Abstract
Terrorism is politically motivated violence directed against non-combatants. It is no doubt as ancient as organized warfare itself, emerging as soon as one society, pitted against another in the quest for land, resources, and dominance, was moved by a desire for vengeance, or found advantages in operations against ‘soft’ targets. While terrorist violence has been present in the conflict between Jews and Arabs over Palestine for over eighty years, the prevalence of the rhetoric of ‘terror’ to describe Arab violence against Israeli and Western targets, is a more recent phenomenon. This rhetoric has fostered the popular perception that Arab terrorism is the central problem in the Middle East crisis, and that once solved, progress can be made on other issues.
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Notes
In his diary Theodor Herzl wrote: ‘We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in our own country Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly’. In Raphael Patai (ed.), The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), vol. I, p. 88.
Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881–1999 (London: John Murray, 1999), pp. 140–1.
Benny Morris, ‘Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948,’ in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds.), The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 40.
Tomis Kapitan (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1997), pp. 9–11,19–24.
Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 103; and see Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 659. Tom Segev writes that despite attempts by Ben-Gurion’s biographers to distance Ben-Gurion from the idea of forcible transfer, his ‘stand on deportation, like that of other Zionist leaders is unambiguous and well-documented’ (One Palestine, Complete. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999, p. 407).
Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1987), p. 270.
David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, second edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 48–55.
Charles Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, fourth edition (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 130; Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 114.
Joseph Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet: The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961), p. 485.
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and idem, ‘Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus.’
Menachem Begin, The Revolt (New York: Nash Publishing Corporation, 1951), p. 164.
Khalid Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2000), p. 248.
Abou Iyad with Eric Rouleau, My Home, My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle (New York: Times Book, 1981), pp. 111–12.
See Robert Friedman, Zealots for Zion (New York: Random House, 1992).
Tomis Kapitan, ‘The Terrorism of “Terrorism”,’ in James P. Steba (ed.), Terrorism and International Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 47–66
Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 24
Benjamin Netanyahu, Terrorism: How the West Can Win (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), p. 204.
Ibid., pp. 202–5. See the assessments of Netanyahu’s book in Edward Said, The Essential Terrorist,’ in Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestine Question (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 149–58. See also Avishai Margalit, ‘The Terror Master,’ New York Review of Books, October 5, 1995, pp. 17–18; and Kapitan, ‘The Terrorism of “Terrorism”’.
Robert Ashmore, ‘State Terrorism and its Sponsors,’ p. 107. This policy was followed in a 1953 raid on the West Bank village of Qibya, by a military unit commanded by Ariel Sharon, in which 66 men, women, and children were killed. Discussions of the policy occur in Hanan Alon, Countering Palestinian Terrorism in Israel: Toward a Policy Analysis (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1980)which mentions that Israeli policy includes the proviso that civilian populations that ‘shelter anti-Israeli terrorists’ will not be immune from punitive action. Noemi Gal-Or 1994 also discusses this aspect of Israeli policy, in ‘Countering Terrorism in Israel,’ in David A. Charters, ed., The Deadly Sin of Terrorism (Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press 1994), pp. 137–72; as does Barry Blechman’s earlier study, ‘The Consequences of Israeli Reprisals: An Assessment,’ PhD dissertation, Georgetown University (1971).
Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection (New Brunswick: North American Inc., 1982), p. 388.
Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, pp. 422–8; Swee Chai Ang, From Beirut to Jerusalem (London: Grafton Books, 1989).
Yonah Alexander, Palestinian Religious Terrorism: Hamas and Islamic Jihad (Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 2002), p. 346.
Stephen Zunes, Tinderbox (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2003), p. 149.
Haig Khatatchadourian, The Morality of Terrorism (New York: Peter Lang, 1998).
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Kapitan, T. (2004). Terrorism in the Arab-Israeli Conflict. In: Primoratz, I. (eds) Terrorism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230204546_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230204546_13
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