People embellish their enemies in order to improve their own reputation. Fighting a prominent enemy is a marvelous task. Thus Israelis attribute pan-Islamic qualities and freedom fighters’ aspirations to Palestinian peasants, and the Arabs, in turn, mythologize the IDF. Being defeated by the armed-to-the-teeth monster is not that insulting. Israelis, for their part, inflate the effects of terrorism out of proportion even though they are statistically insignificant, compared to road accidents.
Modern terrorism is a return to historically standard situation of no universal security. Every man stood – and stands – for himself. Medieval travelers were much more likely to fall prey to bandits than Israelis – to Arab terrorists. Terrorism is a normal mode of war where the enemies don’t match forces in the open, but undertake to crush each other’s will to fight. In moral terms, terrorism against non-combatants is no different from sieges which also affect non-combatants. In both cases, the status of non-combatant is dubious, since the entire population supports war effort by paying taxes and encouraging able-bodied males to fight. Indeed, the textbook example of non-combatants – pregnant women - give birth to soldiers, and babies will soon become soldiers.
Israel patently demands that Palestinian Arabs stop terrorism before the final-status negotiations commence. The British occupiers of the same land failed extracting the same concessions from Jewish guerrillas. Irgun and Lehi continued attacking the British until they withdrew, much like the Afghan mujahedeen attacked the withdrawing Russians, and like Hezbollah and Hamas pursued the Israelis. Israel negotiates with Palestinians only because of the terrorists. Should they stop, Israel would abandon the negotiations at once. Israelis want to hold on to Judea, but don’t want to pay even a minor price of suffering terrorism. Public support for abandoning Judea to Arabs grows with the increase in terrorist acts in Israel.
As a lawyer, I recognize that people have conflicting values which often cannot be reconciled. I encountered many situations where I could equally well argue both sides of the conflict. In the present Jewish-Muslim situation, both sides are right. Jews needed a land for our state and sensibly chose a religiously significant land. Palestinian Arabs settled the nearby hills for millennia and sensibly regarded the country as their own. No amount of debate can solve that contradiction. Jews used terror successfully against the British occupiers, and need not scream when Arabs use a similar tactics against the Jews.
Just fight the Arabs.
Thank you, for this article.
I love the clarity.
What your analysis is lacking is global macroconstitutional outlook from the British experience and from this perspective there comes a stage where violence is simply synonymous with refusal to deal with organic constitutional data i.e. the different populations who have appeared culturally on a territory.
In other words…
Islam cannot refuse to deal with the fact there were always Jews present in the Middle East and that the glory of Jerusalem does not come from the Crusaders or Mohammed or Saladin but from Solomon. I mean what is Jerusalem in Moshe's Era…
Once populations have established they are not going to erase each other from a territory they have to accept each other's presence and have to treat those facts in a moral manner unless they "genocide each other" and morally this is not acceptable historically as much as the British deporting the Acadians in North America could not be an experience to be repeated without great historical damages to the British constitutional legacy. It would have been definitely a poor reflection of the Age of Enlightenment where Edmund Burke was very proeminent in influencing the British constitutional architecture in the colonies where respect of organic development was the principle.
Moreover Muslim when they assume fully that Islam reflects the same organic constitutional development that Edmund Burke acknowledged constitutionally definitely for Canada both Israelis and Arabs will have a better picture of British constitutional thinking.
This is why in Canada both the First Nations the different newcomers have their rights protected in Canada and cannot be deprived of their rights. In Britain, the Scots could see parliamentary devolution along the same lines of organic development.