Protest: between violence and change, between silence and revolt—a journey to the limits of rebellion

Source: Frantz Fanon: violence as a path to liberation

Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reason. It is nothing but pure violence, and it cannot be subdued except by means of even greater violence. Violence has a political role of uniting the ranks and advancing liberation from occupation... It helps the native rid himself of his inferiority complex, of his dreamy or despairing attitude. It turns him into a fearless person, restoring his self-respect.

(Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Babel Publishing, 2006, p. 66)

Explanation: The revolutionary who believed violence liberates

In his final days, at only 36 years old (December 1961), Frantz Fanon, the Algerian revolutionary, wrote his book The Wretched of the Earth.

In his writings he preached continuous revolution, the abandonment of Europe and its culture, opting out of modernity and industrialization, Black violence against whites, and women's liberation. Violence, in his view, is a necessary stage on the road to liberation, a means for those seeking to free themselves from the yoke of oppression. In his introduction to the book, Fanon writes: "Killing a European achieves two birds with one stone, eliminating at the same time the oppressor and the oppressed: what remains is one dead man and one free man."

Perspective: The limits of protest in Israeli law: a right or a disturbance?

In a document issued by Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir in 1983, a directive was given regarding freedom of demonstration in Israel, titled "Freedom of Demonstration." In Zamir's view, relying on a Supreme Court ruling, a protest that causes a public disturbance—due to noise, road blockages, waving signs, and the like—must not be banned, because the right to protest is a principle more important than the right to movement or tranquility. As the honorable Supreme Court Justices Esther Hayut, Uzi Vogelman, and Yoram Danziger wrote (HCJ 6536/17):

These principles, which have long guided us, and the elevated status of the right to freedom of expression and demonstration, mean that not every disruption of order or security justifies restricting the right to demonstrate, and the mere fact that a demonstration causes inconvenience, even great inconvenience, is not enough to ban it. Insofar as the Israeli public desires life in a democracy, it must develop, as in any well-ordered nation, a level of tolerance and an ability to accommodate demonstrations, despite the disruption to daily routine and the inconvenience they sometimes entail.

Apt in this context are the words of Justice E. Procaccia in the Bardenstein case, where she ruled that:

... taking a view that integrates the importance of human rights of expression in the broadest sense with the recognition of individual rights to realize freedom of movement and personal autonomy—it can be said that this constitutes an infringement on the individual that is reasonable, natural, and inherent to the course of life in a democratic society that respects human rights, and also recognizes that a price must sometimes be paid to protect these rights (ibid., paragraphs 9 and 11).

Now the only remaining question is: what are the limits of protest?

Going Deeper: Gandhi: can one protest without violence?

Mahatma Gandhi, Non-Violence in Peace and War, advice to the British government during World War II:

I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.

Culture: Theater in the ghetto: human protest in the face of extermination

"Ghetto," a play by Joshua Sobol. Mira Czeszler, Daat website:

At the height of the Holocaust, in the years 1942–1943, a theater operated in the Vilna Ghetto. The first performance was held there on January 18, 1941, about four months after the deportation of the Jews of Vilna to the ghetto, and about two months after the end of the major wave of extermination in which over fifty thousand of the roughly seventy thousand Jews of Vilna were murdered.

The establishment of the theater in the midst of such terrible days caused an uproar in the ghetto among political circles and intellectuals over creating an "academy of mourning." Despite the protest of these circles, the theater's opening night took place on schedule. The evening's artistic success was also accompanied by considerable box-office success. Echoes of the opening night spread among the ghetto public, tipping the scales in favor of the theater's continued existence.

Within one year of the theater's operation, 111 performances were held. The shows were usually performed before packed houses, and tickets were snapped up in advance, days and sometimes weeks before the performance. By the liquidation of the ghetto on September 20, 1943, the number of performances had doubled, and the number of spectators exceeded 70,000! This at a time when the ghetto population at its peak numbered about 20,000 souls.

Cultural activity in the Vilna Ghetto was not limited to theater alone; two days after the deportation of the Jews of Vilna to the ghetto, a library opened at 6 Strashun Street. On September 19, two weeks after the deportation to the ghetto and in the midst of extermination Aktionen, 1,485 readers were registered at the library, and books circulated at a rate of 400 a day.

Was this an escape from reality, or resistance to it?