An editorial worth considering...
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Drop the 'terrorism' label
By TED VAN DYK
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
Thursday, April 18, 2002
This is about terror, about the Middle East and about some painful truths we will need to face in the months ahead.
Terror, according to its normal definition, involves action taken against civilian, non-combatant persons in war or in political struggle. The word has been used on innumerable occasions to cover a multitude of circumstances -- including recently the Oklahoma City and Sept. 11 bombings in the United States, the Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel and the killings of Pakistanis and Indians in the conflict over Kashmir.
"The terror" during the French revolution involved the imprisonment and beheadings of the nobility and others by the radical Jacobin clique, which dominated the revolution for a period. Before World War I in the Balkans, it involved thousands of assassinations of local functionaries and political leaders as one ethnic group attempted to intimidate another. Balkan terror still is with us today.
Terror accurately describes the brutal killings and internments undertaken by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in their own countries as well as in occupied territories.
But according to formal definition of the term -- that is, calculated action against non-combatant civilians -- it also could be said to formally characterize the Winston Churchill-ordered World War II fire bombings of Dresden and other German cities that contained few if any military targets. By that definition, the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly would classify as terror, as would the intensive U.S. bombings of North Vietnam in the latter stages of the Vietnam War. (Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who along with President Nixon bore responsibility for the bombings, later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending that war).
As Israel strove to become a state, it used terror, including the explosion of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, as a weapon. Israel and present Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in particular were charged with using terror during the military incursion into Lebanon and have been accused of doing so again in the recent attacks by tanks and troops in West Bank communities and refugee camps.
Palestinians and their supporters would say that a teenage girl, sacrificing herself in the cause of her people's freedom and nationhood, was no more a terrorist than an Israeli tanker blasting Palestinian homes and the civilians inside as part of the same conflict. After all, the Palestinians would point out, they have no tanks or well-equipped army, but only themselves.
It is ridiculous for President Bush, Prime Minister Sharon, Yasser Arafat or any other leader in the context of present Middle East conflict to label one or another party using unacceptable force as "terrorist" while absolving another. It is all killing used to serve political ends.
The killing in this instance has been initiated and condoned by Sharon and by Arafat, two men filled with hate for each other and noted in the international community for their willful, shortsighted policies.
Sharon, attempting to capitalize on U.S. and Bush administration hostility toward terrorism in the wake of Sept. 11, has attempted to equate Osama bin Laden's crazy anti-American actions with the longstanding Palestinian struggle. It is all terrorism, the Sharon talking line has gone and, therefore, we must kill all suspected and would-be bombers, wherever they may be but particularly on the West Bank.
Arafat, for his part, has pretended to be unconnected to Palestinian suicide bombers when in fact good intelligence indicates he has sponsored them. Both, of course, are radicalizing and hardening opposition on the other side.
What is to be done?
To begin with, President Bush and others would do well to remove the word "terrorism" from their vocabularies when discussing the current Middle East strife. They would be better served to see it as one more terrible phase in a long struggle. The task now is not to place blame or to affix labels but to de-escalate and then stop the killing. If that can happen, genuine negotiations toward a political settlement can be contemplated.
Will Sharon and Arafat be capable of thinking peace rather than violence? Thus far in their lives they have not. Sharon opposed initially and seems determined to destroy the 1993 Oslo accords and the Palestinian Authority, which was created by them. Arafat walked away from a deal brokered by President Clinton that would have given Palestinians almost all they had sought
The security and territorial integrity of Israel must be protected. The United States has been and must remain committed to that.
Justice also must be sought for Palestinians. Those who have spent a lifetime seeking Middle East peace know that a deal could be made to get that done in five minutes -- the land-for-peace components are self-evident -- if Sharon and Arafat would commit themselves to it.
The United States must recognize this: Further American progress in the war against genuine terrorism, and toward deposing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, will not be broadly supported in the Arab, Muslim or, for that matter, Western worlds until violence between Israelis and Palestinians subsides and moves off center stage.
President Bush must use political capital and American prestige to help that happen or our own agenda will be stuck in the mud just as surely as the Israelis and Palestinians presently are stuck.
In the meantime, further accusations about "terror" in this conflict are pointless, irrelevant and hindrances to getting Sharon, Arafat or their more responsible successors to the negotiating table.
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Ted Van Dyk, a visiting scholar at the Institute for International Policy at the University of Washington, has 40 years of private- and public-sector experience in national policy issues. E-mail: t_van_dyk@hotmail.com
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