Getting beyond the hypocrisy

Hillel Halkin, "Getting beyond the hypocrisy", The Jerusalem Post

The world, it seems, just doesn't get it. Most of the world, anyway. Yasser Arafat, one of the two arch-terrorists of our times (you would need a pocket calculator to figure out whether he or Osama bin Laden have been responsible for the taking of more innocent lives), dies and gets a hero's send-off. The French government gives Arafat's body an honor guard to the airplane taking it to Cairo. The democratic states of Europe and Asia send representatives to his funeral. Newspapers, radio, television - all lament him as effusively as if he were a combination of George Washington and Che Guevara. (Ah, yes, the man made some mistakes, he didn't always play by the rules - but he was a great leader, the fearless father of his people.) What gives?

What gives, it would appear, is not just that the world, despite having had the opportunity to observe him in action for 40 years, didn't understand anything about Arafat. It also, three years after 9/11, doesn't understand anything about terrorism.

Or is it perhaps we in Israel who refuse to understand?

Let us stop for a moment to define what it is that we're talking about. Can we all agree that an act of terrorism in today's world is an act of physical violence, committed with the deliberate intention to kill or maim, on a random basis, civilian or non-combatant members of a society for the purpose of frightening and provoking a reaction from that society to further a political or national cause?

Like all useful definitions, this one also tells us what terrorism isn't. It isn't killing combatants. (When a Hamas fighter kills an Israeli soldier in Gaza, this isn't terrorism, it's guerrilla warfare.) Neither is it killing non-combatants who have been singled out as specific individuals. (The Palestinians who killed Knesset member Rehavam Ze'evi, a man with a record of calling for the mass expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, were murderers, not terrorists; Ze'evi was targeted because of his anti-Palestinian political opinions.) Nor is it just killing a lot of innocent people. (A psychotic opening fire on shoppers in a supermarket is not politically motivated.)

Who is a terrorist, then? Well, the perpetrators of 9/11 were terrorists because they (1) deliberately killed civilian Americans; (2) chose their victims at random (it didn't matter to them who was in the Twin Towers when they collapsed); and (3) had the political goal of frightening American society and goading the American government into actions that would rally Muslims to the jihadist cause.

And by the same token, the Palestinians who for decades, at Yasser Arafat's behest, killed Israelis simply for being Israelis in order to promote the goals of the Palestinian Liberation Organization were terrorists, too.

WHY DOESN'T the world understand this? Because, the world says, you can't compare bin Laden with Arafat. Bin Laden ordered the killing of Americans for unjustifiable reasons; America had done the Muslims world no harm - or at any rate, no harm that a massive attack on New York City would have rectified or been an appropriate response to.

Arafat, on the other hand, was acting on behalf of a Palestinian people whose land and freedom Israel had stolen; attacking Israeli civilians as a way of getting these things back was therefore legitimate.

Or, to put it differently: There is nothing intrinsically bad about terrorism in itself. It is bad only when it serves an unworthy political goal. When it serves a worthy one, it is good.

Which is to say that what the world calls "the war against terror" is not the war against terror at all. It is the war against politically disapproved-of terror.

One can wax indignant at such hypocrisy. But it is not enough, in arguing against a point of view, to point out that it is hypocritical. One also must point out why it is wrong.

And this isn't as easy as it might seem. After all, as its non-hypocritical defenders have never tired of pointing out, terrorism is the weapon of the weak. The real hypocrisy is for the militarily stronger party - America in Iraq, Israel in the occupied territories, the Russians in Chechnya, the Turks in Kurdish Turkey - to say to the weaker party: "You want to fight? Fine. Put on your uniforms and let's have it out fair and square, army to army."

This is like a 200-pound man challenging a 70-pound boy to a Marquis-of-Queensbury-rules boxing match. How else but by terror, an honest apologist for Arafat can argue, could the Palestinians have achieved what they did? Does anyone believe that, had they scrupulously limited their attacks after 1967 to Israeli soldiers, they would have made headway? Their own casualties would have been heavier, Israel's would have been lighter, and Israeli society would have gone its merry way. Only by striking at this society's soft underbelly - at its civilians - could the Palestinian resistance make this society feel that the status quo was intolerable.

Moreover, as the quite logical argument for terrorism goes, it is ridiculous to blame terrorists for the deaths of innocents when regular armies that suppress insurrections are guilty, even if they are not deliberately trying to cause them, of many more innocent deaths. Three Palestinians have died in the current "intifada" for every Israeli; and even if the Palestinians' percentage of combatants in this toll is much higher, their non-combatant fatalities outnumber the Israeli ones.

The truth of the matter is that there is a serious case to be made for terrorism. The fact that almost no one in the Western world is willing to make it - that it is made surreptitiously, mealy-mouthedly, by regularly denouncing terrorism on the one hand and praising or condoning those who practice it on the other hand - is a mere matter of intellectual laziness or cowardice.

And are we here in Israel immune from this? Are we not, too, prone to say to ourselves, when the victims of terror are not Israelis but someone else, say Russians, "Well, it's not very nice of them, but what other choice do those Chechens have?"

If a serious case is going to be made against terrorism, it has to be made everywhere, at all times and in all places, no matter how understandable the aspirations of the terrorists may seem or how hopeless their chances might be were they not to resort to such methods.

Such a case has not been made yet, certainly not by the world that eulogized Yasser Arafat - and until it is, the war against terror is no such thing.