By Chris Floyd 
Professor As’ad AbuKhalil points us to this telling comment in The Economist, on the Israeli massacre of unarmed citizens on its borders this week. An excerpt:
FOR many years now, we’ve heard American commentators bemoan the violence of the Palestinian national movement. If only Palestinians had learned the lessons of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, we hear, they’d have had their state long ago. Surely no Israeli government would have violently suppressed a non-violent Palestinian movement of national liberation seeking only the universally recognised right of self-determination. …
In any case, if you’re among those who have made the argument that Israelis would give Palestinians a state if only the Palestinians would learn to employ Ghandhian tactics of non-violent protest, it appears your moment of truth has arrived. As my colleague writes, what happened on Nakba Day was Israel’s "nightmare scenario: masses of Palestinians marching, unarmed, towards the borders of the Jewish state, demanding the redress of their decades-old national grievance." …
So now we have an opportunity to see how Americans will react. We’ve asked the Palestinians to lay down their arms. We’ve told them their lack of a state is their own fault; if only they would embrace non-violence, a reasonable and unprejudiced world would see the merit of their claims. Over the weekend, tens of thousands of them did just that, and it seems likely to continue. If crowds of tens of thousands of non-violent Palestinian protestors continue to march, and if Israel continues to shoot at them, what will we do? Will we make good on our rhetoric, and press Israel to give them their state? Or will it turn out that our paeans to non-violence were just cynical tactics in an amoral international power contest staged by militaristic Israeli and American right-wing groups whose elective affinities lead them to shape a common narrative of the alien Arab/Muslim threat? Will we even bother to acknowledge that the Palestinians are protesting non-violently? Or will we soldier on with the same empty decades-old rhetoric, now drained of any truth or meaning, because it protects established relationships of power? What will it take to make Americans recognise that the real Martin Luther King-style non-violent Palestinian protestors have arrived, and that Israeli soldiers are shooting them with real bullets?
Unfortunately, I think we all know "how Americans will react." We have already seen how the Progressive Peace Laureate in the White House has responded, sending out his mouthpiece to praise the Israelis for their "restraint" in slaughtering only a few unarmed people, and not the multitudes they could have killed with their super-cool, American-supplied weaponry.
Then again, we will probably never know how Americans would react to the reality of a non-violent Palestinian resistance movement — because Americans are not going to be told about it in the first place. As AbuKhalil notes in another post, on the New York Times’ coverage of the Sunday shootings:
" Israel’s borders erupted in deadly clashes on Sunday as thousands of Palestinians — marching from Syria, Lebanon, Gazaand the West Bank — confronted Israeli troops to mark the anniversary of Israel’s creation." Note the language. First these are "clashes" (even when Arab protesters are armed, as in Libya, the Times does not refer to repression by regime as "clashes"), and then it talks about the victims "confronting" Israeli troops. How did they "confront" them? By receiving their bullets in their chests?
The hideous irony of a black president praising the slaughter of people following Martin Luther King’s example is beyond all comment. And beneath contempt.
This article originally appeared on Chris Floyd’s blog Empire Burlesque on May 17, 2011.