Acts of Terrorism and Acts of War

Acts of Terrorism and Acts of War

The standard dictionary definition of terrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion (see note). As a condition, terror is a state of intense fear or anxiety. As an act, terror is violent or destructive behavior motivated by a desire to intimidate a population or government into changing course or granting a demand. Although, as with any term, there is no universal definition of terrorism, the consensus is that terrorism refers to acts intended to terrorize people (not merely the destruction of property or sabotage), that are systematic and motivated by political goals, and that either deliberately target or consistently disregard the safety of non-combatants (civilians).
Granting this understanding, and setting aside contrived definitions of terrorism found in self-serving law codes created by specific states to advance particular interests, it is difficult to argue that those individuals who attacked the Navy destroyer the USS Cole in October 2000, while harbored in the Yemeni port of Aden, are terrorists. True, seventeen American sailors were killed in the attack. But sailors are not non-combatants. Whether you agree with the motive of those who carried our the bombing, the USS Cole was a legitimate military target. In March of 2007, a federal court ruled that the Sudanese government was responsible for the bombing, arguing the al-Qaeda operatives who carried out the attack could not have done so without the assistance of the Sudanese government. This ruling means that the attack on the USS Cole was an act of war. It follows, then, that those held by US authorities at Guantanamo Bay are to be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Convention and other international principles concerning the treatment of prisoners or war. To consistently identify the case of the USS Cole as part of an ongoing war on terror (whatever this war is really about) is inappropriate.
In contrast, the acts of Israel in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, which started on December 27, 2008 and lasted until January 18, 2009, killing more than 1300 Palestinians, injuring thousands more, and destroying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property, do constitute terrorism, as the acts amounted to the systematic use of terror as a means of coercing Palestinians into ceasing acts of resistance to Israeli colonization and occupation of Palestinian land. The Israeli policy of both targeting civilians (around 70 percent of those killed were civilians, one third were children) and consistently disregarding the safety of civilians was intended to terrorize Palestinians. Yet, the United States not only backed Israel all the way, but is now seeking to prevent Palestinians access to weapons to defend themselves from violence and resist colonization while continuing to sell weapons to Israel (including DIME and white phosphorus ordinance).
Note: Coercion is often defined as restraining or dominating by force or to achieve by force of threat. But it is also defined as an act or situation that compels persons to act certain ways or choose certain things. To compel means to drive or urge forcefully or irresistibly. Hunger, for example, compels one to behave in ways that increase the likelihood of food, since hunger compels one to eat (failure to eat causes death, therefore any policy that causes starvation is homicide). For example, a situation in which land is monopolized by a few, and the many are forbidden to freely seek food, compels the many to act in ways they otherwise would not, by either submitting themselves to the wishes of the few or organizing to overthrow the rule of the few (for those who own the land inevitably rule those who do not). The former usually takes the form of some type of servitude, ranging from chattel slavery (where persons are outright owned) to wage slavery (where persons are compelled to rent their bodies). Any situation becomes coercive when there are few or no alternatives to acting in ways contrary to the actor's wishes. Not all coercion is wrong. Ideally, the criminal law is designed to coerce people into making socially-appropriate choice, these designed to enhance the freedom of society as a whole.

http://wwsword.blogspot.com/2009/01/acts-of-terrorism-and-acts-of-war.html

Caryl Churchill play: Seven Jewish Children: a response to Gaza

Caryl Churchill, one of Britain's leading playwrights has written a short play, called Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, which is a ten minute history of Israel, ending with the bombing of Gaza. Thirteen performances are taking place on the main stage of the Royal Court in London. Churchill has said "It came out of feeling strongly about what's happening in Gaza - it's a way of helping the people there. Everyone knows about Gaza, everyone is upset about it, and this play is something they could come to. It's a political event, not just a theatre event…. Anyone can perform it without acquiring the rights, as long as they do a collection for people in Gaza at the end of it."
The Guardian’s Michael Billington writes “The work consists of seven cryptic scenes in which parents, grandparents and relatives debate how much children should know and not know. It moves, implicitly, from the Holocaust to the foundation of the state of Israel through the sundry Middle East wars up to the invasion of Gaza. At first, the advice indicates the deep divisions within Israel ("Tell her they want to drive us into the sea" / "Tell her they don't"); at the end, it becomes a ruthless justification for self-preservation ("Tell her we're the iron fist now, tell her it's the fog of war, tell her we won't stop killing them till we're safe")…What she captures, in remarkably condensed poetic form, is the transition that has overtaken Israel, to the point where security has become the pretext for indiscriminate slaughter. Avoiding overt didacticism, her play becomes a heartfelt lamentation for the future generations who will themselves become victims of the attempted military suppression of Hamas.”
An extract of the play is below:
“Don’t tell her how many of them have been killed
Tell her the Hamas fighters have been killed
Tell her they’re terrorists
Tell her they’re filth
Don’t
Don’t tell her about the family of dead girls
Tell her you can’t believe what you see on television
Tell her we killed the babies by mistake
Don’t tell her anything about the army
Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army. Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not, tell her the whole world knows, why shouldn’t she know? tell her there’s dead babies, did she see babies? Tell her she’s got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I’m not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them, tell her we’re the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can’t talk suffering to us. Tell her we’re the iron fist now, tell her it’s the fog of war, tell her we won’t stop killing them till we’re safe, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policeman, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don’t care if the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? Tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her. “
The full text of the play can be downloaded from:
http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/files/downloads/SevenJewishChildren.pdf
The URL for the Royal Court is:
http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/whatson01.asp?play=548

Gaza:WHAT CAN I DO? SOME SUGGESTIONS here

BRINGING IT HOME

http://www.transcend.org/tms/article_detail.php?article_id=823

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By Jake Lynch

I live in the northern Sydney suburb of St Ives, in an area known as Ku-ring-gai, so called after the Aboriginal people who are its traditional owners and custodians. Ku-ring-gai was named in a survey last year as having the highest quality of life of anywhere in Australia. Australia being, at the same time, top of the UN’s Human Development Index, we could be said to enjoy the highest quality of life anywhere in the world (that grinding sound you can hear is the local real estate agents sharpening their pencils).
It was people like me, no doubt, who Rihab Charida had in mind when she told a Sydney audience recently that they could have “literally no idea” what life was like for Palestinians. As I listened to her, I remembered how I found, on my first trip to the West Bank, that nothing I had read had quite prepared me for the day-to-day realities confronting the friends who made us feel so welcome.

And nothing encountered on short visits can give anything more than a general impression of the impotence, unpredictable peril and sheer randomness of living under Israel’s military occupation.
Charida is known to many of us as the Australia correspondent for the Iranian television news channel, Press TV, in which capacity she has been to interview me several times. She’s also the daughter of Palestinian refugees, and she was speaking at a weekly gathering that has become a Sydney institution, Politics in the Pub.

The pub looming large in many Australian communities, there is a sense in which the exchanges there, which actually take place in a local Gaelic club, serve to bring world events home to us in our privileged and largely sheltered part of the world. Every Friday evening, a different panel of speakers take it in turns to make statements and answer audience questions.  
This particular evening was opened by the celebrated stage and screen actress, Judy Davis. She risked – and, through exquisite comic timing, carried off – an anecdote about her attempt to cater for a Jewish dinner guest, which went awry when the meal she’d prepared turned out, inadvertently, to infringe on religious observances. She went on to recall conversations she’d had, over the years, with showbusiness colleagues, about the conflict with the Palestinians.

Davis’ humorous yet moving contribution ended by inviting us to join her in saluting the courage of those who speak out, like Charida, and fellow panellist Antony Loewenstein, the journalist and author who has specialised in raising, from within Sydney’s Jewish community, questions that many would rather remain unasked.
One of these questions brings the conflict home as far as leafy St Ives itself. The suburb boasts a branch of the chocolate café chain, Max Brenner. It’s a hang-out for local youth – preferable, no doubt, to their parents at least, to having them drawn to the pub – but it also makes us complicit in the conflict, and even in the behaviour of the so-called ‘Israeli Defence Force’. Recently, Loewenstein has been alerting us to boasts by the café’s corporate owners of how they support the troops.   
Under the heading, ‘In The Field With Soldiers’, the Strauss group tells browsers of the ‘Corporate Responsibility’ page of its website that:
“Our connection with soldiers goes as far back as the country, and even further. We see a mission and need to continue to provide our soldiers with support, to enhance their quality of life and service conditions, and sweeten their special moments. We have adopted the Golani reconnaissance platoon for over 30 years and provide them with an ongoing variety of food products for their training or missions, and provide personal care packages for each soldier that completes the path. We have also adopted the Southern Shualei Shimshon troops from the Givati platoon with the goal of improving their service conditions and being there at the front to spoil them with our best products”.
The Givati platoon took part in ‘Operation Cast Lead’, the assault on Gaza which began on December 27, 2008, and the Golani platoon are carrying out their reconnaissance in territory that Israel illegally seized from Syria in 1967, and has illegally hung onto ever since.
Apartheid
It therefore places Max Brenner on a different front line, the one looming large in the minds of anyone who – like many in the audience at Politics in the Pub – has asked: what can I do, in response to the naked brutality and lawlessness of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians?

The chocolate on sale in Max Brenner is imported from Israel, so profits go directly to support the country’s economy and the company – by its own account – goes out of its way to support the military. It therefore falls squarely into a category singled out by Naomi Klein as a valid target for boycotting.
It’s one of a number of persuasive comparisons between the situation facing the Palestinians and that of blacks in Apartheid South Africa. Indeed, the then South African Intelligence Minister, Ronnie Kasrils – a veteran Communist of Jewish descent – said a couple of years ago, on a visit to the occupied territories, that the architecture of segregation he had witnessed was worse than the bad old days in his homeland.

“The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to Apartheid”, Klein wrote, in The Nation, as the pounding of Gaza was at its height.
Back in the 1980s, I remember attending the massive anti-Apartheid demonstration in London, where exiled ANC leader Oliver Tambo spoke, along with the Reverend Jesse Jackson. “It’s not the destitute, or the prostitute”, Jackson intoned, to the assembled masses in Trafalgar Square, “but the man in the three-piece suit that is keeping Apartheid alive in South Africa today”. It was a plea to put the bite on businesses, which ultimately depend on our custom and goodwill to survive.
Sport was also seen as a means to bring pressure to bear. “Sports and business have a lot of common ground”, the Strauss website burbles. “It is no wonder that the language of business often uses terms from the world of sports such as team work, friendship, tolerance and support”.

One of the classic anti-Apartheid posters, which festooned our student bedsits, showed a South African policeman wielding a sjambok on a crowd of black protestors, above the slogan, “If you could see their national sport, you might be less keen to play them at rugby”.
I can imagine handing out leaflets outside Max Brenner in St Ives, perhaps showing a stricken Palestinian family being lowered over by a gun-toting Israeli soldier with some wording such as, “If you could see what they have for breakfast, you might be less keen to eat their chocolate”. It could cause ructions.

St Ives is home to a sizeable Jewish community, although we should not leap to the conclusion that its members automatically support Israel, any more than does Antony Loewenstein – indeed, many may very well be emboldened to speak out for what they believe is right, by his courage and example. Another notable contingent locally is South African émigrés, many of whom were glad to see the end of Apartheid, only to become disillusioned at the country’s continuing problems, and vote, with their feet, to leave.
Lobbying
Activists in Australia are now redoubling their lobbying efforts to get the government to take a firmer line. Pronouncements by the acting Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, in the early days of the latest crisis, proclaiming Israel’s “right to defend itself”, became a focus for particular discontent. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith has now agreed to meet a deputation, which will call on Australia to:
“Use its diplomatic leverage to:
·    Request that the Quartet on the Middle East and its Special Envoy Tony Blair, and the US Special Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell, expedite a just peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by ending Israel’s economic blockade and illegal occupation of Palestinian Territories.

·    Demand full and unimpeded humanitarian access for humanitarian staff and assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment.

·    Secure the immediate lifting of the Israeli blockade on Gaza to allow freedom of movement of people and trade in and out of Gaza”.
The letter sent to Smith continues:
“We also urge the Australian Government to increase its humanitarian commitment to the Palestinian civilians affected by the conflict:
·    By immediately increasing its allocation of funding and resources for relief and reconstruction efforts for long-term recovery.

·    To immediately provide in-kind support to civilians, and specific support and resources for women and children, affected by the conflict to ensure access to adequate health services (including treatment in third countries - and/or Australia as needed).

·    To immediately increase access to education services for Palestinians, including scholarship programs in Australia, to build capacity for long-term reconstruction in Gaza”.
This last point brings the issue home in a different way, of course, since we university academics would, in many cases, gladly accept Palestinian scholarship students on to our degree programs. Another option, that is often raised, would find us more divided, however. Should we extend our boycott from the men in suits at the Strauss Group to men and women in academic gowns?
When this question arose at Politics in the Pub, Rihab Charida had a ready answer – only shun contact with academics and institutions clearly complicit in the regime. That’s a relief for me, since I have enjoyed good cooperation and collegiality with Israeli colleagues who work courageously, in both professional and personal capacities, for peace. They deserve our support.
There is a phenomenon of social psychology known as ‘the bystander effect’. The more onlookers there are, at an incident of danger or depravity, the less likely it is that any one of them will take decisive action to bring it to an end.

The murderer witnessed in the act by fifty people will get away, because everyone will assume someone else has called the police. Michael Ignatieff, in The Warrior’s Honor, argues that television’s global reach has now made the inequalities of today’s world into everyone’s business, and an implicit moral challenge to all of us. But it may simply have increased the number of bystanders. 

My colleague, Annabel McGoldrick, has found that the way conflicts are reported tends to make us feel ‘disconnected’ from any prospect of a solution to the all-too evident problems. It has to start somewhere, though – so it may as well start here, with a chocolate melt.

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