Terrorism: Arab, Israeli, and American Style

By Don Bustany

This is about terrorism--the political kind--as practiced by Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans.

First, let's get a definition on the table. Unlike pornography--which a Supreme Court justice once said he can't define, but knows it when he sees it--terrorism can be defined, and has been with broad agreement.

The definition can be worded a dozen different ways. The "working definition" used by our State Department is this: "Terrorism is premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents usually intended to influence an audience."

It kind of works if you take the time to interpret it, but there are easier ways to say it: "Political terrorism is the use of violence upon noncombatants to make people (or a government) do what the terrorist wants them to."

But something is missing in both versions here because they both would define as terrorism the actions of the police using force/violence to disperse demonstrators unlawfully blocking a street. Such an action would not be terrorism, so the definition needs one more element: "Political terrorism is the use of violence upon noncombatants to make people do something they have a right not to do."

That gets the police off the hook for lawfully confronting demonstrators or rioters; but, if that same police department tried to break up a lawful demonstration for which the demonstrators had a permit and therefore a right, that would be terrorism. It certainly was terrorism, more than 150 years ago, when our government forced the Indian people in the eastern part of the United States to set out on the Trail of Tears that took them to the western part of the U.S. Those first Americans certainly had the right to continue living in their traditional homelands. It certainly was terrorism in 1970 when the Ohio National Guard fired on the campus of Kent State University as they demonstrated against the Vietnam War. Two classic cases of state terrorism: in one the threat of force and in the other the use of force to make people do what they had a right not to do.

So much for American terrorism. In the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, there are some Palestinians who would like to stop the peace process. And, since they can't persuade a majority of Palestinians to go along with their thinking, they resort to terrorism: they kill noncombatant Jews in Israel by bombing buses and other public places in the expectation that such violence upon civilians will persuade Israel to call off the peace talks. Looking back at the intifada, we have Palestinian kids in the occupied West Bank and Gaza using violence--throwing stones at Israeli soldiers--to make the Israelis go away. Is that terrorism too? Arguably not. Because, as a conqueror/occupier, Israel has no right to be in what's left of Palestine, and universal convention has always held that an occupied people have the right to cast off their occupier any way they can.

Room for Argument

To suppress the intifada, the Israelis were breaking bones, using teargas in ways that caused injury and death, and shooting kids with rubber bullets--which are really metal slugs with a thin rubber coating. And you can be sure it's not the rubber part that kills and maims. Anyway, the Israelis did all those things to get the Palestinians to stop resisting the occupation of their land--something the world recognizes as a basic human-social-political right. When Hamas guerrillas captured Israeli Corporal Nachshon Waxman in October 1994, was that a terrorist act? The visceral impulse, without giving it any thought, is to say yes. But there's room for argument. Some say no because he was a soldier in an occupying army; others say yes because he was taken from within Israel proper. The incident ended in a tragedy all too common in the Holy Land: Waxman, three of his captors, and an Israeli commando were killed in a failed rescue attempt.

On Jan. 22, extremist Palestinian suicide bombers killed one civilian and 18 Israeli soldiers at a bus stop near the Israeli seacoast city of Natanya. On April 9, Israeli aircraft, tanks, and artillery pounded southern Lebanon in retaliation for Lebanese attacks on Israeli positions in southern Lebanon. On April 10, two Palestinian suicide bombers, in separate incidents, attacked Israelis in the occupied Gaza Strip, killing six soldiers and two civilians.

Do these three items qualify as terrorism under our definition? Let's see. In the first case, the same arguments apply as to the case of Cpl. Waxman. It can be interpreted either way. In the second case, the attack by Lebanese nationals on Israeli occupiers was not terrorism. But when the Israelis "retaliated" and attacked Lebanese fighters and civilians--in Lebanon--that was either terrorism or a flat out act of war--which some would describe as terrorism in the extreme.

Israel has no right to be in what's left of Palestine.

In the third case, both Palestinian suicide bombers attacked Israeli soldiers in the occupied Gaza Strip. Not terrorism. The two Israeli civilians who died would come under the Gulf war rubric of "collateral damage."

The Israelis have been applying every kind of pressure they can devise to encourage, persuade, or force the Palestinians to leave the West Bank. Confiscating more and more and more of their land and putting Jewish settlers on it is one such encouragement. Taking most of the Palestinians' water for use in Israel and by the Jewish settlers serves to persuade the Arabs to leave. And uprooting their trees and bulldozing their houses certainly gets the Palestinians to thinking about finding a better life elsewhere. Confiscating someone's land is done by force/violence or the threat of it. The same in taking someone's water supply. And bulldozing a family home into rubble speaks for itself. Israel is doing these things to the Palestinians to get them to go away, to give up any notion of ever being safe and secure in their own land. It's using force, or threatening to, to get the Palestinians to do something they have a right not to do.

When I put this proposition to a State Department press officer, Joe Reap, who had given me the definition, he icily denied that Israel's actions could be defined as terrorism. I told him I understood the constraints he worked under, that he was not free to be candid--particularly with a caller he didn't know. But, not to worry--you can't fool all of us all the time.

Don Bustany is co-chair of the Arab-Jewish Speakers Bureau of Los Angeles, past president of the ADC Los Angeles Chapter, and co-president of the Media Image Coalition, LA County Commission on Human Relations.