Youth And Revolution
The Beijing Spring and the Palestinian Intifadah
by Ali A. Mazrui
ed. note: On June 9, Professor Ali Mazrui spoke on "The Intifadah in Palestine and the Student Movement in China: A Preliminary Comparison." The talk was part of the 11th annual banquet of the Palestine Aid Society and was held at the First Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor. Donations were accepted at the door in order to raise money for a kindergarten in the village of Deir Samet in the occupied West Bank.
Mazrui, a U-M Professor of Political Science and Professor of Afro-American and African Studies, will be taking a two-year leave of absence next fall to accept a position at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
The following article is a modified transcription of Professor Mazrui's speech. Parts of the text have been changed to make the spoken word more readable. Subtitles have also been added and, where necessary, the text has been fortified or clarified with excerpts from "On Youth and Revolution: The Beijing Spring and the Palestinian Intifadah," a chapter in Professor Mazrui's book-in-progress "Cultural Forces in World Politics" (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press and London: James Currey, 1990).
In December 1987, an uprising erupted in the Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation. It was a revolt against 20 years of Israeli military rule and a demand for Palestinian self-determination. A young generation of Palestinians found the will to sustain the revolt month after month though hundreds of people were killed, maimed or imprisoned during that period.
In the spring of 1989, a pro-democracy movement started among students in Beijing. It was a revolt against corruption and dictatorship and a demand for a more open society in China. At first the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square were given greater tolerance by the regime in Beijing than any tolerance ever extended to Palestinians in 20 years of Israeli occupation. In other words, although the recent news in Beijing has been devastating, the initial phase of the revolt received greater toleration from the government of China than the Palestinian movement ever received. And although the massive attacks since then have also been devastating, it is important to remember that there was a phase when it seemed that decisions about the future of China could be made in a manner which did not demand too much brutality.
The Chosen of God and the Elect of History
If we place these two movements together, the Palestinian movement and the Chinese movement, it is important to reflect on the wider theories suggested by the comparison and to place those theories alongside additional social analysis.
Theories abound about who are the decisive history-making groups in society. Social Darwinism created a human paradigm of the survival of the fittest, making the most enterprising groups the vanguard of fundamental change.
Racial Darwinism created a hierarchy of races, sometimes making the Anglo-Saxons the vanguard race of history . Under the Nazis, racial Darwinism put the German people in the forefront of human destiny.
The Jewish concept of the "chosen people" is a religious rather than a racial concept. It does not create, or is not supposed to create, a hierarchy of religious privilege, but it does separate out the Jews as an extra-special category of the human species.
Marxism does not have a concept of the chosen people but it does have a de facto concept of the chosen class. Marxism does not have the idea of the Elect of God, but it does have the idea of the Elect of History. The chosen class is the proletariat, sometimes defined in China in terms which paradoxically encompass the peasantry.
Then there are theories which entrust history to great personalities. In the nineteenth century the most important thinker in that tradition, using the English language, was probably Thomas Carlysle in his works about Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. What we would now call "charismatic figures" capture the moment of destiny and, according to Carlysle, push societies one more step forward.
All these concepts - the chosen people, the chosen race, the chosen class, the chosen personality - may have helped us to understand something about our situation today.
Youth: The "Chosen Age-Grade"
The big gap is perhaps an adequate theory of the "chosen age grade." Is there a special role for the younger generation, not the chosen class, not the chosen people, not the chosen race, not the fittest in a struggle for survival but, is there an age-grade, a particular sub-category of age that plays a decisive role at certain moments in history? On the evidence so far, the historical role of the younger generation has been more convincingly demonstrated in the Third World than in the First and Second Worlds.
We define here the First World as the world of advanced capitalist countries, mostly North America, Western Europe and Japan. We define the Second World as the world of advanced socialist countries, mainly the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe. And we define the Third World as the universe of the technologically undeveloped countries.
It is in the Third World that the younger generation has sometimes played a historic role. In Ethiopia in 1974 students played a part not only in overthrowing an ancient imperial dynasty under Haile Selassie but they were also decisive in radicalizing the soldiers into socialists. They were just soldiers before. In fact, the students' role in Ethiopia in pushing the military regime to the left was more fundamental than their role in toppling Haile Selassie.
In Iran, under the Shah, young people were part of the waves of demonstrators who gave their lives in the streets of Tehran in 1978 and 1979 to bring down the Pahlavi dynasty. Many of them were killed and those who survived returned to the streets the next day. It was the most impressive non-violent demonstration since Mahatma Gandhi mobilized the Indians against the British Raj 40 years earlier.
In the streets of Khartoum in 1985, young people protesting against President Jaafar Nimeiry forced the army to intervene, and bring Nimeiry down after more than 15 years in power. Civilian rule was later restored.
In South Korea students were the absolute vanguard of the struggle for democracy. From time to time large numbers of them have been killed in the process of agitation for a more open society. In 1987 and 1988 the students made major gains in democratizing the society as a whole - not the chosen people, not the decisive proletariat class, not the fittest in a struggle for survival, not great personalities in history - but an age-grade.
And then came the Palestinian Intifadah - erupting in December 1987. Since 1948 the Arabs had waged five, some would say fïve-and-a-half, major wars against the Israelis and basically lost every one of them. The Intifadah was a brand new experience for the military might of Israel. For the first time the Israelis were confronting an adversary even weaker militarily than the Arab armies, but the
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younger adversary was endowed with a moral will which was of a different order. Month after month the casualties mounted, but the moral resolve of the young seemed undiminished.
Then, in faraway Beijing in the spring of 1989 another set of young people initiated their own "Sino-Intifadah." For a while they retained a moral high ground of their own as they turned the world's attention on the need for greater openness in the People's Republic of China. And then came the devastating first weekend of June 1989, and the massive military power at Tiananmen Square crushed the democracy movement at least for a while. The Chinese students had been a kind of collective Alexander Dubcek. Dubcek, you will remember, in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968, had attempted to give a human face to socialism. Then the tanks of the Warsaw Pact came rolling in, in the name of Proletarian Internationalism. The Prague Spring of 1968 came brutally to an end.
Similarly, the collective Dubcek of Beijing attempted to give China a new socialism with a human face. The tanks of the 27th Army brought the Beijing Spring to a similar brutal end.
The young people, both of China and Palestine, have attempted a fundamental vanguard role. Again - not as a chosen people, or a chosen race, or a chosen class but as a chosen age-grade - the elect generation of history.
It is worth remembering that young people sometimes perform instrumental roles (used in a grand design chosen by others), rather than fundamental roles. From 1966 to 1969 students in China played a major role in implementing Mao Tsetung's Cultural Revolution. The grand design was not of the students but of the power elite of Mao's China.
In Iran's war against Iraq from 1980 to 1988 young people committed themselves to a massive crusade and hundreds of thousands lost their lives. The grand design was not of the youth this time. They were playing an instrumental role in implementing somebody else's grand design.
But the Palestinian lntifadah from 1987 onwards captured the initiative from the older generation. The demonstrators were not instrumental in carrying out somebody else's design. They had captured the fundamental role from their elders.
Similarly, the Sino-Intifadah of Beijing of 1989, unlike the Cultural Revolution of 20 years ago, was an attempt by the young to play a fundamental rather than instrumental role. In some sense, they saw themselves as the elect of history.
Between Masochism and Sadism
Now things have not been smooth for either set of young people. The Third World generally - that is most of Asia, África and Latín America - has a high propensity for collective masochism. We hurt ourselves a lot. The First World, on the other hand - Europe, the U.S. and Japan - have a long record of collective sadism. They hurt others.
Third World governments commit brutalities mainly against their own people (masochism). First World govemments commit their worst brutalities against other people (sadism). Third World countries are victims of intemal instability, and First World countries are very often perpetrators of external imperialism.
Where do China and Israel fit into this? China is ideologically part of the Second World of socialism. But technologically it is part of the Third World of underdevelopment. China has a high propensity for collective masochism (self-hurt), and continues to demonstrate tendencies of instability. The great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was one of the greatest eruptions of collective masochism even by Third World standards. Since Mao's death, China has wanted technologically to become part of the First World, to be at last an approximation of a bigger Japan, if you like.
But while technologically China has sought an exit out of Third World conditions, ideologically it has been reluctant to move too fast towards the First World. It has been reluctant to liberalize politically towards a "bourgeois democracy." The student movement in the spring of 1989 was a declaration that modernization without democratization was not enough. Without saying so explicitly, the students were trying to nudge China towards the liberal paradigm of the First World. And then, all of a sudden, China's Third World collective masochism reasserted itself . The inherent Third World instability erupted. And then the human cost, if we are to believe the reports, has been heavy.
If China is still technologically Third World and ideologically Second World, what is Israel? On the whole, Israel is both ideologically and technologically part of the First World, in spite of the fact that a large part of its population is of Third World ancestry. Israel is a First World society not because 80% of its population is Jewish but because 40% is of Western and European extraction.
If the Third World is haunted by a tendency toward masochism, the First World, as I indicated, has an inclination toward sadism and that sadism has sometimes taken the form of imperialism.
Curiously enough, Israel started as a product of colonization rather than imperialism. Before 1948 deliberate Jewish settlement for Zionist reasons was indeed a case of colonization in the classical sense of the Pilgrim Fathers in America or the early Dutch settlers in South Africa who colonized not as part of an external imperial power, but as groups establishing settlements.
During the mandate period Palestine experienced both British imperialism and Jewish colonization. The British imperialist factors retreated in 1948. The Jewish colonization began a Jewish state. One question which arose was whether the Jewish state would become an imperialist power in its own right. Would the chosen people become the chosen race?
A state created in the teeth of the opposition of an indigenous people. inevitably became a state surrounded by hostile neighbors. Could the collective sadism of the Western heritage be kept in check for long? Or is it a case that, just as white Christians in Africa had once used the Bible to justify their imperialism, Jews in Palestine would now use the Bible to justify Jewish expansion?
Expulsion of individual Palestinians, the bombing of Palestinian camps in Lebanon, the shooting of demonstrators, and the detaining of thousands of Arabs are to some extent official Israeli concessions to the country's own extremes. By the standards of German Nazism, these Israeli actions look benign. But by the standards of the Jewish dreams which accompanied the creation of Israel, something has gone seriously wrong. The dream of Israel is in danger of becoming a Jewish nightmare, and Israel's collective sadism against others can become a self-destructive form of masochism.
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Threats to Israeli Democracy
The Israelis thought the Palestinian uprising a threat to Israeli security. In fact, it is a threat to Israeli democracy. If the whole of the Arab world had failed to defeat Israel in five wars, how could stone throwing young people in Gaza or the West Bank constitute a major security threat?
The Intifadah itself is not a "threat to Israeli security." But the suppression of the Intifadah has been a threat to Israeli democracy. What form has this threat to democracy taken? The impact has included most immediately, the escalation of vigilante activities by Jewish settlers in the occupied territories. At a time when the United States is getting out of the whole tradition of lynching, which has been part of the American experience right into the 20th Century, Israeli citizens are learning the brutal tactics of lynch mobs and private executions.
Even Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir is beginning to be alarmed that Jewish settlers in the occupied territories have begun to take seriously his own proud proclamation that Jews can crush Palestinians like "grasshoppers." So the first threat to Israeli democracy in its most immediate form is vigilantism in settled territories.
The second threat to Israeli democracy is the widening of the moral gap between the Israelis as victors and Jews as victims. Increasingly, that which the Jews suffered as victims is beginning to be imitated by some Israelis as victors. One of the latest is the 1989 decision to make Palestinians wear special types of open badges of identification. Even Israeli liberals themselves have said "How different is this from wearing the yellow star as a Jew in Nazi Germany?" How different is it? Israeli liberals themselves are saying, "Are we moving to a form of open identification that we were subject to as victims? Now that we are victors we impose that form of identification on others." Israelis as victors are diluting the moral standards that Jews as victims had originally set for themselves.
The third threat to Israeli democracy is the increased strength of the ultra-nationalist right wing in Israeli politics. The Jewish state has moved substantially to the right. Since the 1973 October War, right-wing militancy carries more authoritarian and theocratic risks. Both the Israeli sense of fair play and the principal of the secular state have been at greater risk than ever since Menachem Begin inaugurated the era of right wing militancy in Israeli politics.
The fourth threat to Israeli democracy is racism proper. Within the wider move to the right in Israel is the more ominous tendency of racism itself. Jewish racism is confronted honestly in Israeli society. People debate it. They talk about it on campus. Some of you may remember the eruption of indignation last fall when I gave a lecture on Israel and South Africa, including the appearance in my class of a Jewish student who virtually threatened that she would hound me off the campus.
I must say, my going to New York has nothing to do with that threat! In fact I am going to a state which is probably more pro-Zionist than any other single state in the country. And although my appointment was controversial in that state, scholarly considerations prevailed. I am going, I understand, to a university which has a bigger proportion of Jewish students than this one. So I anticípate continuing dialogue with my students, and I'll have hearthside dialogue with Jewish students over the years. That one who came to threaten was not typical. In fact,
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in the same class at the end of the period, three Jewish students came to me to dissociate themselves from the threats of the militant one. Some people are trying to silence American campuses on certain issues when those issues are discussed openly on Israeli campuses.
And I did not invent the term "Judeo-Nazism" for which I have been blamed widely . There were even leaflets distributed when the university honored me with the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award. The term Judeo-Nazism is Israeli. It was, in fact, coined by Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz of the Hebrew University and editor of Encyclopaedia Hebraica. And he was worried precisely with the same things I was expressing concern about: the drift towards racism and fascism in some sectors of Israeli society, a threat to Israeli democracy which deserves a better fate than that.
A Balance Sheet of Repression
To the credit of the Israelis is that over a period of 18 months they have killed, according to press reports, far fewer people than the Chinese seem to have done on a single weekend. If we are to believe the reports so far, there is a major difference between the 27th Army of China and the Israeli Defense Force. But there is no room for complacency on either side.
To the credit of the Chinese is the fact that not a single student was hurt for some seven weeks while some of the highest Chinese leaders begged them to go back to class, sometimes going to talk to them directly in Tiananmen Square, face-to-face. The Israelis, on the other hand, started killing Palestinians almost from the first day of the Intifadah. So one distinction is the Chinese waited seven weeks before the thing collapsed. The Israelis started killing and maiming almost from the start. To the credit of the Chinese is the fact that the total leadership of the country as a whole had been deeply divided over their brutality, while the Israeli public opinion seems to remain basically supportive of even harsher measures against the Palestinian uprising.
So, both systems have been repressive. One is divided in a crisis of conscience and a possible political split. The other shows no signs of such a massive indecision over the suppression. They may be divided on other issues, but not over suppression of the Intifadah. To the credit of the Chinese is that the brutality against the students even raised the specter of armed conflict within the Chinese military; the same military that had behaved so brutally seemed, if we are to believe the reports, divided precisely over that treatment of the students. In Israel there have been individual soldiers who have had a crisis of conscience, who have rebelled against the idea of participating in repression in Gaza, on the West Bank. Other recruits have refused to serve. So there have been individual Israelis who have drawn the line, but the dissension within the Israeli Army has not been deep enough to threaten military cohesion or threaten a mutiny in the armed forces. In China the army seemed to have been sometimes close to mutiny.
The Israelis have killed more than 500 people in the Palestinian youthful population of less than 1 million under their occupation. Let us say the Chinese army has killed 2000 people (we don't know for certain) in a Chinese youthful population of approximately 400 million. In proportion to the number of young people under their respective jurisdictions (both within Israel and in the occupied territories), the Israeli army has eliminated a far bigger percentage of young people under their jurisdiction than the Chinese People's.
Moreover, West Bank and Gaza demonstrations have hardly ever consisted of hundreds of thousands of people at a time. The whole population of the two areas is less than two million. They have hardly ever consisted of tens of thousands of people at a time protesting and shrieking at the Israeli army. We have no idea how many people the Israeli Defense Force would kill if confronted by the size of demonstrations which characterized the student movement in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in May and early June.
To the credit of the Chinese, the suppression of the students in Beijing has provoked student demonstrations elsewhere. In other Chinese cities they have been spreading, and Shanghai seems to be aflame, if we are to believe Western press reports . In Israel itself, there has been relatively little student agitation against the repression in Gaza and the West Bank. Even Israeli Arabs, relatively speaking, have been far more quiescent about repression in the occupied territories than Chinese students in Shanghai have been about repression in Beijing.
Comparative Western Reaction
As for the reasons of the Western observation posts and their judgement, differing standards are again at work. The West has been selective in its reaction. The United States has actually imposed military sanctions against China's People's Liberation Army. After one terrible weekend of chaos, this government has found the will to impose some degree of military sanctions in spite of the special relationship that the present president has with Chinese leaders.
But with regard to the U.S. attitude toward the Israeli army, not in a weekend of collapse, but in 17 months of repression, the U.S. attitude has not been military sanctions but continuing subsidies for the Israeli Defense Force. Some Western leaders have been moved, surprisingly moved, about the repression in Tiananmen Square. This morning the Australian Prime Minister spoke with great emotion in public over the brutalities in Beijing. And considering for how long Australia had laws designed to keep Chinese out, its old "White Australia" policy; it was moving that there should be an Australian leader so affected by the tragedy in Beijing that he virtually broke down in tears. For an Anglo-Saxon leader, that's really quite something.
Third World leaders occasionally break down and weep. President Kaunda of Zambia breaks down in tears at every third conference, but here is an example of an Anglo-Saxon leader doing that. It's very moving. But again you ask, "How come this degree of emotion after one-and-a-half years of Palestinian uprising has not manifested itself in precisely those same societies?"
Japan is getting tough with China following the terrible weekend but continues to be relaxed about South Africa after five years of a state of emergency, with young people demonstrating, a country now under a cloud of censorship so we know very little about what is happening. The West is relatively unmoved by the Intifadah, but devastated by a single weekend of breakdown in Beijing.
Well, in that breakdown there were a lot of posters by those young people. One played on something from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," that it was necessary to kill Caesar for the sake of Rome. Brutus said, "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more." And the Chinese students paraphrased it, "Not that we love rice less, but that we love rights more." The Palestinians in rebellion in the West Bank and Gaza have a similar concern: "not that they love peace less, but that they love justice more."
Conclusion
The Chinese and the Jews are both heirs of great civilizations. Both were endowed with a de facto doctrine of the chosen people, viewing the world in terms of the "ins" and the "outs," but playing a decisive role in civilization all the same. Then the two peoples each has a Diaspora. There's a Chinese Diaspora and a Jewish Diaspora. And both Diasporas have been incredibly productive and energetic in their own different parts. Ethnic Chinese are the Jews of Asia.
Both China and Israel have a kind of Law of Return of their own. But not everybody in the Diaspora wants to return. Will there be a return of Hong Kong to China in Ï997 after a century of British rule? Will there be a return of Taiwan to China after half a century of nationalist rule?
But although the Chinese and the Jews are among the great actors in the history of civilization, their role in the political drama of the twentieth century has ebbed between victim and victor, between martyr and master. The latest episodes in the drama have been acted out in Beijing, Gaza and the West Bank. And young people have been at the center of these historical encounters.
When the Chinese students imitated the Statue of Liberty and called it the Chinese Goddess, the West was almost unanimous in recognizing the statue as a symbol of democracy for the students. When young Palestinians defiantly waved the flag of Palestine in defiance of Israeli law and regulations, not enough Westerners recognized it as a symbol of self-determination on the part of the Palestinian youth. If Chinese students don't deserve to suffer for displaying the Statue of Liberty, surely Palestinian youth don't deserve to suffer either for displaying the Palestinian flag. Both the statue and the flag are symbols of freedom and the masochism and the sadism must cease.