Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (27 page)

Ever since Israel reoccupied Palestinian territories, the events at Jenin have become the metaphor for Israeli state terror. Like the United States, Israel, too, is convinced of the need to use massive power, totally out of proportion to the alleged provocation, so as to leave the outcome in no doubt. “By what inhuman calculus,” asked Edward Said,

did Israel’s army, using dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, along with hundreds of missile strikes from US-supplied Apache helicopter gunships, besiege Jenin’s refugee camp for over a week, a one-square-kilometer patch of shacks housing 15,000 refugees and a few dozen men armed with automatic rifles and no missiles or tanks, and call it a response to terrorist violence and a threat to Israel’s survival?

The use of disproportionate power can be sustained only in the absence of accountability and a guarantee of impunity. That guarantee can be provided only by American power. In the era when the United States had regularly insisted that the protection of human rights must trump any claim of state sovereignty, Israel remained the exception: it successfully refused to have its actions in Jenin investigated, when it did not even claim sovereignty over the city. Since no UN inquiry occurred, we may never know the full story of what happened in Jenin. But we can get some idea from individual accounts. Particularly illuminating is the story of Moshe Nissim, called “Kurdi Bear” over the military radio—“Kurdi” referring to his Kurdish origins and “Bear” to the sixty-ton D-9 demolition bulldozer he operated. He was given a few hours’ training in driving the bulldozer and then left in charge of it. In the words of the Israeli newspaper that ran his story: “For 75 hours with no break, he sat on the huge bulldozer, charges exploding around him, and erased house after house…. There was not one soldier in Jenin that did not hear his name. Kurdi Bear was considered the most devoted, brave and probably the most destructive operator.” How does a man work so long, with no break?

Do you know how I held out for 75 hours? I didn’t get off the tractor. I had no problem of fatigue, because I drank whisky all the time…. For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. Any house that they fired from came down. And to knock it down, I tore down some more…. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down.

If Kurdi Bear presented the face of a state terrorist, the Israeli army was not without those who resisted orders to target civilians. The right-wing Israeli newspaper
Hatzofeh
carried the story of “an Israeli helicopter gunship pilot” who “refused to fire a missile at a Palestinian house.”
The Guardian
correspondent in Jerusalem cited this as “the latest sign of growing unease among some Israeli troops over the conduct of the fighting in Palestinian cities of the West Bank.” The pilot refused the order to fire repeatedly: the first time when a regimental commander ordered the strike at the house “to ‘liquidate’ five alleged terrorists apparently hiding inside”; the second time when the commander assured the pilot “that the terrorists could be exactly pinpointed in the house and again ordered him to shoot”; and the third time when the commander told him “that the terrorists had disappeared, but ordered him to fire at the house nonetheless.”

The destruction in Jenin was not mindless or just punitive. If Ariel Sharon claimed its purpose was to destroy “the infrastructure of terror,” this made sense only if one understood him to mean by it the infrastructure of resistance, including the very capacity for organized civic life. That the operation went far beyond targeting armed guerrillas to destroying the civic life of Palestinians was a fact discussed far more critically in the Israeli than in the American press. Amira Hass wrote in
Ha’aretz:

Let’s not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to search and destroy the terrorist infrastructure…. If they thought incriminating evidence was hidden in the Education Ministry and the International Bank of Palestine and in a shop that rents prosthetics, the soldiers would have examined document after document, and not thrown the files on the floor without opening them…. There was a decision made to vandalize the civic, administrative, cultural infrastructure developed by Palestinian society…. It’s so easy and comforting to think of the entire Palestinian society as primitive, bloodthirsty terrorists, after the raw material and product of their intellectual, cultural, social and economic activity has been destroyed. That way, the Israeli public can continue to be deceived into believing that terror is a genetic problem and not a sociological and political mutation, horrific as it may be, derived from the horrors of the occupation.

The practice of collective punishment involves the denial of both individual responsibility and individual agency. Both are central to Culture Talk. The racial branding of Palestinians—and of Arabs in general—seems to be gaining a degree of respectability that would have been unthinkable before 9/11. In a recent interview with the Israeli historian Benny Morris, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak spoke of Palestinians in words that few American racists would dare utter in print: “They are products of a culture … in which to tell a lie creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn’t.” In the next sentence, Barak applied this generalization to “Arab society”: “The deputy director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation once told me that there are societies in which lie detector tests don’t work, societies in which lies do not create cognitive dissonance.”

The tendency to brand Palestinians and Arabs racially has not been limited to the domain of politics. Take the following example from the American academic establishment. The 2001 issue of
Human Immunology
, the journal of the American Society of Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics, contained an article by a team led by the Spanish geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena of Complutense University in Madrid titled “The Origin of Palestinians and Their Genetic Relatedness with Other Mediterranean Populations.” It began with scientific evidence indicating that “Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East share a very similar gene pool and must be considered closely related and not genetically separate.” The authors concluded that “rivalry between the two races is therefore based ‘in cultural and religious, but not in genetic differences.’ “A year after its publication, the article was removed from
Human Immunology’s
Web site, and “letters have been written to libraries and universities throughout the world asking them to ignore or ‘preferably to physically remove the relevant pages.’ “The journal’s editor, Nicole Suciou-Foca of Columbia University, claims “the article provoked such a welter of complaints over its extreme political writing that she was forced to repudiate it.” So as to remove any doubt about the journal’s political position, Arnaiz-Villena was sacked from it’s editorial board.

In the annals of the modern state, the practice of collective punishment is identified with colonialism and racism. It has involved abrogating notions of individual responsibility central to a rule of law in favor of collective responsibility for all political acts. In this vein, Alan M. Dershowitz, Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard, wrote in
The Jerusalem Post
, proposing the destruction of a Palestinian village in retaliation for every Palestinian act of resistance or terror: “It will be a morally acceptable trade-off even if the property of some innocent civilians must be sacrificed in the process.” As a professor of law, Dershowitz could not have been unaware of how article 6(b) of the 1945 Nuremberg Charter for the Trial of the Major Nazi War Criminals defines war crimes:
“namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, … wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages.”

Unlike crime, political acts make sense only when linked to collective grievances. Whether we define them as acts of terror or of resistance, we need to recognize a feature common to political acts: they appeal for popular support and are difficult to sustain in the absence of it. If there is a logic behind the practice of collective punishment, it is the acknowledgment that collective punishment can only be a response to political acts, not criminal deeds. Take the debate around the September 3, 2002, decision by the Israeli Supreme Court that the army could expel from the West Bank the brother and sister of a Palestinian militant accused of organizing a suicide bombing and send them to the Gaza Strip. Amnesty International argued that the “unlawful forcible transfer” of Palestinians under Israeli occupation constituted a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. More important than the legal reasoning by the nine-judge panel is the political rationale behind the decision. The
New York Times
recognized that this was part of a larger attempt to halt Palestinian suicide attacks.

Security trumps rights—in Israel when it comes to the rights of Palestinians, and in the United States when the rights in question are of groups stigmatized as terrorist. If the invasion of Afghanistan led to the internees in Guantánamo Bay, the invasion of Iraq has gone alongside a similar internment at Camp Cropper, on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport. None of its Iraqi prisoners—3,000 in August 2003—were charged with any offence. They were listed as suspected “looters” or “rioters” or simply as “loyal to Saddam Hussein.” The International Red Cross was allowed inside the camp, but its officials were barred from describing what they saw. However, some of the staff broke ranks to tell
Amnesty International of the conditions of daily life in Camp Cropper. Here is a composite description: “Each prisoner receives six pints of rank, tepid water a day. He uses it to wash and drink in summer noonday temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius. He is not allowed to wash his clothes. He is provided with a small cup of de-lousing powder to deal with the worst of his body infestation. For the slightest infringement of draconian rules he is forced to sit in painful positions. If he cries out in protest his head is covered with a sack for lengthy periods.” Camp Cropper also held a growing number of “special prisoners,” such as former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, the former speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, Saadium Hammadi, and Dr. Hudda Ammash, said to be a key member of Saddam’s chemical and biological program. According to one of the few prisoners released, Adnan Jassim, “Tariq Aziz has aged very much in the past months in the camp. He shuffles and has a stoop. This may be because he has to dig his own toilet. It is forbidden for anyone to help him to do this. He is treated just like anyone else—an animal to be driven wherever the guards want him.” Another former detainee, Qays Al Saiman, said, “The worst offenders had their hands tied behind their backs and were put face down on the ground in the sun for two hours.” According to a Red Cross visitor, the women, like the men, “are not allowed to wash their underwear—and several have developed unsightly sores.” Amnesty International said in June 2003 that the conditions in the camp “may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, banned by international law.” Such was daily life in America’s shameful Gulag until it was closed in October 2003 and its inmates were transferred, presumably to another detention facility.

If we are to find a way out of the dialectic of collective punishment and group resistance—and out of the cycle of terror in its
many forms, state and societal—we have no choice but to identify and address the politics that inform all sides of the debate.

The Settler and the Suicide Bomber

The violence of the settler and the suicide bomber, more than any other, has come to define the contemporary world of terrorism and counterterrorism. The debate on terrorism revolves around two poles, the cultural and the political. Culture Talk seeks the explanation for a deed in the culture of the doer. In contrast, Political Talk tends to explain the deed as a response to issues, to a political context of unaddressed grievances. Whereas I am more partial to political than to cultural explanations of political terror, I am also aware that both share a common predisposition: for both, political terror is an
inevitable
response, either in the grip of a premodern culture or in the face of terrible oppression. Neither point of view considers political terror an act of choice, and both lack a historical perspective. Cultural explanations ignore the specific issues that fuel conflict, while political explanations overlook the fact that the practice of terrorism over time leads to the development of an extremely short-term point of view and an amoral political culture that legitimizes the use of terror in the pursuit of worthy causes.

The debate on suicide bombing has brought out the cultural and political explanations of political terror. Stephen Schwartz’s article “Ground Zero and the Saudi Connection” is still the best-known example of an argument that tries both to disassociate the roots of terror from the cultural tradition of Islam and to locate it in one particular tradition within Islam. He begins with a politically correct posture: “The attacks of 11 September are simply not compatible with orthodox Muslim theology, which cautions
soldiers ‘in the way of Allah’ to fight their enemies face-to-face, without harming non-combatants, women or children.” Schwartz seeks the cultural roots of terrorism in “a strain of Islam”—Wahhabi Islam—a form of “stripped-down Islam” that “hate[s] ostentatious spirituality,” which emerged “less than two centuries ago” and is “violent,” “intolerant,” and “fanatical beyond measure.” A single example—“the Wahhabis fell upon the city of Karbala in 1801 and killed 2,000 ordinary citizens in the streets and markets”—suffices to establish the claim that “from the beginning” this “cult was associated with the mass murder of all who opposed it.” Then follows his own stripped-down conclusion: “all Muslim suicide bombers are Wahhabis,” immediately followed by an afterthought: “except, perhaps, for some disciples of atheist leftists posing as Muslims in the interests of personal power, such as Yasser Arafat or Saddam Hussein.” Undeterred, our author continues: “Bin Laden is a Wahhabi. So are the suicide bombers in Israel. So are his Egyptian allies. So are the Algerian Islamic terrorists. So are the Taleban-style guerrillas in Kashmir.” One has the impression that Schwartz is here talking of terrorists as if they were victims of a premodern tradition that had seized hold of them almost as would a tropical or desert fever. To the extent that “culture” becomes a code word for describing certain peoples by ascribing to them a set of unchanging attributes, it functions as a latterday counterpart of race talk.