rela­tion­ships among people (and all living things) for the estab­lish­ment of justice and the ultimate well-being of all parties. It draws its power from awareness of the profound truth to which the wisdom tra­di­tions of all cultures, science, and common expe­ri­ence bear witness: that all life is one.

If we can’t define “non-violence” and “violence,” we can’t discuss them. Is the above a def­i­n­i­tion or non-sensical babble? The latter. No def­i­n­i­tion, no dis­cus­sion. Earlier, I suggested that it is not so simple to define “non-violence” and “violence,” a sug­ges­tion that the gob­bledy­gook above inad­ver­tently confirms. Try a very quick thought exper­i­ment. I am in a room with a man holding a gun to my head. I have a stick in my hand with a spike in it. There is another person in that room. If I refuse to use force against that man by hitting him—possibly lethally—with my stick, he will kill me, then kill the other person. If I kill him, I will save the other person and myself. What kind of “non-violence” causes excess violent deaths and redounds to violence? The theorist raises his hand, quavering: “There are excep­tions!” Of course there are. Otherwise the tension between theory and ethics would simply rip the argu­men­ta­tive fabric apart. Academic non-violence theory provides for excep­tions in the case of sudden and over­whelm­ing force. More col­lo­qui­ally, self-defense, taking its cue from common sense and inter­na­tional law. What “prin­ci­pled non-violence” mainly means in practice is the refusal to use bodily-harming force except when con­fronted with a deadly threat against which there is no other way to resist.

That exception makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the principle—building an ethical and moral firewall between a per­mis­si­ble exception for self-defense in the face of immediate, corporeal danger and an exception for self-defense against the struc­tural violence of colo­nial­ism, occu­pa­tion, or cap­i­tal­ism. Espe­cially, this does not make sense when the goal is the min­i­miza­tion of human suffering. The dif­fer­ence is essen­tially aesthetic—there’s no ready-to-hand alter­na­tive to violence in self-defense when the threat is manifest and present, despite the theorist’s aesthetic pref­er­ence for militant non-violent practice, the inverse of fascist war-fetishizing. Despite the abstract grace of the theory, it needs an exception to shoehorn it into reality.

Continue reading I am done with Matt Taylor. we now return to normal operating hours

Tech­no­rati Tags: Hasbara, Israel, liberal Zionism, Matthew Taylor, Palestine, resis­tance movements, Zionism