Terrorism is Terrorism

After the Sept. 11 massacre, President George W. Bush assured his outraged nation that the United States’ government would not allow an attack against its civilians to pass with impunity—that the U.S. would make no distinction between the people who planned the attacks themselves and those who supported and harbored them while doing so. And the nation stood behind Bush with almost unprecedentedly unified support for a “war against terrorism.” Of course, there were, and are, a vocal minority of those who oppose such a campaign on the grounds that it targets civilians and constitutes a form of collective punishment—but those voices seem to constitute a small percentage of Americans’ opinions.

Just over a week ago, in a five-minute address to his outraged nation, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel made similar promises to Bush’s—that the Israeli government would not allow terrorism to pass without retribution. One of the initial steps in Israel’s response to the latest spate of nail-studded explosives directed against toddlers, octogenarians, and other innocents has been to surround and hole up Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat in his office in the West Bank town of Ramallah. This move, and the military incursions into other Palestinian cities, have been met with cautions and reproach from the Arab world, Europe and now even the U.S., with Ariel Sharon receiving daily exhortations from President Bush to end the offensive in the West Bank immediately.

There is dangerous hypocrisy in any U.S. criticism of Israel’s operations responding to suicide bombings, when those criticisms come—as they often do—from people who do not also criticize the U.S. war in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) in response to Sept. 11. To maintain a modicum of consistency, anyone who takes issue with Israel’s military actions must also take issue with the U.S. war—for the two countries’ fights are two battles in the same war.

If the U.S. is justified in toppling governments that harbor terrorists and making unwelcome military incursions into countries in order to hunt down alleged perpetrators—even if that means some civilians will be killed in the process—then Israel is also. Indeed, if we take into account that a vast majority of Palestinians support the suicide bombings, then so-called collateral casualties in Afghanistan, where most people were happy to see the Taliban toppled, are much more morally reprehensible than such casualties in Palestinian territory.

Some might claim that the scale of the attacks is not commensurate—that, in essence, flying planes into buildings and killing thousands is a greater offense than detonating a bomb in a hotel and killing, say, 27. This argument falters even if we pass over the wholly plausible idea that any killing of innocent civilians, no matter how small in scale, can and must be punished. For if we consider the number of victims of suicide bombings in the past two weeks alone in proportion to Israel’s population, then there were in fact more Israeli victims, by percentage, than Americans who perished on Sept. 11. With this in mind, Israel’s response to these attacks has been—both in proportional and absolute terms—much more restrained than the U.S. war, which is, for that matter, only in its beginning stages.

A more common—and more troubling—attempt to differentiate Israel’s operations from that of the U.S. consists of the claim that whereas the attacks against the World Trade Center have no rationally defensible justification, the suicide bombings, although reaching the deepest levels of barbarism and cruelty, at least are directed towards achieving a just goal—an independent Palestinian state. But when murder of innocents is the means, the ends become meaningless and unimportant. Every terrorist, whether from Hamas, al Qaeda, the IRA, or any other such organization, thinks that his ends justify his means. As a practical as well as a moral matter, therefore, it is unacceptable to distinguish terrorists from one another based on their perceived goals, for doing so simply serves to encourage other terrorists, who may or may not have ends that we think are acceptable.

By criticizing Israel for responding to terrorists with the putatively just end of achieving Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza, we send the message to more terrorists with less just ends like, say, Osama Bin Laden, that such tactics are effective.

If Israel capitulates to the demands of Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, or the Al-Aksa brigades, then we should expect before long suicide bombers in Grand Central Station at rush hour. The U.S. learned on Sept. 11 what happens when terrorists are not actively hunted, and it is now trying to rectify that situation with a global war. Restraining or criticizing Israel from participating in that war by hunting down Palestinian terrorists spells disaster for the U.S. as much as for Israel itself.

Zachary S. Podolsky ’04, a Crimson editor, is a classics concentrator in Currier House.