Via Sullivan, Nir Rosen puts the Gaza fighting - and the word “terrorism” itself - in perspective:
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.
Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition.
None of which is intended to justify Hamas’ rocket attacks into Israel. But why is it always that when one side kills civilians, it’s horrible and wrong; when the other side kills civilians, it’s understandable and, sure, perhaps regrettable but necessary.
Been following the Israeli pounding of Gaza, which follows Hamas sending rockets into Israel after the cease-fire ended. Israel flattened a mosque today; that will trigger some very bloody retaliation.
Not sure what to think of all this, though I suspect Megan McArdle gets as close to right as possible:
I’ve heard all the arguments about who’s really to blame about a zillion times. And all I get out of it in the end is that the whole thing makes me sick and sad. I don’t see any untainted victims. I see a bunch of people who have been stomped on by history beating up each other in revenge for past wrongs that can’t be righted, lashing out whenever they think they can get away with it without losing the foreign funding that allows them to continue the fun.
I always think of it in terms of dead kids. You kill my kid with that rifle/suicide attack/bombing run? I’ma gonna kill your kid. And so the cycle continues.
