Wholesale terrorism escalates: the threat of genocide.

• Author: Herman, Edward S.

FOR DECADES IT HAS BEEN THE STANDARD practice of the U.S. mainstream media to designate Palestinian attacks on Israelis as acts of "terrorism," whereas acts of Israeli violence against Palestinians are described as "retaliation" and "counter-terror." This linguistic asymmetry has been based entirely on political bias. Virtually all definitions of terrorism, if applied on a nonpolitical basis, would find a wide array of Israeli operations and acts of violence straightforward terrorism. Thus, a standard dictionary definition calls terrorism "a mode of governing, or of opposing government, by intimidation." A U.S. government definition describes it as "a violent act intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population." Benjamin Netanyahu himself defines terrorism as "the deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing to inspire fear for political ends." (1)

That Israel's use of force against Palestinians regularly fits these definitions is crystal clear. This was even openly admitted by former Israeli U.N. Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abba Eban in a response to a letter published in the Israeli press by Prime Minister Menahem Begin in August 1981. Begin had railed against the hypocritical Labor Alignment's criticisms of his bombing of Beirut in that year, which had killed hundreds of civilians, by giving a "partial list" of 30 civilian sites bombed by Labor governments. Begin pointed out that these attacks had regularly inflicted casualties on "Arab civilian populations." (2) Eban replied harshly to Begin, but not only did he not deny Begin's facts, he went on to say that deliberate attacks on civilians were defensible when serving larger ends, as when "there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that afflicted populations [i.e., innocent civilians deliberately bombed] would exert pressure on governments for the cessation of hostilities." (3)

Eban's statement, which admits and justifies deliberate bombing of civilians to intimidate, and which fits both the U.S. official definition and Netanyahu's definition of terrorism as well, was never quoted in the New York Times or any other U.S. mainstream media institution. But it, plus Begin's statement, constitute open acknowledgement by the Israeli leadership that Israel has engaged in serious terrorism and is a terrorist state. This was also admitted by Israeli Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur, who pointed out back in 1978 that for years Israel has been "fighting against a population that lives in villages and cities," citing as examples bombardments that cleared the Jordan Valley of all inhabitants and others that drove a million and a half people from the Suez Canal region. (4) Israeli military analyst Deev Schiff summarized Gur's remarks as follows: "In South Lebanon we struck the civilian population consciously, because they deserved it...[T]he importance of Gur's remarks is the admission that the Israe li army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously...the army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets...[but] purposely attacked civilian targets even when Israeli settlements had not been struck." (5)

The Diary of former Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett is another source of evidence that Israel has deliberately targeted civilians, taking advantage of its military superiority and the knowledge that the friendly Western governments and servile U.S. and other Western media would look the other way. Sharett claimed that there were repeated unprovoked attacks across borders designed to destabilize neighboring countries and provoke military responses to which Israel could then answer with escalated violence. Sharett was a relative dove, and was shaken by the ruthlessness of the Israeli military establishment--"the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and so many clashes we have provoked," the "narrow-mindedness and short-sightedness of our military leaders,... [who] seem to presume that the State of Israel may--or even must--behave in the realm of international relations according to the law of the jungle." (6) Sharett himself referred to this long effort as Israel's "sacred terror ism." But again, Sharett's diary is not a favored source of the New York Times or Washington Post, and for them and their media colleagues Israel has never engaged in terrorism, sacred or otherwise.

The admission of actions that fit the definition of terrorism occurs even today--Ariel Sharon told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on March 5, 2002, "Don't expect Arafat to act against the terror. We have to cause them heavy casualties and then they'll know they can't keep using terror and win political achievements." He was also quoted as saying that the Palestinians must be "hit hard until they beg for mercy." This brings him close to Eban's 1981 statement that "afflicted populations" attacked by Israel might exert pressure to force their governments to terminate hostile actions. It never occurred to Eban and it does not worry Sharon that the attacking of civilian populations and inflicting "heavy casualties" on them is itself terrorism; they leave it to their Western apologists to make it clear that only their victims terrorize; they merely retaliate.

Sharett was wrong; in a laudatory article on General Ariel Sharon in the New York Times Magazine of October 18, 1981, Amos Perlmutter claimed that the slaughter at Qibya was based on knowledge of where terrorists came from, and was a genuine retaliation, an outright fabrication. Even more interesting is the fact that over the last twenty years at least, mentions of Sharon in the New York Times have never cited Qibya, a clear case of a civilian massacre, with numbers killed greater than the more problematic Racak massacre of January 15, 1999, and with most of victims at Qibya women and children, in contrast with Racak, an incident that was used to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia. (8)

Interestingly, and relevant to the...