'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Suicide bombings, contd.

In a post here yesterday (Tuesday), I posed five questions about the phenomenon of Palestinian suicide bombings and assigned myself the pretty onerous task of addressing them "over the coming days."  (You can go straight to the list of questions, from here .)  In that earlier post, I tried to tackle Question 1, Is there something about these types of attack that makes them uniquely different from any other form of assault against a society, and if so, what is it? -- and I made some reference to a couple of the later questions.  

Today, I want to start at Question 2, Do the "special" attributes of this form of attack justify "special" forms of response against those judged responsible for such attacks? And maybe from there I'll segué right on into Question 3:  How broadly or narrowly should such "responsibility" be ascribed?

Yesterday, my broad conclusions were, (a) that one attribute of suicide bombings--except for those that can clearly be seen as being directed against military targets--is that they do indeed constitute a form of terrorism; (b) that there is nothing "unique" about the use by some Palestinian militant organizations of this tactic; and (c) that indeed, in at least one other notable case, that of the Tamil Tigers, western and other diplomats have engaged this group in serious negotiations, with some success, despite their use of this tactic.

In at least one respect, then, my findings yesterday have already started to answer part of Question 2 since one of the "special" forms of response to Palestinian suicide bombings that the Sharon government and many citizens in Israel, as well as the Bush administration, have all urged has been that precisely because of their use of this heinous tactic the Palestinian militant organizations should be shunned and combated at every turn.  Certainly, in this view, these organizations should not be considered to be potential parties to any peace negotiation.

Indeed, last year, when Abu Mazen's government in Palestine succeeded in winning the commitment of all the major Palestinian militant organizations to the Palestinian-wide hudna (truce) that had been specifically required of him by the Americans and the Israelis, as a pre-condition for any further progress in the diplomacy, the Americans and Israelis still refused to countenance the idea of involving militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the peace negotiations, even though they had committed to the truce.  Instead, they laid on Abu Mazen the task--one which was totally unrealistic, in the circumstances--of proceeding from the truce to a next step of disarming and dismantling Hamas and Jihad; and to do this (at least, in Sharon's version of the demand) even before they would offer him even an opening position in the diplomacy.

Of course, this is part and parcel of the continuing demand that Sharon (and, echoing him, the Americans) has continued to make of all portions of the PA leadership, whether "President" Arafat or either of his successive Prime Ministers, namely that they should disarm and dismantle the Palestinian militant groups as a precondition for Israel's participation in any substantive diplomacy.

I note here, therefore, that this demand stands in strong contrast to the willingness of all the major international players in the diplomacy around Sri Lanka to engage the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in their diplomacy, rather than posing any demand that it self-destroy, or be destroyed by others, "as a precondition" for any diplomatic progress.  There is, after all, a fairly general rule in diplomacy to the effect that: It's your enemies your need to make peace with, not your friends!  And of course, in the long history of decolonization--which was the backdrop against which I grew up in 1950s England--it was quite routinely the case that people who one day had been described in the press as "terrorists", "bloody killers", "backward Mau-Maus", or whatever, would turn up a few days later on the front page-- their faces sometimes still a little bruised from their time in Britain's colonial jails--and now, they'd be shaking hands stiffly with "Lord What's-It" or "Sir Edgar Thisorthat" or some other colonial administrator as both sides signed a new Treaty of Independence...

In those end-of-empire days, both sides had behaved pretty badly toward the other.  But that didn't in itself prevent each side from seeing that it needed to reach a peace-plus-transition agreement precisely with the people on the other side who had the power, and not only with their "friends".

Same in Palestine/Israel, it seems to me.  I'm sure it sickens most Palestinians to think of the possibility of doing a deal with Ariel Sharon; and it sickens most Israelis to think of the possibility of doing a deal with Hamas and Jihad-- or even, these days, with tired old Yasser Arafat.  But if people really want an end to the conflict (and there are certainly reasons to doubt the validity of this assumption, on both sides), then doing a workable deal with the people who have power on the other side of the line is the way to achieve that.  Certainly, from the perspective of Israelis, the idea that people would rule quite out of the possible the idea of even talking to Hamas and Jihad seems very shortsighted.

Espcially, I might note, after the government of Israel has just engaged in a quite voluntary agreement with Lebanon's Hizbollah, in which they freed many hundreds of Lebanese, Palestinian, and other prisoners in exchange for the return to Israel of the mortal remains of three Israeli soldiers, plus one living, breathing Israeli who it turns out may well have been some sort of underworld figure or drug-dealer!  (Okay, no less a rights-bearing person for all that.)

So, an extreme form of diplomatic "shunning" (plus, even the secondary "shunning" of Arafat & Co. for refusing to act against them) is one way in which Israel tries to implement a "unique" response to the Palestinian militants' sadly non-unique use of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.  Another form of "unique" (or perhaps, sadly non-unique) Israeli response is the broad array of collective punishments that Israel has been deploying against the Palestinian residents of the occupied territories, which it claims are somehow "justified" because of the "uniquely heinous" nature of the suicide bombings that some-- and actually, only a small  proportion-- of Palestinians have deployed against Israel.

Most recently, of course, the fact of the Palestinian suicide bombings has been used by the Sharon government--with broad support from many Israelis, I think--to justify his construction of the hideous land-grabbing Wall.  But the fact of the bombings, along with the claim that they are somhow uniquely heinous in the burden they place on Israel, is routinely used by Israeli military and political leaders and many Jewish-Israeli citizens to "justify" a whole range of other major rights abuses that their security forces visit in a continuing way on the 3.5 million Palestinians of the occupied territories.  That includes both episodic gross rights abuses like the unjustified use of lethal force against Palestinian demonstrators, the completely illegal use of extrajudicial executions against suspected Palestinian militants, or the imposition of tight lockdowns on whole communities, as well as continuing, day-in-day-out collective punishments like the tight movement-control regimes that have been maintained continuously on most Palestinians of the occupied territories since September 2000 and in many cases before that, too.

Make no mistake about it, these collective punishments have killed many hundreds of people, even though those seldom show up in the statistics.  And on everyone else in the Palestinian community, they have imposed progressive pauperization, fear, despair, the inability to engage in the normal human activity of planning for a hopeful future, uncertainty, stress, and dread.

When most Israelis are asked how they, of all people, can support such the imposition of such extreme and debilitating forms of collective punishment on all the Palestinian people of the occupied territories, their answer is, "But we have to!  Because of the suicide bombers!"

I remember back in May 2002, on an occasion when I was able to join the line of Palestinians who were walking through the dehumanizing checkpoint that the Israelis maintained then (and still maintain today) between Jerusalem and Ramallah, I took a moment to ask the two young Israeli soldiers checking everyone's papers how they liked their job.  They replied, "Not at all."

-- Why do you do it then?

-- This is our country!

-- It's not your country, that's nonsense! You don't really believe that, do you?

-- Okay, so it's not our country.  But still, we have to prevent the suicide bombers coming to Tel Aviv.

-- Excuse me?  All these people in this line are coming from Jerusalem to Ramallah.  How exactly, by standing here, are you preventing the suicide bombers from coming to Tel Aviv?

... And that's how it always is.  Ask most Israelis about any aspect of the inhuman (and too often lethal) regime of movement control that they're maintaining on the Palestinians, and they'll say "Because of the suicide bombers."  That seems to justify everything.  Few indeed are the Israelis who, like Amira Hass, or Gila Svirsky, or a few thousand other stalwarts of the peace movement, are prepared to say in public that it is the dragging, grinding despair engendered among the Palestinians by the stifling movement-control regimes and the multiple other humiliations that Israel visits on the Palestinians at every turn that are themselves the main fuel that motivates the Palestinian militants and gives them continued public support.

(I have a whole theory about how, when fighting terrorism, the best strategy is to think hard not about the terrorists themselves but about the much broader milieu of people who condone their activities, even if they do not actively participate in them; and to craft approaches that win over the sustained allegiance of the condoners, as a prerequisite to isolating the men of violence.  But I need to do more to write that up... I haven't given the talk on it since December 2001.)

Anyway, what I want to do here, is to try to pick out the similarities, actually, between what the governmental authorities of Israelis do to the Palestinian public and what the Palestinian men of violence do to the Israeli public.

My aim here is not to find some tricky way of labeling Israel's policies as "state terrorism".  Rather, it is to take a broader view, and to label both what the Israeli government does to Palestinians and what the Palestinian suicide bombers do to Israelis as "collective punishment".  And both are equally unacceptable.

But hey, you may ask, isn't someting that is "terrorism" necessarily, in our post 9/11 world, a whole lot worse than something that is "collective punishment"?  No, I don't think so.  In my post yesterday, I presented the best figures I could find for the numbers killed on both sides during the current intifada. You can find them there, along with some explanation, if you scroll down just a little from my list of questions.  These figures count people killed in physical confrontations between September 29, 2000 and January 24, 2004.   They came to:  Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces or Israeli civilians: 2,385, of whom 449 were minors under 18.  Israelis killed by Palestinians: 838, of whom 104 were minors under 18, 471 were other civilians, and 263 were members of the Israeli security forces.  Each life lost is equally valuable.

Now one of the notable things about that tally is that the number of Palestinians counted there as "killed by Israeli security forces or Israeli civilians" does not even include the hundreds of Palestinians whose lives have been shortened precisely by the periodic lockdowns, the sustained imposition of the movement-control regimes, or many other forms of collective punishment.  It does, however, include many victims of other measures that can be described as "collective" punishment: the many people killed as "collateral damage" during extremely deadly extrajudicial killings, for example; or people killed during unnecessarily lethal applicatons of deadly force against demonstrators.  In none of those cases were these people--many of them minors or other civilians-- killed by direct intent.  But they were killed through quite evidently reckless endangerment: a level of "collateral damage" that most Israelis evidently consider to be--however momentarily regrettable--nevertheless, quite acceptable.

Indeed, Moshe Ya'alon, the IDF Chief of Staff, has produced his own quite developed theory of the political goals that he sees Israel as pursuing through its imposition of tough regimes of collective punishment on the Palestinians of the occupied territories. When he was first appointed Chief of Staff in August 2002, he famously said that the political goal of everything that the IDF was doing in the occupied territories was, "the very deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us, will not make us fold... If that [lesson] is not burned into the Palestinian and Arab consciousness, there will be no end to their demands of us." (Ha'Aretz , Aug. 29, 2002; no hyperlink for this yet).  

As I noted in this post last October, Ya'alon did at that point have a momentary pang of conscience (or, I would say, plain old good sense), and he started noting publicly things like that,"comprehensive travel restrictions and curfews imposed on Palestinians were actually harming Israel's overall security", and that such measures "increase hatred for Israel and strengthens the terror organizations."  He also-- a bit late in the day, perhaps?-- argued at that point that "Israel should have eased punitive measures to bolster the fortunes of the former Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas."  (Abbas, of course, had resigned back on September 6 from the sheer frustration of the Israelis having given him absolutely nothing, zilch, to work with...)  Anyway, Ya'alon's crise de conscience did not seem to last long.  More recently he's been back into "sear it into their brains" mode again...

So, now we come to the core of my argument that: suicide bombings as used by some Palestinians are terrorism, but they are also a form of "collective punishment" against Israelis.  Here it is:

1. Suicide bombings, like other forms of collective punishment, are by design aimed "indiscriminately" against members of the target society.  In neither case is any real effort put into discriminating between people who are actually guilty of committing a prior offense and people who are not.  The aim is to punish a whole large group until its members, most of them civilians, bow to the will of the perpetrator.
2. From this point of view, both suicide bombings and other forms of collective punishment rely quite unacceptably on the use of forceful, sometimes lethal, means in order deliberately to entangle civilian members of the target community in what is in essence a battle of wills between two competing political leaderships.  This deliberate entanglement of civilians in a battle--and an entanglement that poses a real risk of death and other forms of longterm endangerment-- is contrary to the whole spirit of international humanitarian law.

There are a number of other similarities between suicide bombings and other forms of collective punishment, as well.  One is that those who condone these actions often use the same, essentially racist, forms of argumentation to try to "justify" their actions-- "The only language the [XXX's] even understand is the language of force!" is one common one, which can certainly be heard with depressing frequency on both sides of the Green Line in Palestine/Israel.

And thus, finally, I come to my present, still tentative answers to Questions 2 and 3: No, the "special" attributes of suicide bombings do not justify "special" forms of response such as trying to impose a blanket "shunning" on organizations judged to have used the tactic or to impose collective punishments on the community judged to be harboring perpetrators.

[I also don't believe that the use by some Palestinian militant organizations of the tactic of suicide bombing justifies the use of extrajudicial executions against anyone.  How can extrajudicial executions ever be "justified"?  Where is the outcry against the use of this measure by Israel--quite frequently--and now, sadly, on occasion also by the US?]

The way I see it on collective punishments is that the fact that the "other" side uses a tactic against your community that is essentially a collective punishment does not at all justify the recourse by one's "own side" to collective punishments, in response...  And that is the case for both sides in Israel/Palestine, since, as I argued earlier, suicide bombings themselves act--and are designed to act--like a form of "collective punishment"...