ISRAEL'S VICTORY OVER TERRORISM HAS COME AT A PRICE

ISRAEL'S UNEXPECTED VICTORY OVER TERRORISM
by Yossi Klein Halevi & Michael B. Oren

(The link is to The New Republic. If you need to log in to see the article use the id "whoisme" and the password "ollie".)

...[T]he Israeli army [has] destroyed most of what remained of Hamas's organization in the West Bank and a substantial part of its infrastructure in Gaza. Just last week, Israeli gunships rocketed a Hamas training camp in Gaza, killing 15 operatives. Hamas leaders, who once routinely led rallies and gave interviews to the media, don't dare show their faces in public anymore. Even their names are kept secret. Hardly a night passes without the arrest of a wanted terrorist. Hamas's ranks have become so depleted that the organization is now recruiting teenagers: At the Gaza border, Israeli forces recently broke up a Hamas cell made up of 16-year-olds.

Meanwhile, life inside Israel has returned to near normalcy. The economy, which was shrinking in 2001, is now growing at around 4 percent per year. Even the tourists are back: Jerusalem's premier King David Hotel, which a few years ago was almost empty, recently reached full occupancy. All summer, Israel seemed to be celebrating itself, with music and film festivals and a nightly crafts fair in Jerusalem that brought crowds back to its once-deserted downtown. Everyone knows a terrorist attack can happen at any time. Still, Israeli society no longer lives in anticipation of an attack. The Beersheba bombing, which once would have seemed to Israelis part of an endless and unwinnable war, is now perceived as an aberration. Terror that no longer paralyzes is no longer terror....

The price Israel has paid for its victory has been sobering. Arafat may be a pariah, but Israel is becoming one, too. Increasingly, the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty is under attack. Former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, for example, has called Israel's creation a "mistake." In Europe, an implicit "red-green-black" coalition of radical leftists, Islamists, and old-fashioned fascists has revived violent anti-Semitism. Along with the desecration of Jewish cemeteries by neo-Nazis and the assaults on Jews by Arab youth, some European left-wingers now sense a sympathetic climate in which to publicly indulge their anti-Semitism. In a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Greek composer and left-wing activist Mikis Theodorakis denounced "the Jews" for their dominance of banks, U.S. foreign policy, and even the world's leading orchestras, adding that the Jews were "at the root of evil." In the Arab world, a culture of denial that repudiates the most basic facts of Jewish history--from the existence of the Jerusalem Temple to the existence of the gas chambers--has become mainstream in intellectual discourse and the media. Government TV stations in Egypt and Syria have produced dramatizations based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Boycotts of Israel are multiplying: The nonaligned states recently voted to bar "settlers"--including Israelis who live in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem--from their borders. Among young Israelis across the political spectrum, there's growing doubt about the country's future and widespread talk of emigration.

In its victories and its defeats, Israel is a test case of what happens to a democracy forced to confront nonstop terrorism. In their daily lives, Israelis must contend with the most pressing questions of the global war against terrorism: Can terrorism be defeated? And, in doing so, can basic democratic principles be maintained? Finally, does the moral necessity to defeat terrorism supersede the moral necessity to address the grievances of those in whose name terrorism is committed?

So far, Israel has answered these questions affirmatively, providing valuable lessons for the United States in its own war on terrorism....

No country has been subjected to more relentless terrorism than Israel; nor has any country been subjected to greater scrutiny or vilification. Though the terrorist war was launched by the official Palestinian leadership--and polls have consistently shown a Palestinian majority in support of suicide attacks--Israel considers itself at war with only the perpetrators of terrorism, not with the Palestinian people. Israel has not resorted to the indiscriminate bombings, mass expulsions, blockades of food and fuel that modern states have frequently adopted in wartime. Despite intense fighting, no city in the West Bank or Gaza remotely resembles Dresden in 1945, Hanoi in 1972, or Grozny today. In contrast to Palestinian terrorists, whose goal is to kill the maximum number of Israeli civilians, Israeli soldiers have risked their lives to minimize civilian Palestinian casualties, searching out terrorists in house-to-house fighting rather than calling in artillery. ...

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