Cease fire!

Since 9/11 the United States has acted with far less concern than ever about the rule of law. It does because it can and possibly while it can. It may not be the world's hyperpower forever. Its war on terror has been a vehicle for installing a new world order that often sounds like a new world disorder. The arrogance of the attempt to sort out the Middle East by force of arms in the invasion of Iraq simply beggars belief.

In the lee of the United States' bold ventures into gunboat diplomacy on a grand scale, Israel has had a free hand to adopt similar tactics in dealing with its own problems. Law, justice and the obligations of states have been jettisoned shamelessly. Perhaps the most appalling instance has been the bombing of the homes of suicide bombers in Gaza. In which civilised country would the state suppress crime by bombing residences of persons presumed innocent until they are found guilty?

But what about the terrorists? It is all very well for me to pontificate while living in a country where riding a bus has become little more than a rare treat for children and not a life-threatening necessity. I live in a country that has known only peace since World War II. My grandparents died at home and not in a Nazi death camp. I am often invited to shut up and leave the slaughter to those who have lived with the smell of blood and burning in their nostrils for 60 years. I will not shut up. I know what it is like to live in peace and they do not. I know what is at stake and they appear unable to appreciate it, they are so used to the other thing, the other way of thinking: force before reason. The utterances of their politicians and even of their ambassadors reveal their detachment from common values. Their thinking is a menace to themselves and to all others. Terrorists, properly so called, are outlaws, criminals, indeed international criminals, pirates, the enemies of mankind. Having no hope of conquering and holding territory, they have no need to attack military targets. Striking the civilian population achieves their aims better than blowing up military installations. Their aim is to terrorise. It was the symbolic value of the twin towers that made them a target. If states adopt their tactics to combat them, they commit state terrorism and justify the terrorists instead of defeating them. Terrorists too also do because they can. They tell themselves that it is the only way they can. Blasphemously they tell themselves that their religion justifies the horror, that they are giving their lives in a fight against ultimate evil and that they will be martyrs. Their strategists know that in every bombing they make obvious the vulnerability of an interconnected and an increasingly vulnerable world. Nobody is safe.

They are terrorising the world. You do not have to ride a bus in Tel Aviv to be at risk. We are all smelling the blood and the burning. As we panic and shed civil liberties, the core values of our civilisation, the terrorists make further inroads, win more than they can ever hope to do by bombing us. There can be no war on terror in terms of law, wars are only fought between states. The war on terror is a political metaphor that allows the states involved to persuade their populations that a state of emergency exists and that political actions normally unacceptable must be supported. It is very easily done when the bombs are exploding and people are dying. The media is a great help both to states and to terrorists. The war on terror metaphor is a great advantage to anyone seeking the self-destruction of Western civilisation.

No state has ever won against terrorism by military means alone. It is impossible. While denying a terrorist organisation the free use of a territory is evidently an advantage to the state involved, it never ends the conflict, it moves it elsewhere. What brings terrorism to an end is the defeat of its raison d'être, its philosophy, the beliefs and justifications that allow it a network of support, often within the targeted population itself.

So far it is force of every kind that has been employed. Alone, it is doomed to fail. The sledgehammer approach clearly does more harm than good: the deaths and devastation extend the rancour and the conflict in space and time.

They make it all the harder to begin the assault on the underlying terrorist philosophy. It makes the targets deaf. It robs the state of the necessary credibility. The one crucial weapon in the conflict, belief, remains in the hands of the terrorists. Israel has invaded Lebanon devastating its infrastructure, killing its citizens and wrecking its economy in order to rid itself of the Hizbollah and to send a message to all its neighbours that it can and it will. It has been a disaster. While Lebanese civilians have been the principal victims of the conflict and will continue to suffer from its effects for decades, the Hizbollah have become regional heroes, stopping the feared Israeli army in its tracks and inflicting harrowing losses upon it such as the 39 tanks destroyed in one day of fighting. The display of Israel's ability to destroy bridges, power stations, port facilities and hospitals was no news. The loss of its reputation of invincibility on the ground is a disaster strengthening the hand of extremists across the region, strengthening belief in their cause. It places Israel in greater danger, increases its fear and raises the potential for further conflict. The root causes remain unaddressed.

What about Israeli victims? They too are human. Every one of them of infinite value, a human life. The toll is always infinite whether it is told in ones and twos, hundreds or in hundreds of thousands. It is always unjustified. It is always a crime. Just as the deaths of their enemies are a sinful crime. Avenging the taking of two prisoners by causing the death of hundreds on both sides makes less sense every day. Every day the need to talk and to transform terrorists into politicians becomes clearer. Israel is founded on such a transformation; it should know how to pull it off.

Israel remains a failed experiment, a byproduct of the Nazi horror, an alien bridgehead in the Middle East. Unless and until it can relate to its neighbours by spreading a web of reciprocal interests with all of them such that any threat to the fabric is necessarily painful to all, Israel will remain under threat, insecure, fearful and consequently dangerous. It will continue to rely on military might and to instill fear in its neighbours, hatred in its victims and to pollute the region with the perverse morality of revenge.

It is unquestionably in Israel's interest that Palestinians should have a viable, functioning state of their own as soon as possible. To demand that any solution or any proposal should please everybody to such an extent that all terrorist action will cease is to prevent the first step towards a solution. Perhaps the latest incursion into Lebanon can have one positive effect if it allows Israeli politicians to abandon the stance they have insisted upon up to now in negotiations with Palestinians. Achieving a settlement is itself the greatest possible victory available against terrorism. It would rob the terrorists and their sponsors of their strongest foundation.

It will not end terrorism. There will always be the irreducibles. To wait for them to give up before engaging with the core problem is to leave the initiative with them, to allow them to dictate the perpetuation of conflict. As long as Israel believed in its own overwhelming military power, it did because it could. Today it may see the need to do what it should in order to bind all others to the rule of law. Israel's security depends less on its ability to blow up any facility anywhere in the Middle East than on its ability to weave a web of interests giving every family in the Middle East something to lose, an economic future, the fruits of peaceful co-existence. Is the US watching?

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.

www.alternattiva.org.mt

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