sending suicide bombers into Israel." But big powers, too, can use terror. Dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima was a terrorist act, designed to frighten the Japanese population into demanding that their government surrender. So was the Nazi blitz on London and the British bombing of Dresden. Churchill and Hitler were as different as day and night, but they used the same method.
Israel has used this method from the day of its inception. In the early 1950s the IDF committed "retaliation raids" designed to frighten the villagers beyond the border in order to induce them to put pressure on the Jordanian and Egyptian governments to prevent the infiltration of Palestinians into Israel. During the War of Attrition in the late 1960s, Moshe Dayan terrorized half a million inhabitants of the Egyptian towns along the Suez Canal into fleeing, so as to put pressure on the Egyptian president to stop attacking Israeli strongholds along the Canal. In the 1996 "Grapes of Wrath" operation, Prime Minister Shimon Peres terrorized half a million inhabitants of South Lebanon by aerial bombardment into fleeing north, in order to pressurize the Beirut government into stopping the Shi'ite guerrillas from attacking the Israeli occupation force and its mercenaries. It is the same method that is used in the army when a commander punishes all the soldiers in a company, so that they will turn against the one who made him angry.
The trouble is, it does not work in conflicts between nations. Generally, it is counterproductive. The Taliban have not turned bin Laden over but have become more extreme in their opposition to America. The IDF blockade against Palestinian villages, which this week denied them water and food, does not isolate the "terrorists," but on the contrary, turns them into national heroes. The devastation caused by the Russians in Chechnya did not break-indeed, it strengthened-the opposing guerrilla forces.
Since terrorism is always a political instrument, the right way to combat it is always political. Solve the problem that breeds terrorism and you get rid of the terrorism.
Solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem and the other flash points in the Middle East, and you get rid of al-Qaida. It will wilt like a flower deprived of water.
No one has yet devised another method.
January 29, 2005
Perhaps the Second Intifada has come to an end. Perhaps the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip will develop into a general, mutual ceasefire.