Blood and the Covenant

Terrorism can be defined as the use of fear to achieve some end. This end can be political, territorial, religious, ideological, etc. Often there is no easily identifiable end: terrorism can be purely primitive and the perpetrator may just be very pissed off. Rightly or wrongly he may see himself as the victim and the object of his rage as his actual or symbolic oppressor. There are uncountable acts of terrorism every day, all around us. The man who points a gun at someone and says, “Your money or your life” is a terrorist; so are the schoolyard bully, the violent husband the sadistic cop, the brutal pimp, and so on. Most acts of terrorism do not make the newspaper headlines: only the more egregious, spectacular and consequential ones are reported. Sometimes a certain amount of terrorism is understandable, even beneficial: the fear of imprisonment by a potential criminal is a good thing; so is the fear of punishment by a rebellious and undisciplined child. A maxim of English common law is “the king can do no harm,” which means that the state cannot be held accountable for injury it may inflict on a citizen. Fortunately this canon has by now lost most of its force: the king can, indeed, do harm, as can the court, the general, the pope, the imam, the rabbi – there is no end to this list. There is no reason to call a suicide bomber a terrorist, but not so a pilot dumping fragmentation bombs or phosphorous bombs on a town. It makes no sense to call a bombing by an organization such as al Qaeda or Hamas an act of terrorism, but not the bombing or shelling of a hospital or a UN observation post by Israeli forces. That state terrorism exists can easily be established: Ben Gurion, Begin, Rabin, Shamir and others accepted terrorism as a legitimate tactic and strategy for the Zionist enterprise, and practiced it themselves as leaders of the Irgun and the LEHI (Stern Group). It is commonly accepted by both Jewish and Gentile historians that the Haganah, the semi-official army of the Zionists, with the assistance of the Irgun, the LEHI and its own special rangers, the Palma, committed acts more than a dozen Arab towns, the most famous of which was Deir Yassin. Among the outrages committed during that campaign, people were lined up against walls and shot in cold blood. The intended consequence was that thousands of Arabs flew in panic and the areas around the massacred towns were taken over by the Israelis. On May 14, 1948, Israel proclaimed itself a sovereign state and was almost immediately recognized by the US and Russia. On May 17, 1949, Israel was admitted into the United Nations, which implies that it accepted the institution’s charter as binding. The Haganah became the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) but the series of massacres and ethnic cleansings mentioned above continued. If the actions of the Haganah constituted terrorism, then the similar actions of the IDF after May 14, 1948 also constituted terrorism. But now, since the IDF was the official armed force of the Sovereign State of Israel, the latter can be qualified as a terrorist state. In 2001, after the World Trade Center bombing, President H.W. Bush declared that “Those who help terrorists are equally guilty of terrorism” – a self-incriminating statement, considering the role of the US in terrorist activities in Guatemala, Chile, Honduras, El Salvador and a few other places. This accusation has been paraphrased into such assertions as, “If you harbor a terrorist, you’re a terrorist” and “If you finance a terrorist, you’re a terrorist.” The underlying proposition of all these we may call the Bush Principle, one of the very few Bush propositions I agree with completely. Now, Britain, France and the US supported all the IDF actions mentioned above. Therefore, by the Bush principle, Britain, France and the US are terrorist states to the extent that Israel is a terrorist state. Considering that from 1985 to2005 the US gave, on average, $3.2 billion in Outright grants to Israel, and considering that the US used its veto to annul more than 30 Security Council resolutions against Israell, it is reasonable to call the relation between the two countries an axis. Since one of its main consequences is the unjust oppression of another people, the Palestinian Arabs, I suggest we call it the axis of injustice.