Suppose you are a young person living in Gaza. Your home has been destroyed by Israeli rockets. Your whole family lives in a corner of the ruins, or maybe in a hole in the ground. Food is scarce, because the Israelis haven’t allowed your people enough land to feed themselves and they are driving away any ships that might be bringing supplies of any sort to you. Walking down the street is dangerous: you might be hit by an Israeli bomb or rocket.
Your leaders tried negotiating with Israel, and this is what they got. You protest to the international community’ and Uncle Sam, the world’s self-appointed policeman, tells you that Israel is his cop on the beat in your area. They are keeping the Middle East safe for democracy (and the oil under its soil safe for Uncle Sam). If you got hit by one of their rockets, then you must have stepped in the way when they were firing at a terrorist. That’s called collateral damage’.
If this was your experience, wouldn’t you feel that if only you could strike some blow at the Israelis, you would pay any price, even your own life? If you can be killed or maimed when they aim at terrorists, would it be any worse if you were a terrorist and hit back?
That sounds desperate, but a lot of people in Gaza are desperate. Young people are prepared to turn themselves into bombs: strap explosives to themselves, get among a group of Israelis and blow themselves up. Because it is difficult to get near Israeli soldiers, they will kill any Israelis they can find, maybe women shopping in a supermarket – and themselves.
That expresses desperation. The enemy is so powerful and merciless that you will die for a chance to kill his mother, wife or children. A terrorist: feels being terribly oppressed and powerless to fight back by any of the accepted rules of war’.
Terrorism is the weapon of the weak, of people who have no other weapon. Terrorism breaks all the rules that nations have built up over the years to restrict war to being a fight between soldiers and to ensure humane treatment for captives and the wounded.
But not only suicide bombers break those rules.
What about the people who bomb him, his mother and small sisters, from a distance and try to starve their victims slowly to death?
What about the Americans who bombed Iraq into the ground?
What about people who don’t just beat you up if you don’t support their party, but then either lock you in a cell where your doctor, your lawyer and the press can’t get to you, or, if someone did take you to hospital, they follow you there to kill you?
Those all break the rules of war. Even if, in the words of Adolf Hitler, they fight a war of terror against terror, they are terrorists. And terrorism is the weapon of the weak. They beat or bomb you because they can’t persuade you. They know they are morally weak.
And there we see a glimmer of hope. The more they fear their unjust power cannot last, the more they pile on the terror. But it cannot last, and the more they pile on the terror, the more they are admitting that they know it can’t last.
Post published in: Opinions