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On
Terror and Its Other Names
By Ernest Sommers
When
the Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam
Zeevi, was shot by a Palestinian
assassin the other day, it was the first
killing of an Israeli cabinet minister
by an Arab. It was not, however, the
first killing of an Israeli cabinet
minister per se: an Israeli Jew
assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin in late 1995.
Illogically, Ariel Sharon and his
Knesset allies denounced the killing as
an "act of terror" and vowed retribution
against the Palestinian population of
the West Bank and Gaza. We found this
odd because we do not recall the
assassination of Rabin being called an
"act of terror" nor do we recall Israel
vowing retribution against itself on
that occasion.
At the same time, the murder reminded
us of a number of questions concerning
"targeted killings" and when they are
justified and when not. Indeed, the day
the killing took place the Wall Street
Journal published a particularly oafish
piece, which sought to argue, more or
less, that since our intent was to
destroy Osama Bin Laden, why shouldn't
Israel be allowed to "target" as many
Palestinian terrorists as it likes?
It seemed to us that it might be
useful to try to disentangle the
terminology of terrorism, assassination,
targeted killings and related terms.
Terror and Collective Responsibility
Terrorism can be
defined in a number of ways, but a key
element has to do with the attitude, and
the position, of the perpetrator as well
as the victim. From an emotional point
of view, "terrorism" is simply something
terrible, and in this sense the act has
no meaning. Rationally speaking,
however, it is clear that terrorist acts
are motivated by specific goals and
specific grievances.
But what are the goals of the
terrorist? Here is where we have to
change the perspective and realize that
what is experienced by the victim as
"terror" is meant as "collective
responsibility" by the perpetrator.
Collective responsibility is one of
the oldest forms of social control and
social manipulation known to mankind.
The situation in which an entire
community, or some randomly chosen
segment thereof, is destroyed for the
sins of a few is a very common theme
throughout history. Communities and
tribes, even in the Bible, were not
decimated or destroyed to the last man
out of blood lust. There was a
calculated message being sent: the
slightest infraction of one will lead to
the destruction of all, or at least an
arbitrary portion.
Collective responsibility, far from
seeking the fragmentation of social
order, as Arendt argued, or being
symptomatic of the "creeping rape of
man" as Buchheim has held, seeks to
shape the target society to police
itself so that the party administering
the violence can proceed unmolested. Of
course, while this is the basic aim of
collective responsibility, anyone on the
receiving end will experience it as
terror, because the violence is bound to
seem arbitrary and unpredictable, and
will not be meted out on an individual
basis. Hence, "What did I do to deserve
this?" is a typical response. This is a
legitimate response in our culture that
has slowly come to esteem the dignity of
individual human beings. But we should
always keep in mind that the idea of the
sanctity of the individual in a
political sense is a relatively new idea
even in the West, and largely unknown
outside of it.
It was precisely in the spirit of
collective responsibility that the
Germans shot Belgian civilians in the
First World War: the policy of
Schrecklichkeit was meant to force
the Belgians to contain the snipers who
were harrying the German ranks. In this
case, the Germans were simply employing
a strategy that had been employed
numberless times by Europeans against
each other since the Dark Ages, whenever
the threat of guerilla warfare or chaos
raised its head.
The same idea of collective
responsibility lay at the root of the
Anglo-American strategic bombing
campaign in World War Two against
Germany, as well as the American
bombings of Japan. Together, these
bombing campaigns claimed the lives of
more than one million people, people who
were quite clearly "innocent" on an
individual basis of any war making. To
be sure, there were purported military
considerations in many cases: oftentimes
"strategic" violence is just "collective
responsibility" in new dress. Even so,
it is amply clear from the records and
sometimes the explicitly stated aims
that an underlying purpose of many of
these bombings and indeed the only
purpose of the bombings of Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, and Tokyo was to impose
collective responsibility. Most of the
bombing attacks on Germany were meant to
destroy "morale", that is, to cause the
German people to turn against their
government, leading either its overthrow
or to its unconditional surrender. The
purposes of the nuclear attacks were
variously to compel the Japanese
government for the sake of its people,
or to compel the people to force their
government, to sue for peace. An
explicitly stated purpose for the final
fire bombing of Tokyo was to teach the
Japanese that they should never again
make war against the United States.
The strategic bombing campaigns of
World War Two also reminds us that there
is an ignoble side to the application of
collective responsibility. That is,
while traditionally employed to shape an
enemy society's policy, it is sometimes
used, in addition, because of a failure
to succeed in face-to-face encounters
with the designated warriors of the
target society. We should keep in mind
that the Anglo-American bombing of
Germany was pursued partly because of
the frustrations of the western allies
against their German counterparts in the
field. Indeed, it has often been pointed
out that the British bombed cities like
Hamburg because their string of military
defeats made it impossible for them to
harm the Germans in any other way.
Victims of the Allied
bombing attack on July 24/25 1943
By the same token,
the techniques of collective
responsibility - like area bombing -
were often resorted to because of
military failure. Monte Cassino, Caen,
and many other cities and towns in
France, Italy, Holland, and Belgium were
leveled by British and American bombers
- causing many thousands of innocent
civilian casualties - because of an
inability to break through German lines.
Dresden was bombed, theoretically at
least, because the Red Army was tied up
in its advance towards the city.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed
basically because it was felt that it
was better to kill 200,000 innocent
Japanese than to risk having any more
young American boys killed. So the
threshold is crossed where collective
responsibility, or more accurately the
techniques thereof, becomes a sign of
weakness, or at least an unwillingness
to fight and die by the rules of
ordinary warfare.
The Turn to Terror
It is at this
point where we make the transition from
collective responsibility according to
the usages of war to the "terrorism"
with which we are most familiar. And we
also see the rationale that animates its
cruel violence. Unable to defeat the
police, or the army, the terrorist
strikes at innocent men, women, and
children in order to cause the surviving
innocent men, women, and children to
cause their armed forces to lay down
their weapons or their governments to
make appropriate changes in policy. It
is precisely in this manner, that is, as
a form of collective responsibility,
that terrorism has been practiced since
the late 19th Century: in France, in
Russia, in Palestine, throughout the
Third World in our lifetimes, and, of
course, today in Israel, the United
States, and again Palestine.
With regard to the 911 attacks on
America, the mass murders were clearly
meant to get the United States to meet
some specific goals, articulated by Bin
Laden himself: abandonment of American
bases in Saudi Arabia, relaxation of the
embargo against Iraq, and the removal of
the Jews from Palestine. (In the last
case, according to Joseph Sobran, the
West Bank and Gaza are meant, not the
abandonment of Israel as such.)
Some of these goals might not be
objectionable to some degree, if they
did not contradict geopolitical
imperatives. For example, the Saudi
bases are necessary to prevent more
Iraqi incursions, which would threaten
the oil supply and then the world
economy. So this goal, for example,
could not easily be met. Furthermore, it
is politically and perhaps morally
impossible for Israel to be abandoned
altogether, although a case can easily
be made against continued Israel
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Yet such musings are problematic in
this case for at least two reasons.
First, because acquiescence to applied
collective responsibility, either in the
form of terror or in common usage, means
that one has lost the war, and losing a
war brings with it all kinds of
consequences that one should carefully
consider before surrender. Second, the
scale of destruction, loss of life, and
cruelty of the mass murders of September
11 is so out of proportion to the
specific grievances that it oversteps
any conception of collective
responsibility or terrorism to become
sheer madness. There can be no parley
with such people: they must be
destroyed.
At the same time, we shouldn't have
any illusions about the consequences of
our stance against terror, or more
accurately collective responsibility in
the terrorist mode. Stirring
pronouncements against it cannot
disguise the fact that collective
responsibility is a typical mode of
warfare that has been used by all those
who decry it today. To claim that
collective responsibility via
indiscriminate bombing strikes is just,
while collective responsibility through
truck bombs, hijackings, or suicide
bombings is not, is essentially to argue
that the weak have no right to attack
the strong. Of course, we can be
hypocrites about the whole matter, which
is the easiest path: we will baptize our
collective responsibility as right, and
that of our enemies wrong, and declare
any comparison "moral equivalency." That
may satisfy the masses, but that is an
utterly futile way of addressing the
problem. The weak will always fight
against the strong, especially if the
strong is overbearing, arrogant, or
greedy; and they will use whatever
weapons they can find. In the short
term, of course, we can kill. But in the
long term, we must address the
inequalities.
Terrorism in Israel
The situation is
slightly different in Israel. There, the
Israelis have occupied territories since
1967 that the United Nations has
repeatedly claimed that Israel has no
right to inhabit. This is important,
because the United Nations ratified
Israel's existence itself. In effect,
Israel uses the authority of the United
Nations to justify its existence on half
of the original Palestinian Mandate, and
then defies the authority of the United
Nations to occupy the other half. Israel
has repeatedly built settlements,
accommodating hundreds of thousands of
Israeli Jews, throughout these occupied
territories. Israel has seized all of
the water in the region, and doles out
to the native Palestinians a fraction of
what the ground holds. Finally, Israel
repeatedly seizes Arab land for further
settlements or "security zones",
destroys Palestinian homes, crops,
orchards, and olive groves, sometimes as
a policy of collective responsibility,
sometimes in order to build access roads
to its illegal settlements, and
sometimes, it appears, out of sheer
spite.
Under these conditions it is only
natural that the Palestinian population
would object, and that has been the root
cause of the two uprisings (intifidas)
that Israel has faced. Of course, we can
see on our TV's how Israel carries out
collective responsibility on its end:
with battle tanks, armored personnel
carriers, attack helicopters with
rockets, and F-16 fighter jets. The
Palestinians do not have such weapons at
their disposal, so they use what they
can get: rocks, guns, the occasional
grenade or mortar, and most recently
suicide bombers.
Of course, the Palestinians, divided
into their separate cells, have no hope
in defeating any contingent of the
Israel Defense Forces face to face. They
are outnumbered and outgunned. For this
reason, the Palestinians have been
compelled, not only to resort to a
policy of collective responsibility, but
also a policy of killing mostly innocent
civilians. Yet their aim is not mere
murder: their aim is to retaliate
against the IDF, which they cannot
defeat, and also to influence Israeli
public opinion to call off its warriors,
and leave the West Bank, Gaza and East
Jerusalem.
Proof that these are indeed the
limited aims of the Palestinians, rather
than the total destruction of Israel, is
shown by the fact that the first
intifada came to an end when the
Israelis accepted the Oslo process in
1993. At that time, the Palestinians
explicitly accepted the right of Israel
to exist in exchange for a return to the
pre-1967 borders. The second intifida,
on the other hand, began after the Camp
David meetings in 2000 during which the
Israelis made it clear that they had no
intention of returning to the 1967
borders, a position punctuated by a
provocative and tactless visit to the Al
Aqsa mosque by Ariel Sharon.
The Israeli reaction, meanwhile, has
been to hold the entire Palestinian
population collectively responsible for
the violence of fanatic sectarians.
True, the Israelis have used largely
non-lethal means in penning the Arab
population into essentially large prison
cantons. At the same time, they have
penalized the entire Palestinian
population by refusing any further
dialogue or any further concessions. In
the process they have killed some 700
Palestinians, including many innocents
bystanders, and a large majority who
were shot dead simply for the
unforgivable crime of throwing rocks at
their jailers.
Even so, the actions of the
Palestinian suicide bombers in
particular have been, in our opinion, at
times clearly over the line that
separates an inevitable struggle for
human rights from gratuitous
destruction.
A Moment of Clarity
And indeed there
are innocents dying, on both sides. Just
as collective responsibility and terror
are two sides of the same coin,
depending on who's giving and who's
getting, so now "murder of innocents"
and "collateral damage" are also to a
large extent terms determined by our
perspective. Some say that there's a
difference: "murder of innocents" is
deliberate, while "collateral damage" is
simply a by-product of the larger
objective. This would be scant comfort
to those murdered in New York. After
all, it is clear that the terrorists
mainly wanted to destroy the World Trade
Center, to destroy a symbol, and inspire
terror. If they had wanted to kill, they
would have flown later, and lower. But
it would be impossible to characterize
our fellow citizens murdered that day as
"collateral damage," it would violate
any standards of humanity and decency.
Quite so: just like the term itself.
Now this finally leads us back to the
killing of Rehavam Zeevi. Once again, we
have a dual terminology. If one accepts
the validity of the homicide, it is a
"targeted killing." On the other hand,
if one objects, it is "murder" or an
"assassination." However, it must be
said that it was not an act of terror.
It was not carried out as an act of
collective responsibility: on the
contrary, Zeevi was singled out as an
individual for his often expressed
contempt for Arab aspirations. Nor was
it carried out in order to influence
either Israeli public opinion or the
Israeli government. In fact, the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
claimed that the killing was carried out
to avenge Israel's killing of its own
leader, Mustafa Zibri, in a helicopter
missile attack on August 27.
It follows then that the death of
Zeevi, however unjust, and however
deserving of our sympathy, was not an
act of terrorism at all. If anything, it
was reminiscent of a gangland execution
carried out in retaliation for the
gangland execution that preceded it, and
so on, back to infinity, and perhaps,
forward as well. It is precisely for
these reasons that the United States,
heavily stung by assassinations in the
20th Century, constantly rebukes Israel
for its "targeted killings" because it
knows where such killing leads. It leads
to endless killing, and ultimately the
collapse of the rule of law. That should
be a sufficient moment of clarity for
anyone. |
