TERROR,
STATE TERROR
AND WAR

While the U.S. and most of the West agreed that Hezbollah's 18-year war on Israel constituted rightful resistance against foreign occupiers who had killed thousands of Lebanese civilians, they contest the militia's assertion that the Israeli withdrawal is incomplete -- and say Hezbollah should now disband its military wing.

"Complex Foe: Brandishing Weapons and Aid, Hezbollah Tests U.S. Resolve", The Wall Street Journal, Monday, December 17, 2001, pg.1 [emphasis added]

In the Islamic world, the United States's support for Israel is regarded as help to its "pet." Israel is regarded as a favorite nation of the United States, which supports it right or wrong against the Arab world.

One might suspect that this perception is the result of the free-floating antisemitism in the Islamic world. But the perception occurs because . . . it is very nearly and nearly always true.

The United States supports Israel staunchly nearly all the time. It is said to be officially committed to Israel's survival. Israel is said to be a very important American ally.

The quote above mentions in passing on the front page of a very distinguished conservative American newspaper a fact that has received very little attention in American news media. This fact has therefore little established itself in the American mind concerning the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians.

What is this fact? This fact is, that when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 in an effort to destroy or, failing that, expel the Palestine Liberation Organization, it heavily bombed Arab villages in southern Lebanon, thus killing tens of thousands of Arab civilians.

The United States made no attempt to stop Israel from invading. (The Israeli who instigated the invasion, and was in charge, defence minister Ariel Sharon, discussed his plans for Operation Peace for Galilee with the Americans months before going ahead.) Apparently those thousands of soon-to-be-dead Lebanese civilians didn't outweigh the need of the U.S. to support Israel.

Is this favoritism, perhaps?

I remember no newspaper or magazine story in 1982 that more than barely mentioned that there had been bombing. I remember no story about this bombing. I remember no estimate of casualties.

I am tempted to think the reason must have been that the victims were . . . just Arabs. For the North American media the big story was . . . Israeli action against the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Until very recently, Arab lives were just not taken very seriously in North America.

# # #

Until the first intifada (violent Palestinian uprising against Israeli domination) in 1987, few North American newspapers reported anything but the Israeli point of view about significant developments in the Israeli-Arab struggle. Israeli defence and civilian sources were always quoted and interviewed; rarely was there an attempt (certainly never an attempt in depth) to quote or publicize Palestinian views. (I'll try to discuss the causes for this later.) But In the 1987 intifada so many pictures appeared on television of Israeli (what shall we call them?) excesses/abuses that North American public sympathy for the first time wavered toward the Palestinians. Up to that time the image of the Palestinians was strictly that of chaotic terrorists.

The fact is, my friends . . . the Palestinians have a righteous cause.

Hundreds of thousands of the 700,000 Palestinians (conservative estimate) who fled their homes and villages in 1947-1948 were deliberately expelled at gunpoint from their homes and villages to establish a Jewish-dominated State of Israel. Some Arab women were raped. Some civilians were deliberately executed to terrify many others into fleeing. This is why the Palestinians fled to and continue to exist in primitive poverty in various Arab countries, the West Bank and Gaza. This is how the so-called "Palestinian problem" was first created.

The "Palestinian problem" was created deliberately, by ethnic cleansing to create Israel. It continues, because the original unjust ethnic cleansing has never been rectified.

For years the propaganda story was given out that the Palestinians had voluntarily left at the urging of their muezzins (Islamic callers to prayer) and religious leaders, who hoped that invading Arab armies would quickly destroy the Jews so that the Arabs could return to a cleansed Islamic land.

This account of things was decisively disproved by an Israeli scholar some 15 years later. In fact, the muezzins urged the Arabs to remain where they were. (But you can still find this phony story put forward in Grose's book A Changing Israel, published in 1984. See bibliography. And I have a clipping somewhere from a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal about 2001 where an American doctor repeats the claim.)

Instead, the ethnic cleansing worked the other way than, according to the propaganda story, it was supposed to work.

The Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia is interesting in this regard. It says

"Terrorism was used on both sides. . . . The war produced 780,000 Palestinian refugees. About half probably left out of fear and panic, while the rest were forced out to make room for Jewish immigrants from Europe and from the Arab world." ("Palestine," Microsoft Encarta Encylopedia Deluxe 2000.)

Clear enough? Encarta says half were forced out to make room for Jews.

Interestingly, Encarta also notes that prior to the war

"Although the Palestinians outnumbered the Jews (1,300,000 to 600,000), the latter were better prepared. They had a semi-autonomous government, led by David Ben-Gurion [1886-1973 -- GS], and their military, the Haganah, was well-trained and experienced. The Palestinians, on the other hand, had never recovered from the Arab revolt [1936-1939 -- GS], and most of their leaders were in exile."

In Palestine in 1947 the Palestinians outnumbered the Jews by more than 2 to 1 (except in Jerusalem and one other town, where the Jews outnumbered the Arabs). The United Nations proposed partition in November, and drew a proposed line of demarcation. It gave the Jews 60% of the country. (Remember that the Palestinians outnumbered Jews by 2 to 1.) Both the Arab and Jewish proposed "states" were each divided into three sections. The proposed Jewish areas were very narrow in places and hard to defend. (I don't have the partition map to reproduce here, but I'm working on it.)

Now the story has always been given out that Israel grudgingly accepted the line of demarcation and partition, and the Arabs refused it, and called in the Arab armies. But -- perhaps -- this is not quite true.

For, besides the main group of Jews -- we might call them the Ben-Gurion group -- which did accept the partition plan -- there were also the Jabotinskyites. Ze'ev Vladimir Jabotinsky (died 1940) led his group the New Zionist Party. These were the so-called Revisionist Zionists. Menachem Begin (1913-1992), later prime minister of Israel, was one of Jabotinsky's chief followers and admirers. Begin was also the guerrilla commander of New Zionist Party's military wing Irgun. (Its full name was Irgun Zvai Leumi.)

The New Zionist Party wanted the reestablishment of Israel along the borders of David's and Solomon's kingdom; i.e., Israel's absolutely largest extent in history. (There appears to be, oddly enough, no archeological evidence for this kingdom.¹ But it is believed to have lasted approximately a century, about the 10th century B.C.E. -- 2900 years ago.) The New Zionist Party and Irgun wanted territory on both sides of the Jordan river. (Their map, I think, showed Solomon's kingdom as including part of southern Lebanon.) They wanted it . . . all.

So my question is, Did the Jabotinskyites accept partition? [I have learned: No, they didn't.] How sincerely did they accept it? Would they have accepted the proposed borders? [No. Menachem Begin said he would never accept it.] Or once the State of Israel was set up, had the revisionists been in control instead of Ben-Gurion, would they have used military action to extend Israel to Jabotinskyite dimensions? [Probably. Even Ben-Gurion was hopeful there would be "opportunities" to expand Israel in future.]

I think we are entitled to wonder what the real Israeli reaction was to partition (I don't know what it was [I do now, in June 2002]), and whether they were sincere . [Actually, I now (May 2002) know the answer to this. See my piece on Israel.] After all, the Revisionist Zionists had been so determined/fanatical to establish Israel that Begin had blown up the King David Hotel in 1946, killing over 100 British, Arabs, and Jews. (Is this act at all comparable to Osama bin Laden's alleged blowing up of two American embassies in Africa?) And Israeli terrorists (correct me here if I'm wrong: Hasn't this act always been attributed to Begin? [No, apparently it was Shamir's Stern Gang.--GS]) assassinated the Swedish United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte on September 17,1948. (Is this perhaps comparable to recent terrorist bombings and slayings by Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, such as the assassination in late 2001 of the Palestinian-hating Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi?) Resisting the League of Nations/United Nations mandate, Irgun had captured and executed British soldiers.

So Irgun and the Jabotinskyites were a bunch of extremists. Would they have accepted a partition not on their terms? Recently I have read material which suggests they did not.²

Begin's group Irgun seems to me analogous to Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad today. As Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad defy Palestian Authority official policy, [Arafat consistently states he is opposed to attacks on civilians--GS] so Begin's Irgun tried to defy the Haganah and smuggle in weapons for its own group on board a ship called the Altalena. A pitched battle ensued at the port. Haganah (Ben-Gurion's mainstream Jewish fighters, later the Israeli army) killed some of Begin's men and sank his shipload of weapons. Irgun continued to use terror to attain its aims (check out the destruction of the Arab village of Deir Yasin -- between 125 and 250 dead Arab men, women, and children there). Like, say, the Provisional IRA, it wanted the whole of its goals without compromise.

By the way -- Irgun wasn't the most extreme of the Jewish groups.

That honour belonged to Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, run by that later prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir (1914-   ). The Stern Gang was at the Deir Yasin massacre along with Begin's men; Shamir was a member of both. Does anyone remember that both Begin and Shamir were thought of by many Israeli Jews for decades as extremists, terrorists and nuts? Later, they became prime ministers . . .

Which brings up the whole messy topic of terrorism.

I take it we are all trying to get away from a world where civilians get arbitrarily blown up, bombed, or decimated.

I take it we are also trying to get away from a world where some humans are considered sub-human or Not Really Like Us, so that it's perfectly all right or at least acceptable to wipe them out.

But the problem is, we all have goals which sometimes require these things to happen.

If you believe that your sufferings and the sufferings of your ancestors and relatives in history and recently in Europe require your own national home, you may have to expel hundreds of thousands who don't agree, or wound or kill them if they won't leave the place you've chosen.

If you believe that the death of thousands of your fellow citizens by ruthless terrorists requires a worldwide coalition against terror, you may drop bombs on the terrorists which go astray and kill 3000 innocent civilians.

Ah, the fortunes of war . . .

Of course, you're not a terrorist yourself. You didn't intend bad things to happen. You simply wanted the good things you wanted . . .

You were forced by the bad guys to be harsher than you would have liked.

To get rid of a terrorist organization and to get security for your deserving people you had to bomb villages that were or, well, might be sheltering terrorists. Fortunately, none or few of your fellow citizens were in those villages. You didn't intend to kill those thousands (or, in Henry Kissinger's case) hundreds of thousands of people³, but what were they doing there among the terrorists?

To get rid of the people occupying your land with their foreign practices -- you had no other way -- you had to shoot at them or blow them up with explosives strapped to your youth.

To end the war, you had to drop a nuke on the enemy's cities or burn them out with incendiaries. (Former American secretary of defense Robert Macnamara now saves he was greatly involved in the World War II incendiary bombing of Japanese cities. See the new Earl Morris film The Art of War.) To save millions of lives, you had to make the difficult choice to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of (their) lives. Victory, security, the Big Picture -- all required you to make these heart-rending choices.

We all have worthwhile goals to achieve. Unless we are true pacifists, we sometimes use or advocate force to achieve our goals.

If we put our soldiers in uniforms and declare war, it seems we entitle them to use methods that we do not countenance in times of peace. We let them be . . . a little careless. A state struggling against its enemies seems to overlook "errors" and excessive zeal by its forces. There are few real curbs on the practices of state-sponsored soldiers. C'est la guerre (That's war for you).

If, however, our soldiers do not wear uniforms, their actions are likely to be described as terrorist. The Lebanese, in the Wall Street Journal story I quoted, seem to have developed a third category, "resisters". The southern Lebanese Arabs defend the resistance of Hezbollah to Israeli invasion, occupation, assassinations, and bombing of civilians. I'm sure an Israeli wouldn't look at that way. Wasn't Israel just conducting a police action to eradicate terrorists?

The fact is, after invading Lebanon in 1982, and withdrawing from most of it a few years later, Israel finally left southern Lebanon in 2000 because it had taken too many deaths of its soldiers from "resisters." Over 1000, in fact. That was more blood than Israelis could stomach for a few miles of territory south of the Litani river that they had occupied to create a buffer zone.

So "terrorism" or "resistance" (choose at least one) worked. In that case, anyway. It got rid of the hated Israelis and (incidentally) many of their hated proxies, the South Lebanese Army (Christians, I think; armed and sponsored by the Israelis when they did Israel's bidding).

It can be argued that terrorism often works. For instance, it worked for the Jews in the 1940s. They drove out the British in 1948 with terrorist/guerrilla acts, and they drove out perhaps half the 780,000 Palestinians who fled also. This enabled the Jews to establish the State of Israel on 75% of Palestine west of the Jordan, with themselves in the majority. And terrorism since 1987 appears also to have got the Palestinians some way toward their goals.

The Palestinians want their own state. (It worked for Israel, maybe it will work for us.) They want to control their own space. They would hardly be allowed to create uniformed military personnel whose avowed goal would be to throw out the Israelis. So instead the Palestinians have martyrs/terrorists/bombthrowers/freedomfighters/guerrillas/fanatics/resisters (please pick at least one) who blow themselves up in the midst of crowds of Israeli civilians.

This seems to have got them part of the way to what they want. But the Palestinians' problem is weakness. They just don't have the money, the economy, the lethal sophisticated military equipment or the trained, motivated military personnel that the Israelis have.

So they use the small arms and bomb-making equipment that they have, and their cadre of frenzied/idealistic/fanatic/dedicated/crazy/desperate educated young people who are willing to immolate themselves to establish Palestine (or at least, to get revenge against the Israelis for real and imagined evils).

To put it mildly, I see no possible peaceful solution to this situation.

What if the Palestinians assassinated the American envoy General Zinni? Would they then be in a comparable position as Shamir? Would the assassin doing it eventually be prime minister of Palestine?

But I jest; tastelessly jest.

No, I too want a peaceful solution, and I want it now. And I don't see one.

A year or two ago I was optimistic that the Oslo/Madrid series of treaties could work. Former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres seems a reasonable human being. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak seemed a reasonable person. But it may be that the Palestinians have screwed themselves again. It may be that too many of the senior ones really want to go all the way, like the terrorist/resistance group Hamas, and kill all the Jews. There is some evidence that some of the top leadership wants to get all of Palestine back, and won't give up a thing.

Which, of course, is impractical, unlikely -- no, impossible -- and would involve great evil.

So what's the answer?

I don't know.

The guerrilla actions now underway in the State of Palestine (as I guess we must learn to call it) seem to be escalating. The latest phase is small rockets. What's the next, lethal anti-tank weapons? [Out of the mouth of babes. As I write this, the Palestinians managed to destroy two Israeli Merkava tanks that were supposedly invulnerable. April 3, 2002.] Stinger anti-aircraft missiles? Yes, the acts of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Brigades constitute terrorism. I don't see what else to call it, and I concede the term.

But, for your consideration, I put the following questions:

Have not the actions of the Israeli government toward the Palestinians -- and I mean, since Israel's creation -- constituted state terrorism? Are the Israeli actions not designed to cause terror and despair among civilian populations? Are they not designed to frighten and cow the Palestinian populace into conformity with Israel's will, so that new settlements of Jews on the West Bank can be made (Sharon has added 34 since becoming prime minister in September 2000, and I have lately discovered that he wants the Palestinians "badly broken" so that they will agree to his terms), old settlements can be expanded, and, in general, Israel can have hegemony over the Palestinians or force them to accept unequal agreements? Are not the Israelis continuing to use their army to force Palestinians from their homes and villages, to create new settlements, and to protect the land-thefts of the settlers? Is this use of force ethnic cleansing and state terror? Is it just?

Some rebel groups have occasionally decried what they call state terrorism. This consists of the use of overwhelming force by the government of a recognized state, to terrify a populace whom it occupies or attacks. I think we must accept that not only rebel groups and guerrillas may employ terror, but also governments. (For some reason, when governments use force against civilians, this is often not considered terrorism.) When Nazi bigwig Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in 1942, the Nazis wiped out a Czech village in retaliation. Was this not state terror? When British forces acted against Canadian rebels in the 1837 Rebellion, they burnt villages in Ontario's Norfolk county. Was this not state terror? If some want to call these actions reprisals, I concede the point; but surely they were also acts of state terror.

So I think we must accept that not only private fanatics, and fanatics in conspiratorial groups and networks like al-Qaeda can constitute terrorists, but also that uniformed soldiers acting for the governments of recognized states can be terrorists. Uniformed government soldiers often do exactly what non-uniformed terrorists do, after all, and with the same goal in mind, but with weapons and might of which classic terrorists can only dream.

# # #

Which brings us to the topic of war.

In war, one naturally attempts to win. According to the Chinese strategist of war Sun Tzu (fl. 3rd century B.C.E.), the best strategy is to discourage the enemy. In that way, the enemy will give up without a fight.

Next best, in Sun's opinion, is to terrorize the enemy. If he is terrorized, he will act in a confused manner, and perhaps run away.

Least effective, in Sun's opinion, is defeating the enemy by fighting him.

So we can see that terrorism is a way of trying to defeat the enemy by Sun's middle method.

# # #

Terrorism and state terror seem to me to shade into war -- armed and violent conflict between recognized governments. War is the most intense and destructive violence humanity knows. For many centuries humanity has attempted to formalize rules of war, rules that would limit the horror of war to "humane" kinds of violence. Sometimes these rules prevent the use of mushroom bullets or poison gas or biochemical weapons. Sometimes these rules provide for the treatment of prisoners. Sometimes they forbid attacks against unarmed civilians.

Such attempts are commendable. But the problem with rules of war, of course, is enforcement. If one side violates the rules, who punishes them? The answer seems to be, the victim of the violation -- if and only if the victim is the winner of the war.

I note also that several countries including the United States have supplies of biochemical weapons [my friend author Robert Charles Wilson assured me in spring 2003 that the United States has unilaterally eliminated its store of biochemical weapons; can anyone confirm this?], and that all sides in World War II attacked civilian populations. The purpose of carpet bombing conducted by the Allies was surely to terrify and disrupt the enemy's civilian population.

And isn't this (state) terrorism?

It is, surely, not the guerrillas but the state terrorists who are most dangerous to us all. Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's bombing campaign in Cambodia using the United States Air Force caused the deaths of perhaps 600,000 civilians by bloodily bombing their villages. The campaign did not even prevent the eventual conquering of the country by communist Khmer Rouge forces, who took power in 1975 and killed an even larger number of Cambodian civilians even more bloodily and stupidly.

[To Be Continued and Revised]

Notes

¹ Gilmour, Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians, pg. .

² Gilmour, Dispossessed, pg. .

³ Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, pg. .

Books to Investigate

Chomsky, Noam. Pirates and Emperors. Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Gilmour, Douglas. Dispossessed: the Ordeal of the Palestinians. London: Sphere Books, 1990.

Grose, David. A Changing Israel. New York: Vintage Books (a division of Random House),1984.

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Last modified: 10:59 PM 09/06/2003