Obama, you will recall, started as a community organizer. So did Dr. King. Of course it's obvious that more will be required than a few marches, sit-ins and boycotts to change the habits of occupation and internal repression in the Palestinian territories. It took a lot more than that to bring the United States as far as it has come. But civil disobedience in the Middle East has some promising precedents, even in the blood-drenched Holy Land.

The Arabs of the little village of Bil'in on the West Bank, working with Israeli and Palestinian activists, have won international attention and the support of the Israeli courts in their fight to change the path of the wall that would have divided their community. But there is an earlier and even more significant example.

The closest the Palestinians have ever come to what Dr. King and President Obama might understand as massive civil disobedience was the first Intifada that began in 1987 and lasted until 1993. It finished forever the Palestinians' passive endurance of Israeli occupation. Before then, for the first two decades after the West Bank and Gaza were taken by the Israelis in the 1967 war, the Palestinians there had waited for the Arab Nation or their own leaders in exile or maybe the good offices of the United States to end their plight. Then they just couldn't wait any more. Children began throwing stones at the Israelis, and would not stop, even when soldiers broke their bones. That is not nonviolent, to be sure, but the message was much the same: a popular uprising based on sheer guts against the massive brawn of the occupiers. And the rock-throwers were backed by general strikes and refusals to buy Israeli products.

That sort of resistance, built on asymmetric courage, not asymmetric warfare, can change radically the way adversaries think about each other and themselves. It can open the door to peace, and there was a long moment in the early and mid-1990s when the Middle East conflict was indeed much closer to being resolved than most people remember now. Made possible by massive, mostly nonviolent resistance, it was destroyed by terrorist acts on both sides. An Israeli slaughtered dozens of unarmed Arabs as they prayed in Hebron in 1994. Another Israeli murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as he attended a rally, singing peace songs in Tel Aviv in 1995. Among the Palestinians, Hamas and other groups, including a wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization, embraced the notion that only ferocious, suicidal violence could win respect.

Very likely Hamas still believes that, even after the events of the last month demonstrated how powerless it is to defend its people, and how feckless its little fireworks displays really are. All Hamas's violent resistance does is make it easier for otherwise sensible Israelis to rationalize the use of overwhelming force, and while many regret the death of so many hundreds of innocents, the general sentiment in Israel is that proportionality is for suckers. You meet fire with fire, and if you've got the guns, you use them. Having made its point, the Israeli government has been shrewd enough to pull most of its forces out of Gaza just before Obama takes the oath of office. It might even claim it did him a favor.

So, as the new American president takes power, we will hear many voices in the Arab and Muslim world calling on Obama to impose peace on the Middle East. And, yes, he can help and, I believe, wants to do so. But he has to have something to work with. An Arab movement that shows its unity and courage through stubborn peaceful resistance, not violent potshots and suicidal rituals, would offer a truly new beginning. Civil disobedience is a language of confrontation that leaves the door open to conciliation. It was the language of Dr. King, and it is a language that Barack Hussein Obama, the community-organizer-cum-president, understands very well. Some Arabs know it already. Others would be wise to listen to them.

© 2009