THE PALESTINIANS'S "PECULIAR INSTITUTION"

The Peculiar Institution: Understanding Why Palestinian Terror Is Different
By Lee Harris

...Terrorism is a Palestinian tradition that must end. But in order to bring about this desperately needed change, not only must the Palestinian people cease to show sympathy with their indigenous terrorist organizations, so too must Westerners, both in Europe and in the United States. Sympathy with the Palestinian people is in order, but not sympathy for the institution that has held them back from all progress toward a genuinely responsible civic polity.

For that is what terrorism has become among the Palestinians -- it is their peculiar institution, the way slavery was the peculiar institution of the American South in the nineteenth century. For, like the slave system, terrorism, deployed as a means of achieving political goals, ends by poisoning the society that permits it to flourish in its midst. The only group that draws any advantage from its use are those who are ruthless enough to use it. Like slavery, it corrupts whatever it touches, and is of value only to those who live off it. Like slavery, it appears to be an institution that can only be destroyed by those who are willing to use extreme and drastic measures to eradicate it. And, lastly, like American slavery, Palestinian terrorism has its defenders, many of them decent and well-intentioned individuals. In what follows I will try to explain why these individuals are mistaken in extending their sympathy to organizations like Hamas and other "militant" Palestinian groups. ...

[W]hy do so many well-meaning people in the West observe a double standard when it comes to the terrorism used by the Palestinians and the terrorism used by al Qaeda? .... To attempt to provide the answer to this question, I have identified three distinct sources of cant in defense of Palestinian terrorism, each of which may be summed up in the stock phrases that usually spring to the lips of those who are engaged in the process of defending or apologizing for Palestinian terrorism. They are:

(1) "THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE"

.....You walk into my house and shoot my wife dead. I chase you out of the house and gun you down in the street. The next day your son kills me; and two days following my son kills your son.

Now here is a cycle of violence, and yet can there be any doubt who started this cycle? You did. True, I may have done things that, in your opinion, justified your violence; but provided I did not use physical violence against you or yours, then you were the first one to escalate to the deliberate use of violence.

So how could I have stopped the cycle of violence? Well, by not doing anything to you or your kin when you killed my wife.

But would this have stopped the cycle of violence? What if you came the next day and shot my son, and I still didn't use violence to avenge myself. In this case, is my refusal to stoop to the use of violence a factor promoting the end of violence, or an incentive to more violence on the part of the person who first decided to use it?

The "cycle of violence" is a cant phrase, like so many other cant phrases circulating today, in that it permits us to feel as if we have said something profound when in fact we are talking utter nonsense. Yes, violence, once begun, often breeds violence -- but, as history amply demonstrates, violence breeds violence no matter how the other party responds to it. Fighting violence breeds it, but so too does appeasing violence. Furthermore, massive and overwhelming violence, far from continuing the cycle of violence, often stops it in its tracks, like the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So what is the phrase "cycle of violence" good for? Well, for deceiving ourselves into thinking that we can be even-handed and fair-minded in our approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since it is all just a cycle of violence, we do not need to take sides, or decide whose violence is justifiable. All violence is equally wrong, on this view; hence the role of the honest broker is to deplore both Israeli violence and Palestinian violence as if there were no difference between them.....

(2) "THE LEGITIMATE ASPIRATIONS OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE"

This second cant phrase is short hand for saying that while, of course, we can't approve of all the aspirations of the Palestinian people, such as the liquidation of the state of Israeli, we can approve of their legitimate aspirations, such as the desire to have a state of their own. But this is like telling a young man who has his heart set on marrying your daughter that you approve fully of his desire to find himself a bride, but that you have no intention of offering him your daughter's hand in marriage. By doing this, you are not recognizing his actual aspirations as legitimate; you are trying to get him to aspire to something quite different -- something that you are prepared to regard as his legitimate aspiration, such as marrying someone else's daughter instead of yours. Thus, when apologists for Palestinian terror use this cant phrase what they really mean is this: If the Palestinians were interested in establishing a state next to Israel that did not continue using terrorism against Israel in the hope of driving it into the sea, then this would be fine with them -- just as a Hitler who was happy in his own homeland and who had no interest in exterminating the Jews would have been fine with Churchill.

It is absurd to suggest that a people who have passionately dedicated themselves to an unacceptable goal, such as the destruction of the Jewish state, are really expressing a reasonable goal cunningly hidden from view within the unacceptable goal. Hitler, for example, in his ultimatum to Poland over the city of Dantzig had a reasonable goal -- the return of a German city to its original homeland -- but accompanying this reasonable goal was one that was quite unacceptable, namely, the use of violence to destroy the independence of Poland. Had Neville Chamberlain said at that time, "Well, Mr. Hitler's ultimatum does reflect the legitimate aspirations of the German people as well as the people of Dantzig," he would have been quite correct -- ninety percent of the city wanted to be re-united with Germany, just as Germany wanted to be re-united with it. But what value were these legitimate aspirations if they were not the real aspirations -- as they clearly were not?

The much maligned Chamberlain was not fooled by Hitler's claims of legitimate aspirations: he had seen what "the legitimate aspirations" model had lead to after the Munich accord when Hitler, not satisfied with re-uniting the Germans of the Sudentenland -- his original legitimate aspirations -- elected to march into the Czech republic and liquidate it as a national entity.

Cant talk of legitimate aspirations, when used in connection with Palestinian terrorism, deceives many well-meaning people into believing that such terror has a realistic and acceptable goal, namely, the fulfillment of the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people to have a state of their own, when in fact the only way to fulfill the aspirations of the Palestinian militants and terrorists is through the liquidation of Israel. That is why any Palestinian political organization that expects Israel, America, or the rest of the world to take it seriously must figure out a way not merely of controlling the terrorists, but eliminating them altogether. No one can take seriously the claims to political responsibility of a people whose elected leaders cannot control gangs of terrorist thugs -- a fact of which the current Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, appears to be painfully aware. .....

(3) THE MYTH OF THE ZIONIST OCCUPATION

The spell that this model casts over minds in the West, including minds that should know better, can hardly be overemphasized. For it is this model that permits Western apologists for Palestinian terrorists to see them as freedom fighters who, like the Algerian revolutionaries, are simply using any means that comes to hand to secure their national homeland from European occupation. As a result, the Palestinian struggle against "the Zionist occupation" is no different from the struggle of any other indigenous people to liberate themselves from colonial oppression.

According to this model, the Palestinian use of terror is legitimate because of the noble ends that it serves. As Lenin remarked, "You cannot make an omelet without breaking the eggs," so that, going on this analogy, that Palestinian terror is nothing more than the egg breaking that is necessary in order to rid the Palestinian people from the yoke of European subjugation, with the establishment of an independent Palestinian state playing the role of the omelet.

On this popular view, the Palestinian struggle is the last great battle for independence from European colonialism, and hence it is, in effect, simply an updated version of the Algerian struggle for national independence half a century earlier. The Algerian revolutionaries used terror; the Palestinians use terror. Both forms of terror, it is claimed, aim at the same end -- liberation from colonial oppression. Therefore, if the Algerians were justified in breaking eggs because of the omelet that resulted, why shouldn't the same culinary logic apply to the Palestinians?

Here we have an example of cant thinking that arises out of a completely false analogy, and that best way to see this is to examine the original proto-type.....The Algerian model of terror can only be realistically effective under certain precisely defined circumstances. First, there had to be a colony that wished to gain its political independence. Second, within this colony there had to be an emergent state apparatus in the form of a nationalist leadership that was capable of acting coherently and for a collective purpose. Third, there had to be a point where the colonizing country would call it quits rather than continue to pay an increasingly costly price for maintaining the colonial status of the native population.

There, terrorism was used in the pursuit of a realistic goal -- France abandoning Algeria; today, the Palestinian suicide-bombers are in pursuit of a fantasy -- the fantasy of Israel abandoning Israel. From this perspective, it is not their use of terrorism that condemns them, but their utter lack of realism.

The rhetoric of the anti-Israeli left is deliberately customized in order to conflate and confuse. It argues that Israel is to Palestine what France was to Algeria -- simply a colonial power occupying territory that does not really belong to it. Israel, on this reading, is transformed from being an independent nation state into being merely a colony of America, or perhaps of the West in general, in which case the model of the Algerian revolution may be piously invoked, as a way of justifying the terror of the Palestinian suicide-bombers. See, the apologists for Palestinian terror exclaim, we are just doing what the Algerians did to gain their independence. If they are justified in what they did, then we are justifying in what we are doing.

This analogy is based on the curious notion that Zionism was a form of colonialism, as if somewhere outside Israel there was a mother country controlled by Zionists -- a contention that can only be made plausible if you accept the argument that America is itself the Zionist mother country. Yet even if you are willing to swallow this absurd premise, the analogy still doesn't hold water -- and a glance back at the Algerian revolution will show us why.

When it became clear that France was going to pull out of Algeria, the pied noirs, or those Europeans who had made Algeria their home generations before, and who were more often than not of Italian and Spanish ancestry rather than French, decided that they were not going to budge, whereupon they themselves began to employ the exact same terror strategy against Metropolitan France that had proven so successful a technique in the hands of the Arab nationalists. The OAS was formed, and the attacks that they carried out were just as ruthless, and often more deadly, than the attacks that had been undertaken by the Algerian revolutionaries -- and all of them designed to force France into reversing its policy of de-colonizing Algeria.

Thus, if the Palestinians wish to evoke the Algerian model of terrorism to justify their own use of terror, they must begin by recognizing that the current population of Israeli does not represent the supposed American colonial power, but are analogous to the stubborn pied noirs who refused to leave the land that they themselves regard as their true homeland -- even if they originally came from somewhere else. It is not necessary to believe that these Israelis are "right" to have such feelings of visceral attachment to Israel -- indeed, you can deplore this attachment as much as you wish; but you must at the same time recognize both the intensity of this attachment and, what is more important, what the people of Israel are willing to do in order to defend what they regard as their homeland, and not merely as a colonial outpost of the American Imperium.

If the Palestinians insist on drawing comparison to Algeria, then they must recognize that they are not fighting American colonialists, who might be willing to leave if things got hot enough for them. Instead, they are fighting against pied noirs who are firmly convinced that they are in their own homeland, and that no one has a right to push them out of it.

But here the analogy breaks down altogether, because the Israelis cannot be compared to the Algerian pied noirs for two reasons. First, because the Israelis are roughly equal in number to the Palestinians, unlike the pied noirs, who were vastly outnumbered by the Muslim population, at a ratio of about 10 to 1. Second, because, unlike the pied noirs, the Israelis do not have to rely on small scale acts of terror, as the OAS did; the Israelis have an army, an air force, and a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons, with a delivery capacity sufficient to devastate every major city in the Arab world. Thus, far from being a vastly outnumbered minority without any means to defend themselves except by copying the terrorism of the Algerian revolutionaries, as the pied noirs were eventually driven to do, the state of Israel possesses the retaliatory capacities that only a handful of states in the history of the world have possessed; and certainly far more than Japan, Germany, Italy, or Spain possesses today. Hence the manifest -- and dangerous -- folly of pretending that Israel is a colony of America or of the West. If the possession of an enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons does not make you a sovereign state, it is difficult to say what would.

In short, the pied noirs could not survive where they were by brute force, whereas the Israelis can. And this one indisputable fact is sufficient to topple the Algerian model completely. It was possible to use terror to drive out the French; but it is not possible to use terror to "drive out" the Israelis, because, like the pied noirs, they are unwilling to be driven out, but, unlike the pied noirs, they have the military might to keep anyone from seriously thinking of driving them out. Hence, those Palestinians who believe that they can secure their goal of driving Israel into the sea are operating on the same level of fantasy thinking that was displayed by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Furthermore, there is this consideration. If the Israelis feel that they have been betrayed, as the pied noirs felt betrayed by France, they would have the wherewithal to make matters quite unpleasant for the world -- and the traditional Israeli admiration for the martyrs of Masada is an indication of just how far the Israeli government might be prepared to go in extremis. If we are to die, we are prepared to take as many with us as possible -- this represents the ace in the hole of Israel, and one that is so self-evident that there is no need to articulate it. When a proud nation is pressed to the wall, and fighting tooth and nail to insure its biological survival, it may take whatever steps it deems necessary to defend itself. When Louis the XIV attacked Holland, the Dutch immediately broke their dikes and flooded their country, thereby making it impassible for the French armies. Similarly, when Napoleon arrived to celebrate his great triumph in Moscow, an order had already gone forth to burn the great and beautiful city to the ground.

Those who have no sympathy for the Israelis must still have a healthy respect for what they might be capable of doing when they suddenly find themselves in the same desperate situation that their ancestors found themselves in on mount Masada nearly two thousand year before. Those who think that the Israelis would go down without a catastrophic parting shot at the Arab world -- and perhaps Europe as well -- are simply being naïve. Hate the Israelis as much as you wish; you must still take a realistic measure of their awesome capacity to inflict damage on anyone who assumes that they could be removed from their land without one final apocalyptic death spasm; and this single fact renders the Palestinian use of the Algerian model utterly ridiculous. Metropolitan France had a breaking point, and the Algerians revolutionaries were able to push them to this point. But the Israelis cannot afford to have a breaking point; and if they did, the achievement of this breaking point by the Palestinians would not result in the evacuation of Israel, but in the destruction of the Palestinians themselves, and perhaps millions in the Arab world as well.

There is a psychological barrier here that is of profound significance. The Algerian terrorists looked upon terror frankly as a tool. Their strategy dictated that there had to be terror bombings, but the terrorists themselves were not interested in slaughter for the sake of slaughter, so that when the French agreed to pull out, those who had been terrorists turned to something else.

But what do the Palestinians suicide bombers turn into when they stop being terrorists? Into cinders. Those who practice this kind of terror do not see it as a bloody and ghastly instrument that they hope one day to set aside, and in this respect they differ profoundly from both the terrorists who helped to found an independent Algeria and the terrorists who helped to establish the state of Israel. ....

The Palestinian terrorists, in short, are past masters at breaking eggs. But, unlike the Algerian revolutionaries, they appear to have forgotten that the whole point of breaking eggs was to make an omelet. They have become obsessed with breaking eggs only for the pleasure they seem to get from smashing delicate things.

Those who support the endless smashing of bodies for the mere sake of smashing bodies are not standing on the right side of history. They are in league with the forces of anti-civilization. They are cheering on those who no longer remember how to create and construct, and indeed who no longer see any purpose in creating or constructing.

This is why those who have genuine sympathy with the Palestinian people must stop extending sympathy for those who continue to pursue a totally unrealistic fantasy, especially now that a genuine alternative is being offered to them by a leader that they have chosen themselves. But Mahmoud Abbas can only be successful in bringing an end to Palestinian terrorism if the opinion of the rest of the world stands solidly behind him in his struggle to control the virus of terrorism that has plagued the Palestinian people just as much -- if not more -- than it has plagued the Israelis. That is why those who continue to apologize or palliate Palestinian terror are betraying the very people that they are claiming to support. It is time, in short, to stop the cant in defense of terrorism, no matter from what source it may come.