Can Our Leaders Avoid the Terrorism Trap?

As a devastating crisis continues to unfold with the horrific bombardment of Gaza, there is little sense of how it will end. As a lifelong student of Israel-Palestine, I found my mind racing through many historical dates to find parallels, meaning, and direction.

Perhaps the date that comes to mind for most people is Oct. 6, 1973, the start of an Arab war effort to regain land taken by Israel in 1967. The 1973 surprise attack, which was 50 years and a day from the Oct. 7 Hamas assault, caught a recalcitrant and hubristic Israel off guard and fundamentally changed the way it thought about its policies toward Egypt in the years that followed, paving the way for a historic peace agreement a few years later.

I thought about the 1968 Battle of Karameh. This battle, little known in Western narratives of the conflict but hugely consequential in Palestinian ones, came after the 1967 war, when Israel enjoyed an aura of invincibility. PLO fighters alongside Jordanian soldiers fought the Israeli military, destroyed some military equipment, and captured more. The battle sent the message that Israeli power was not what it seemed, and it helped swell the ranks of militant factions across the region.

But a more important date stands out: Sept. 6, 1972. The day prior, Palestinian guerrillas had killed an Israeli coach and athlete and taken nine other members of the Israeli team hostage at the Munich Olympic Village, where all the cameras of the world had assembled, and by the time a botched rescue attempt by the German police had concluded, all the hostages and most of the Palestinian guerrillas were dead.

The world watched this all play out on live TV. Before that moment, and perhaps since, no set of events has had a more consequential impact on the emergence of what I call the terrorism framework: a set of policies and practices that defines how such moments should be understood, responded to, and prevented.

At the time, the Nixon White House was scrambling to figure out how to respond. Its foreign policy at the time was focused on detente with Moscow in an effort to manipulate Soviet and Chinese relations as the U.S. war on Vietnam raged. The Middle East, a massive arena of U.S.-Soviet competition, could easily derail all of this. President Richard Nixon’s now infamous tape recorder gives us insight into the thinking at the time.

On Sept. 6, Secretary of State William Rogers had a conversation with Nixon in the Oval Office in the presence of National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and other officials. Rogers’s message to Nixon was straightforward: What happened in Munich was a symptom. “Say Israel retaliates and blows up something in Lebanon, that doesn’t help anyone,” Rogers told Nixon. “What this does indicate to the world is that we’ve got to solve the problem. It’s a hell of a thing to have 11 Israelis killed, and it’s a hell of a thing to have millions of people homeless all these years. So the problem has to be solved.” Nixon was receptive to Rogers’s argument, but Kissinger sat quietly and was alarmed.

The terrorism framework flattens political violence into a question of good and evil—to which impulse, not thought, is the only fitting response.

Kissinger left the Oval Office and telephoned the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Yitzhak Rabin, to tell him about the meeting. Kissinger had his calls taped and transcribed as well. After hearing about the Oval Office meeting, Rabin feared “that those who carried out the action in Munich succeeded beyond their expectations.” Kissinger urged Rabin to go to the U.N. Security Council to try to build a global consensus around fighting terrorism even if the United States and Israel would be isolated there.

Kissinger told him going to the Security Council would “not lead to any practical results but it will focus the problem on an issue on which we can talk jointly while the great danger that I see is that in a few days people will say—as was said at the meeting this morning—we must remove the cause of this.” He urged him that they should do it “before people start thinking about the problem.”

Kissinger was concerned that if the global debate about Munich were not immediately redirected toward uniform condemnation of the Palestinian guerrillas, the more people might think about the root causes and Palestinian grievances.

By adopting this framework, opponents of this violence position themselves as standing with the victims of it and condemning the perpetrators. But in reality, they are merely condemning them all to continued and more horrific rounds of carnage.

It is a framework that allows leaders with the greatest capacity to prevent such violence—in this case, the leaders of the United States and Israel—a way to absolve themselves of responsibility at the expense of the very people whom they have a responsibility to protect. At the end of the day, it is always ordinary people, not states or policymakers or the media outfits that amplify them, who pay the highest price for this commitment to not thinking.

How many Israelis and Palestinians would still be with us had we committed to thinking about the problem—rather than avoiding it—in 1972?

Israel, of course, would go on to blow up many things in Lebanon after 1972, and its invasion of southern Lebanon 10 years later led to a nearly two-decade occupation and the birth and strengthening of Hezbollah into a force that now requires U.S. aircraft carriers to help Israel deter.

It is easy to react to this by claiming that understanding the causes amounts to justification. That is precisely what this dangerous framework encourages us to do: It flattens political violence into a question of good and evil—to which impulse, not thought, is the only fitting response.

The reality is that political violence is part of the human condition and always has been, long before Zionism and long before Palestine. When humans commit to study pathology, it is not out of some desire to justify the diseases that plague us but rather to try to eliminate them; to the extent that there is any evil in this equation, it is in the ideological commitment to refuse to examine the cause of the disease. Without a genuine understanding of why this is happening—one that does not exceptionalize the problem or the perpetrators of violence on any side—it becomes impossible to heal what ails Israelis and Palestinians alike.

The terrorism framework absolves leaders of responsibility to address root causes, but it can also be manipulated in ways that magnify its harm. There is no better example of this than Israel’s policy toward Gaza over the last decade and a half. It was precisely because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew he could rely on the terrorism framework absolving him of any responsibility for Gaza that he preferred to keep Hamas in power there so he could prevent any diplomatic progress toward ending the occupation.

This logic has been explained by multiple Israeli officials over the years. In 2005, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to remove Israeli ground forces and settlers from Gaza, it was billed by many as a concession toward achieving peace, but, as his advisor Dov Weisglass explained in a 2004 interview, it was a move designed to do the exact opposite.

By keeping Gaza separate from the West Bank and ensuring Palestinian political fragmentation and a failed statelet in Gaza, Israel was creating an excuse to never make peace that it knew would be accepted. This “no-one-to-talk-to certificate,” which Weisglass said would be approved by Washington, says: “(1) There is no one to talk to. (2) As long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic status quo remains intact. (3) The certificate will be revoked only when this-and-this happens—when Palestine becomes Finland. (4) See you then, and shalom.” This approach, Weisglass added, “supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Netanyahu, according to the Jerusalem Post, told his associates in 2019 that propping up Hamas in Gaza would keep Palestinians divided and that “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” it.

Read More

Vengeance Is Not a Policy

Emotionally driven reactions from Washington won’t prevent future violence. Dismantling the Gaza prison could.

Argument

|

Ian S. Lustick

America Is a Root Cause of Israel and Palestine’s Latest War

How 30 years of U.S. policy ended in disaster.

Argument

|

Stephen M. Walt

The End of Biden’s Middle East Mirage

The administration’s regional security concept has collapsed. Does the president know it?

Argument

|

Matthew Duss

The PLO had renounced terrorism and recognized Israel (even though Israel never recognized Palestine’s right to exist), and those shifts in PLO positions brought it out of the terrorism framework and into the peace process. But Hamas didn’t follow the same path, in part because the group saw how that path had failed to produce any results for the PLO. Netanyahu, who was always opposed to Palestinian statehood, understood that Hamas represented a get-out-of-talks-free card, just as Weisglass had envisioned.

How many Israelis and Palestinians would still be with us had we committed to thinking about the problem—rather than avoiding it—in 1972?

Breaking from this continued pattern of violence requires an understanding of the difference between justice and vengeance. The lesson that the Greek playwright Aeschylus taught so many years ago is as easily forgotten as vital to remember: The difference between the two concepts is law, which exists only to the extent that there is faith in the equal application of it.

When illegal violence, including war crimes, committed by one side is routinely condemned and the perpetrators held accountable and illegal violence by the other side, including war crimes, is never condemned and the perpetrators are instead excused and enabled to continue perpetrating such violence to ever greater extents, law exists not as an instrument of justice but an instrument of oppression; vengeance reigns; and we lock countless more innocents into lives of horror.

This is precisely where the terrorism framework has led us.