Israel and the Palestinians: terrorism and resistance - World

Catholic New Times, Nov 3, 2002 by Jeff Halper

Terrorism is a frightful and immoral thing. It takes innocent lives and, by its nature, it violates the most fundamental human right of all: the right to life. As Amnesty International puts it: "A fundamental principle of international humanitarian law is that parties involved in a conflict must, at all times, distinguish between civilians and combatants, and between civilian objects and military objectives." It is not permitted to target civilians, that is, people who are not members of the armed forces of either side.

This principle, known as the "principle of distinction," is codified in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their two Additional Protocols of 1977.

What happens, though, when someone's life is controlled by an overwhelmingly superior power that denies them the basic conditions of life? What happens when the right to life of the members of the oppressing society clashes with the fundamental rights of the oppressed: their right to an identity, to a country, to self-determination, their personal well-being and the well-being of their families, to a home, to property, to personal safety, to respect and, in the end, to life without the threat of violence by the dominant power?

International law recognizes the right of the oppressed people to resist. But are there forms of resistance that are illegitimate, like terrorism? The response, according to Amnesty and the Red Cross, is an unequivocal "yes." In their recent report, "Without Distinction," which deals with attacks on Israeli civilians by armed Palestinian groups, Amnesty asserted that "attacks on civilians are not permitted under any internationally recognized standard of law, whether they are committed in the context of a struggle against military occupation or any other context. Not only are such attacks considered murder under general principles of law in every national legal system, but they are contrary to the fundamental principles of humanity that are reflected in international humanitarian law."

What the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows graphically is that the issue of terrorism cannot be divorced from its larger political and military context, nor can the call for an end to terrorism by Palestinians be separated from the call that Israel do the same. Holding Palestinians accountable to international humanitarian law must then be a double-edged sword, holding Israel accountable as well. If Palestinians are forbidden to engage in terrorism so too is Israel forbidden to employ the two forms of terror implicit in an occupation and in the measures required to maintain it: systematic and massive violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention protecting civilians living under occupation, and state terror embodied in Israel's indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations. If terrorism is evil, as U.S. president; George W. Bush repeatedly states, then the equally illegal terrorism of the powerful cannot be dismissed as mere "collateral damage." Adherence to international law cannot be selective. The United States and Israel cannot oppose the International Criminal Court and still argue that terrorism is unacceptable.

The acts of terrorism most condemned by the United States and by other states are those acts of non-state actors in which the legitimate resistance of oppressed peoples to their oppression gets tragically lumped with the loony and pointless terrorism of Osama bin Laden, "Carlos the Jackal," and other professional terrorists. Cruel as it is, this "terrorism from below" is small-scale when compared with the massive "terrorism from above" of states. With the exception of 2001, bin Laden has claimed fewer than 1,000 victims per year worldwide, while the killing of civilians by states reaches into the hundreds of thousands. This is why Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Burmese generals, the Chinese Politburo and other interested state actors frame their "war against terrorism" in solely moralistic terms ("axis of evil") or as self-defence rather than in terms of human rights.

The Palestinians' need to resort to terrorism raises questions of fundamental fairness. One cannot expect a people to suffer oppression forever, to abrogate their own human rights in favour of those rights of others. One cannot deny the protection of international law to oppressed peoples, while demanding that they comply with international law when it suits the purposes of their oppressors. Equality before the law and the universality of human rights, as well as obligations, must guide us all. The international community may condemn Palestinian terrorism only if the legitimate avenues for throwing off the occupation and securing their rights to self-determination are made available to them, Israel and the United States refused to base the Oslo negotiations on international law because they knew that every element of the occupation was illegal and that Israel would lose. Instead, Oslo was based on power negotiations. Not only did they prejudice the outcome from the start, but they allowed Israel to strengthen its occupation to continue its violation of international law, even as it was engaged in negotiations.