This is a response to the posts by Jodi Kantor and Emily Yoffe in Monday’s “Breakfast Table.”
Emily Yoffe and I seem to agree that Israel is partly the issue, but that radical Islamic terrorists clearly have much broader goals. Yoffe notes that Osama Bin Laden listed three causes in his 1998 fatwah; Israel was the third. Did Bin Laden list these reasons in order of estimated overall hatred? Or was he more accurate when he told ABC’s John Miller: “The fatwah is general (comprehensive) and it includes all those who participate in, or help the Jewish occupiers in killing Muslims”?
The answer is that it doesn’t matter whether Israel is Bin Laden’s Grievance #1 or Grievance #3 or Grievance #7. The key issue isn’t the relative motives of Bin Laden himself, or even the motives of his cadres. (Though I note that the plotters in an earlier Bin Laden scheme to blow up and crash airliners gave as their grievance “the U.S. government’s financial and military support of the Jewish state.”) The issue is what will motivate the potential recruits who might fill out the ranks of Bin Laden’s organization, or other similar organizations, in the coming years. This is a long-term struggle, right?
It’s hard to believe that what starts many of these people on their road to radicalization isn’t anger over the Palestinian issue, and that even partially defusing that issue won’t reduce the number of Arab and Islamic men who wind up as terrorists. Bin Laden himself, in his latest fax, seemed to recognize the recruiting value of the Israel grievance when he noted the need for “martyrs in the battle of Islam in this era against the new Jewish and Christian crusader campaign …”
The obvious (to me!) analogy is the Vietnam War. In the 1960s, we student radicals issued lots of manifestos saying the real issue wasn’t Vietnam, or the draft, but something bigger. We opposed the whole capitalist system! But when the draft ended and the Vietnam War wound down, the radical student movement withered into insignificance.
I’m not saying radical Islam will wither and die if the PLO signs a treaty. (Nor do I have anything especially useful to say about the timing of such a treaty or how much each side needs to be pressured at any given point.) I’m saying the Israel-Palestinian conflict contributes “a non-trivial amount” to building radical Islamic terrorist movements, so that a resolution of the conflict will help.
Yoffe and Kantor dispute that. First, they note that the “terrorists don’t want a peace deal between Israel and the PLO!” That’s true, of course, and any deal will undoubtedly be accompanied in the short run by terrorist attacks intending to disrupt it. One reason the terrorists don’t want a deal, though, may be that they realize their grassroots support will shrink considerably in its wake. (Indeed, if Bin Laden hates the idea of an Israel-PLO peace, why would achieving it be appeasing him?)
But the issue is, again, the long-run. If there’s a Palestinian state, recognized by the U.S. and Israel, with its own institutions, will animus toward Israel and the U.S. really remain undiminished? True, as Kantor argues, there might, be “a whole new round of grievances: over borders, surveillance, water rights, and who knows what else.” And to the extent that countries and cultures that fail at modernity need to find scapegoats, America and Israel will still be available. On the other hand, the Palestinian entity will have its own internal problems to worry about, and it will presumably become increasingly enmeshed in trade with its neighbors, including Israel. There’s a chance the hate-filled official propaganda–in the West Bank and the rest of the Arab world–will at least be toned down, so schoolchildren won’t grow up with the notion that martyrdom is a smart career choice.
There may always be people who hate America so much they are willing to give their lives to kill us. But it helps if there are fewer of them. So it matters if the families of suicide bombers are shunned or are rewarded (figuratively or literally) with cakes and cash from their neighbors.
And Kantor and Yoffe have no answer at all to the possibly-more-important point raised by Jacob Weisberg: that an Israel-PLO “settlement could remove a thorn from the paw of the moderate Arab states, making it easier for them to maintain public support while supporting our military campaign” against the Bin Ladens of the world.
Weisberg does worry that since many “moderate” Arab and Muslim states have “milked Palestinian grievances” to prop themselves up, “pulling the thorn from the paw might also remove one of the pillars holding up several unstable regimes.” But is it so terrible if Egyptian President Mubarak has to address the stagnant living standards of his people, or the antidemocratic qualities of his regime, instead of letting Israel be a lightning rod?
Even the worst outcome–a new fundamentalist state in the region–might not be that bad, in the long run. We know from Iran that Islamic fundamentalism can be moderated from within, as the hardships inherent in withdrawing from the modern world become wearying and the population realizes there are causes for its problems other than Israel and America. When an ideology collapses from within (as communism did) it dies in a way it doesn’t if it’s simply suppressed from without. In the meantime, a fundamentalist state–whose terror will have a “return address”–can be deterred militarily, like any other state.
