Why terrorism works

How should the international community have reacted to Palestinian terrorism? Should they never have negotiated with the Palestinians, despite their suffering and despite legitimate claims?

Start in the beginning. It's very simple how they should have reacted. The cause should have been set back, not pushed forward. They should have been kept out of the United Nations, the way the Kurds and the other groups were kept out. Look what happened just the other day. The Basque Party was kicked out of the Parliament in Spain as punishment because the Parliament believes that the Basque Party uses terrorism to further their ends. That is a very effective tactic: You use terrorism, you are not part of the political system.

You never, ever push their cause forward, and that's what we've done. The message that seems to have been sent after, particularly, Munich is "My God, they're willing to kill so many innocent people, they must have one hell of a cause." And that's a complete non sequitur. The Jews who were subject to the Holocaust didn't try to terrorize German babies or children; the French underground was very careful in who they directed their attacks at. There's a famous story about Russian revolutionaries who refused to throw a bomb because a child was in the car. But Palestinian terrorism has been promiscuous, going after the softest targets. Instead of saying that this is a cause that shows us that they deserve to be set back for using terrorism, we push them forward.

A lot of people would argue that, especially recently, Israel does retaliate. Israel punishes the Palestinians for their terrorist acts -- they demolish someone's home, they target specific terrorists, they shut down cities. But it hasn't stopped the violence at all. In fact, it's gotten worse.

I agree with that. That's not a particularly effective way of dealing with it.

So what are they doing wrong?

Israel doesn't have a lot of options. It's not the international community. Palestinian terrorism has to be stopped by the European community but because the European community hasn't done that, Israel is forced into a position where it has to retaliate. Israel always overreacts. Every democracy overreacts to terrorism. That's part of the ploy of terrorism.

Think about what happened after the Camp David accords failed. The Palestinians had been offered 93 percent or something of what they wanted and they turned it down and they were actually looked at very negatively by the European community. So they decided to play the terrorist card again. What happened? You blow up a couple of Israeli children and Israel's going to overreact. As soon as Israel overreacts, the European community hates Israel and begins to love the Palestinians. They're able to change the dynamic very quickly by using a tactic -- terrorism -- which they know will cause a democracy to overreact. The United States overreacts, Israel overreacts, Britain overreacts, Canada overreacted in 1970 -- you can always count on a democracy overreacting to terrorism and thereby getting the moral low ground in the world community because the world community then says it's a "cycle of violence." And they create this metaphor of moral equivalence.

I have to tell you the worst offender of moral equivalence has been the Vatican, which simply fails to understand the difference between democracies that fight back against terrorism and terrorists who target babies and children. I just can't imagine the pope, who met seven times with Arafat, being willing to meet seven times with other killers. It's sent a message: You can kill, you can blow up airplanes and you will still be greeted by the man who's supposed to represent the greatest international morality in the world.

It seems that the moral equivalence stems from the fact that Israel does kill civilians. Israel has an army, the Palestinians do not. More Palestinians have died.

Inevitably, but look. Compare what Jordan did: In one month, it murdered 20,000 Palestinians. Israel, in 55 years of fighting the Palestinians, has killed a tiny fraction of that 20,000, much of it in warfare, many of them guilty. The number of civilians killed by Israel is probably the smallest of any country in the modern world. Compare the number of civilians that Israel killed with the number of civilians the United States killed in Vietnam. Compare it to the number the United States killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Compare it with the number that the British killed in the firebombing in Dresden. No country has ever fought a war, certainly in modern times, where fewer civilians have been killed. Israel has never, for example, bombed a city. It always sends in its troops to do it retail, like in Jenin, where 23 Israeli soldiers were killed, along with 50 or 60 Palestinians. When the police fight criminals, you certainly don't expect equivalence. You don't expect one policeman to be killed for every criminal. You expect that there would be a much, much higher rate of death among the criminals than there is among the policeman.

Now, I'm not defending Israel in everything it's done, obviously. It has overreacted. I was very much against sending that bomb to kill the terrorist in Gaza, which resulted in 14 innocent people being killed. It should never have been done. The first to say that was the Israeli government, which condemned the activity and had an investigation. It's terrible when a young child is killed in a crossfire. But when that happened, everybody in Israel, and most Americans, were crying. When a kid is deliberately killed in Israel, Palestinians cheer. That's a big difference morally. You can't have a moral equivalence there, and I think that's what causes terrorism. The moral success of Palestinian terrorism is what led Osama bin Laden to calculate that he will get tremendous support around the world for Sept. 11.

It's still hard to think that the Palestinians have been rewarded for terrorism. You don't think that Palestinian violence has ultimately hurt their cause for statehood by pushing legitimate political demands to the side?

No, I think it's brought them closer to it. Probably they miscalculated in the end. Had they accepted the Camp David accords, they would have used terrorism effectively to get themselves a state. They may now have overreacted. Remember that Arafat was Sharon's campaign manager; he got him elected. And so the terrorism resulted in a very tough regime being installed in Israel. So it may have backfired.

Do you believe in Palestinian statehood?

I do. I believe in Kurdish statehood. I believe in Tibetan statehood. I don't think that Palestinian statehood comes first.

Is there really a continuum from Palestinian terrorism to Sept. 11? Do you distinguish between Palestinian and Islamist terrorism? You do say that Palestinian terrorism is secular and limited to Israel, whereas --

It's changing now, of course, it's not all secular. Hamas is not secular and Hezbollah is not secular, but most of it is and it has a particular goal. They can turn it on and turn it off. It's rational in a perverse way.

Whereas Sept. 11 was apocalyptic terrorism. But why do you believe that Palestinian terrorism was the precedent for Sept. 11? You write that Sept. 11 was inevitable.

I have no question about that. I don't think anybody would have imagined doing Sept. 11 without the history of Palestinian terrorism behind them. Of course, Osama bin Laden invokes the Palestinians. We know who the people were who did Sept. 11 -- they were fairly well-educated, fairly well-off, mostly Saudis, few Egyptians, and they were apocalyptic and religious.

It's much harder to control that [than Palestinian terrorism] because you can't deter and disincentivize that. You can't say I'm setting back the cause; their cause is an otherworldly one. You can't persuade them that their reading of the Quran is wrong. We can't, anyway. The only thing we can do to prevent the occurrence of al-Qaida terrorism is to not try to give in to their demands or understand them, but to try to prevent them and disrupt them. There we have to use only military tactics.

Now that Palestinian terrorism has been going on for 35 years, and in your view, successfully, is it too late to implement this strategy and send the message that terrorism will no longer be rewarded?

No. This is how I think it should be done. It should be done by announcing that there will be a Palestinian state within, say, two or three years, and then say that timetable and the amount of land that they get will be a function of whether or not terrorism stops. You have to reward the ending of terrorism, rather than terrorism itself. That's what's going on in Northern Ireland. Gerry Adams has now said that they've ended terrorism. He's being rewarded for that. That's what happened in South Africa; Mandela ended terrorism. The Palestinian state has to be created as a reward for the end of terrorism. The United States, Israel and the European community should announce a Palestinian state in the year 2005 but [on the condition that] there has to be two consecutive years of no Palestinian Authority-sanctioned or sponsored terrorism.

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