Haaretz today reports the emergence of a new political force among the Palestinians, one which espouses non-violent protest rather than terror attacks. Although the Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) has been around since 1952 and is active in 45 countries, only recently has it begun to attract significant adherents among Palestinians—including a demonstration of 10,000 people last August in the city of El-Bireh, adjacent to Ramallah.

This is not the first movement advancing the Palestinian cause through the tactical renunciation of violence. I remember back in 1987 hearing a speech by Mubarak Awad, a self-styled Palestinian Ghandi Gandhi, who called for opposing Israel through strictly non-violent protest. Yet when asked what he would advocate if non-violent means fail, the Palestinian Martin Luther King responded that “of course, we would go back to violence.” (So much for Ghandi Gandhi.)

It is with the same feeling of “oops” that one reads about Hizb ut-Tahrir. According to Haaretz:

The party’s goal is the reestablishment of an Islamic caliphate to govern the whole Muslim world under Islamic law—and eventually to bring the entire world under Islamic rule. . . . The intention is to leave violent action—such as the destruction of Israel, which the party supports—to the conventional armed forces of the restored caliphate.

Our sense that Hizb ut-Tahrir’s renunciation of violence is a question of tactics rather than conviction grows stronger as we discover their uncanny ability to inspire their members to undertake violent acts. Haaretz continues:

Even if Hizb ut-Tahrir itself does not maintain an insurgent wing, recent experience in Europe shows that it has acted as an exemplary hothouse for the nurturing and education of future terrorists, who then go on to ply their trade in different frameworks. Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Muhammad Hanif, for example—the two British-Pakistanis who bombed the Tel Aviv bar Mike’s Place in 2003—had been associated with a Hizb ut-Tahrir splinter group in Britain, as had the “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid. This is why the party is outlawed in a number of European countries.

I do not know why Palestinians have failed to generate a single political movement of any strength that renounces terror and violence in principle. But so long as violence remains an overwhelming consensus among Palestinians, and its principled renunciation a public anathema, the prospects for a sustained reconciliation between Jew and Arab seem pretty grim.