After a month and a half of bombing, America has forced the Taliban to flee from their capital city. Now, more than ever before, word is out that nations responsible for terrorism shall perish from this earth. The networking and sophistication allowed by state-sponsored terrorism will also come tumbling down in a rain of firepower that it can not match. It's been pretty amazing, whether you like it or not; and yet, we must not forget that the hardest battle of the "War on Terrorism" has barely begun.
Once the dust settles over Afghanistan, the black and white world we've pretended to inhabit since Sept. 11 will be completely blown to bits, and the haze that sets in will obscure those smaller would-be friends or foes in the Arab world, which, in a way, is scarier than having a tangible national enemy. Most crucial to this puzzle is that narrow, unfriendly, most fought-over strip of land throughout human history, a land that I and millions of other American-born Jews have been told is our birthright.
Earlier this month, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke here in the Granite State, advocating that the United States disregard the hang-ups of its Arab coalition members and pursue with this war against all suspected affiliates of terrorism, including Syria, Iran and Yasser Arafat. The leap implicit in his statement is not only inherently problematic, but it is frighteningly popular. Compare the end of Netanyahu's speech ("Nothing justifies terrorism -- nothing") with President Bush's recent statement, "There is no such thing as good terrorism," referring to Palestinian violence. Although these pieces of rhetoric can be accepted as truisms, there are dangerous consequences to the basic assumptions upon which they depend. Very simply: equating Palestinian terrorism with Osama bin Laden's brand is a horrible mistake.
Through all this talk about "terrorism," we have overlooked one key fact: definition is entirely dictated by popular opinion, and while we have enjoyed worldwide agreement in describing our recent tragedies as terrorism, we do not have such a consensus regarding the violence in Israel/Palestine. Of course, the easiest answer is to ignore anyone who interprets it differently and "stick to the mission," as Netanyahu suggested.
Bad idea. Pursuing military action in defiance of the Arab world will stir more anger among people who are individually capable of committing further violence upon us and upon Israel without any sophisticated, state-supported networks. There are also the states themselves, which will quickly turn on us, and losing our Arab coalition members would also cause most of the other non-NATO nations to drop out, fearing a total ideological clash with Islam. There's the rub of definition being based on popular opinion. But losing our allies would not so much make our definition of "terrorism" wrong by shifting popular opinion so much as it would betray that our current definition is unfair and too broad to be valid, as evidenced by persistent pan-Arab moral support of Palestinian "terrorist" activities.
This is not to say that the violence taking place is in any way defensible, merely that it must be dealt with in its own way. Looking at Israel/Palestine is perhaps the best way to understand this problem: the inhabitants of this one strip of land occupy two completely separate worlds. The United States is often too slow to realize that our world is not the only one. Our discrepancies between terrorism and declared war make no sense in lands that have never been governed by democracy, where the survival of one race has always meant the extinction of another, where a civilian's right to live free of violence has never been wholly taken for granted. The violence inflicted in Israel is not simply viewed as pointless, senseless terrorism like Sept. 11 by the rest of the Muslim world, and we must accept that it isn't that simple.
We are a nation whose most glorious moments came during the pinnacle of nationalism, that bloody mess called World War II. Perhaps it's not surprising that we're still looking to handle problems on a nation-by-nation basis; but after Afghanistan, we're not fighting nations or even governments, anymore. We've got to deal with complete political messes. Arafat can't turn over known terrorists or he'll lose his own power to extremists and surrender any hopes of peace in the process. The government of Syria is in much the same situation. Our old-fashioned system of ultimatum-then-attack is only going to make matters worse by disposing of the most reputable governments capable of ruling in such volatile places.
In order to approach the Arab-Israeli conflict productively, we must do more than play a distant, dispassionate and idle mediator, empowered by the threat of force, to lift the gray shade of constant terror from the so-called Holy Land. It will require compassion for the plight of a people dispossessed of a homeland, stable government and authority of any kind, appreciation for the desperation and poverty of a people who are militarily outmatched a hundred-fold (thanks to us). Until we can display this kind of understanding, our hopes of bridging the gap between us and the Arab world will remain unrealized, and violently anti-American views will remain popular and deadly even if unstructured. President Bush has taken the first step by recognizing a need for a state called Palestine, but this is a war that good intentions alone can not win.
