No Quick Fix to Terror

In a recent article in the Jerusalem Post, Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz proposes that Israel adopt an innovative counter-terror policy: institute a temporary moratorium on retaliatory attacks for acts of terrorism, give the Palestinian Authority five days to prevent terror attacks, and then begin to destroy entire Palestinian villages in response to each act of Palestinian terrorism. It is appalling to hear a supposed civil libertarian advocate such a blatantly racist course of action; it is inconceivable that Dershowitz would propose collective punishment if the victims were Americans or Jews.

Yet Dershowitz’s approach is emblematic of a typical American fallacy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the search for a quick fix to terror that ignores the larger context in which the terror thrives.

Since Sept. 11, the United States has viewed much of the world through a lens of terrorism. There is some logic in viewing Israel through this lens, particularly over the past year where terror attacks are a grim relentless routine, perhaps nowhere more so than in my home city of Jerusalem. Yet the attacks against Israel’s citizens do not take place in a vacuum. For example, Dershowitz would demand that the Palestinian Authority combat terror while Israel maintains a siege imprisoning three million Palestinians in their towns and villages. Though the siege has tripled Palestinian unemployment and reduced 60 percent of the Palestinian population to poverty, there is ostensibly no connection between this poverty and despair and the increased willingness of Palestinians to attack Israelis.

The larger context in which Palestinian terrorism takes place—the context obscured by America’s single-minded focus on terrorism—is Israel’s 34-year military occupation of a civilian population. Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, these territories have been under military occupation, governed by the Fourth Geneva Convention. That remains the legal status of these territories to this day. In spite of the transfer of partial control to the Palestinian Authority in the framework of the Oslo Accords, Israel remains the occupying power and as such controls many facets of daily life for the entire Palestinian population.

Over the past 18 months—in response to the Palestinian uprising—Israel’s military occupation has used increasingly invasive and brutal forms of repression. This is not to assign all the blame on Israel for the failure of the diplomatic negotiations at Camp David in the summer of 2000 and the violence that erupted that fall. The Palestinian leadership certainly bears some responsibility for this violence as well. Yet Israel’s response to this violence has too frequently been to punish the entire population for the acts of its leaders or a few of its members.

In fact, certain Israeli measures are not qualitatively different than Dershowitz’s chilling proposal. On Jan. 10, for example, Israeli Defense Forces arrived in the middle of the night, with no prior warning, and demolished 60 houses in the Rafah refugee camp, near the Egyptian border. Families awoke in panic, grabbed their children and fled, while the bulldozers destroyed their houses with all their possessions inside. Over 600 people were made homeless that night. It is hard to think of any neutral definition of terrorism that would not encompass this act.

This was not an isolated incident. Over the past 18 months, Israel has demolished hundreds of houses in such a manner, as well as uprooting and destroying thousands of acres of agricultural lands.

In response to any criticism of its actions in the Occupied Territories, Israel inevitably claims that its policies are necessary to prevent violence against its own citizens. Israel must protect its population—a Sisyphean task in these gruesome days. Yet its efforts to ensure the safety of Israelis must accord with the principles that are self-evident to any first year law student. A person is innocent until proven guilty. You cannot punish one person for the act of another, let alone punish an entire village for the acts of one individual.

Nothing justifies terrorism. Not any grievance, no matter how justified; not any goal, no matter how lofty. Nothing. Not the legitimate desire for a Palestinian state, nor the urgent need to ensure the safety of Israel’s citizens.

When the end justifies the means, we too become terrorists.

Jessica Montell is the executive director of B’Tselem, an Israeli information center for human rights in the Occupied Territories.