Back in June 1984, Secretary of State George P. Shultz spoke at a conference on international terrorism sponsored by the Israel-based Jonathan Institute.
Founded that year by a then-unknown Benjamin Netanyahu, and named after his brother, who died in the 1976 Entebbe raid, the institute was ostensibly a non-partisan shop concerned with the scourge of terrorism. In reality, the Jonathan Institute advocated for a highly partisan definition of terrorism that primarily singled out Palestinians. Moreover, it presented terrorism as a uniquely threatening and essentializing force.
Whereas — this being the Cold War — the possibility of a nuclear war with the USSR and state-led wars in general were traditionally cited as the number one threat to the Western world, Netanyahu sought to pivot to terrorism as the biggest threat. And while terrorism was long viewed as a tactic adopted by countless parties of different political stripes, Netanyahu positioned terrorism as an essential feature that conferred automatic delegitimacy on any cause accused of using terrorist tactics.
In his address, Shultz conveyed this new Israel-centric view when he denounced the so-called ‘League of Terror’, citing Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Libya — and, of course, the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Shultz condemned the “insidious claim that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,'” but then went on to do precisely that when he conveyed support for the “resistance fighters in Afghanistan … [and] the Contras in Nicaragua,” claiming they do not engage in attacks on civilians.
The U.S.-aligned Contras were, by any reasonable definition, a terrorist organization that engaged in numerous disappearances of civilians as early as 1980 — four years before Shultz stated that the Contras do not “hold mass executions of civilians.”
And, as Amnesty International has reported on the Afghanistan War, “Anti-government groups also carried out torture and executions, including the alleged beheading of captured government and Soviet soldiers, and of civilians accused of supporting the government, after ‘trials’ by these armed groups.”
It’s noteworthy that Shultz said nothing about anti-Castro militants engaged in acts of terrorism, such as airline hijackings. For Shultz was fully onboard with Netanyahu’s agenda: delegitimize all organizations whose political goals do not align with Israel and its patron, the U.S.
“Terrorism” is a contentious term, but the baseline definition is attacks on civilians for political ends. Such a definition should be applied without consideration of any political agendas. But Netanyahu was not interested in a universal condemnation of political violence, but solely in instrumentalizing this definition to brand all Palestinian resistance as terrorism and therefore Palestinian political aspirations as unworthy of support.
This same tactic carries on to this day. Even explicitly non-violent Palestinian resistance, such as BDS, is often derided by Zionists as “cultural terrorism” against Israel.
The irony, of course, is that it is not only non-state actors who engage in terrorism, but states as well (something Shultz recognizes in his citing of several states, including the USSR’s alleged support for so-called terrorist organizations). Israel has engaged in numerous acts of state terrorism through espionage and sabotage.
For decades, the Mossad has engaged in targeted assassinations not just of Palestinian militants, but writers (Ghassan Kanafani), scientists in the Arab world (because only Israel is permitted to have nuclear weapons), scholars (Anis Sayigh, who headed the Palestine Research Center when he received a letter bomb in 1972), and plenty of other Palestinians civilians whose sole offense was daring to document their people’s history and struggle.
Israel’s terrorism has also included false flag operations against Western targets designed to make it look like Arab terrorism. Consider the well-documented Lavon affair, and here I will cite the official IDF archives:
“The Lavon affair refers to a failed Israeli covert operation, codenamed Operation Susannah, conducted in Egypt in the summer of 1954. As part of the false flag operation, a group of Egyptian Jews were recruited by Israeli military intelligence to plant bombs inside Egyptian, American, and British-owned civilian targets: cinemas, libraries and American educational centers. The bombs were timed to detonate several hours after closing time. The attacks were to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian Communists, “unspecified malcontents,” or “local nationalists.”” [Emphasis mine.]
And, ironically, while no country has done more to popularize terrorism as the ultimate scourge — an utterly self-serving agenda — it is the Zionists who are the pioneers of terrorism in the Middle East. Terrorism was essential to the birth of Israel:
In the late 1930s, the Irgun carried out a number of terrorist-style attacks on Palestinian Arabs. […] The combined application of the Irgun”s and Stern Gang”s strategies of chaos worked; they had eroded British control of Palestine to the point where it was ungovernable. This was one of the major factors that influenced the British decision in September 1947 to abandon the Palestine Mandate. […] To enhance their armed and propaganda struggles the Irgun and the Stern Gang also extended their terrorist campaign abroad. On 31 October 1946, the Irgun set off a large “suitcase bomb” at the British embassy in Rome, causing extensive damage.
Lastly, Israeli settlers and IDF troops engage in near-daily terrorization of Palestinians to expel them from their homes.
Israel’s hypocrisy was recently underlined, once more, after the IDF announced it would no longer classify Jewish settler terrorism as terrorism.
Given this history and present-day Israeli terrorism, it is long past time for the media and press to stop treating Israeli officials, public and private, as authorities on terrorism since they are merely playing a game of projection designed to undermine the Palestinians’ rightful claims to self-determination.
Further Reading: The Roots of Zionist Terrorism
