(From Al-Ahram Weekly on line,

After seven weeks of brutal war against the Palestinians, Israel believes

it has softened up the so-called "infrastructure of terrorism" enough to

pave the way for a pax Israeliana. To set the stage, Israeli Prime Minister

Ariel Sharon has come up with an open-ended list of preconditions that must

be fulfilled before agreeing to negotiations. Foremost among these is the

demand to end "violence" or the Palestinian Intifada. For 20 months,

Palestinian human bombs have been the centre-piece of the Intifada. They

have presented the only weapon that Israel's entire arsenal of lethal

American armament couldn't match. Control and elimination of this

phenomenon will, therefore, be the main focus of the next US endeavour to

rekindle the faltering Middle East peace process.

As a first step, Washington is planning to send George Tenet, the director

of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the region, with the primary

mission of helping the Palestinian Authority (PA) restructure, reform and

unify its security services. In this way, the PA will have more effective

control of, and responsibility for, any act or form of resistance against

the Israeli occupation, no matter how long the occupation lasts.

Palestinian resistance factions: Hamas, the Popular Front, Al-Aqsa Brigades

and Hizbullah in Lebanon, have unanimously vowed to continue the armed

struggle against Israeli occupation "by all means available" to them. This,

obviously, includes human bombs, or "suicide bombers", as the Western media

would have it.

A paradoxical situation has developed. Arab governments have succeeded in

persuading the Bush administration to be more involved in the Middle East.

After weeks of incarceration and humiliation, President Yasser Arafat has

emerged with firm instructions to end attacks against the Israeli civilian

population and a promise to reform the PA. Ariel Sharon continues, what

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher has aptly described as, "the

revolving door warfare". Furthermore, European criticism has not been

backed up with action. While the Intifada remains the only effective

reality on the ground, it seems inexorably set for a collision course with

a "reformed" PA, which is under tremendous pressure to end "terrorism". Mr

Sharon would like nothing better than that.

Terrorism, as a modern political phenomenon, has been the bane of civilised

society for more than 200 years. Whether it is merely wanton violence or a

fight for national liberation, the qualitative definition of terrorism is

in the eye of the beholder. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom

fighter. The perspective keeps shifting, depending on the interests

involved and the political priorities at the time. In fact, terrorism

originally referred to acts of extra judicial violence the state committed

against the defenceless individual. Thus, the Constitution of the United

States was laboriously framed by the Founding Fathers to protect

individuals against the tyranny of government.

After the French Revolution of 1789, M de Robespierre's radical Committee

of Public Safety (1793-1794) arrested more than 300,000 suspected "enemies

of the Revolution" and, in less than one year, sent about 17,000 of them to

the guillotine. Many more were left to perish in prison, during the

infamous "Reign of Terror" era. Less than 200 years later, between 1975 and

1979, the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia conducted similar

massacres, albeit on a far wider scale. The death toll is reported to have

been over one million. Individual terrorism, on the other hand, usually

targets political leaders as symbols of a system they seek to overthrow. A

famous example was the assassination of Archduke Frantz Ferdinand, the

crown prince of Austria, and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

Gavril Princip, the 19-year-old Serbian student who shot and killed them,

had no idea that his actions would be the spark to ignite World War I -- by

far the bloodiest war in modern history. Some latter-day historians,

however, have redeemed young Gavril. They acknowledged that colonialist

Europe, blinded by the lust for a more equitable division of conquered

territories, was ready for the fuse to ignite the powder-keg.

In the decades following World War I, terrorism thrived on a lack of shared

understanding of the phenomenon, combined with the rise of nationalism and

universal acknowledgement of the right to self-determination of colonial

peoples and territories. After the end of World War II, and the creation of

the United Nations, the mixed agenda of terrorism and the struggle for

national liberation became even more complex. The phenomenon spread from

Europe to regions under colonial rule in Africa, Asia and the Middle East

and took various forms. It included the hijacking of aircraft, bombings,

hostage-taking and urban guerrilla warfare. A call for collective

international action was sounded and there was no better place for that

than the United Nations (UN). For almost three decades, from the 1960s to

the 1980s, the UN Legal Committee struggled in vain for an all-embracing

definition of terrorism. Some states wanted to outlaw terrorism in all its

forms. Others, particularly those committed to supporting the struggle for

national liberation, wanted also to address "the causes of terrorism".

Developing countries insisted on a distinction between terrorism and

national liberation struggles. Little progress was made.

It was not until 1987, curiously enough, the year of the first Intifada of

the "stone-throwers", that a serious international attempt at condemning

terrorism was made. The Reagan administration, having bombed Libya a year

earlier, made fighting terrorism a key component of its foreign policy. In

December of that year, the General Assembly unanimously adopted a landmark

resolution against terrorism, condemning the phenomenon in the strongest

possible terms. Only two countries voted against the resolution: the United

States and Israel. Why did these two champions of anti-terrorism vote

against a resolution condemning it? Perhaps it was the provision stating

that the rights of people struggling against racist and colonialist

regimes, or foreign military occupation, should not be infringed upon. For

the US and Israel, this touched on two raw nerves: the struggle of the

African National Congress (ANC) against the openly racist government of

South Africa, officially an ally of the United States; and the Palestinian

resistance movement in the Israeli-occupied territories. Moreover,

Hizbullah was effectively fighting Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon.

Another example of double-standards was the decades long dispute between

the US and the UK about Noraid-- the organisation which raised funds in the

US for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland. The UK viewed

it as an effort to support terrorism, the US, clearly influenced by its

Irish lobby, did not. It was not until 11 September that the US banned

Noraid, as part of a new drive to stop funding the sources of terrorism. As

Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT has put it "The world looks very different,

depending on whether you are holding the lash or whether you are being

whipped by it for hundreds of years."

The destruction of 11 September has led to a paradigm shift. One no longer

needs a definition of terrorism to recognise an act of terrorism. It has

also unleashed an indiscriminate global action agenda that has put the

Palestinian resistance at a disadvantage. The bottom line is painfully

evident. Nobody wants to travel on aircraft, dine at restaurants, or go

shopping in malls with the constant fear that the person next to you might

be a human bomb. What is less well understood, is that these would-be human

bombs never wanted to be placed in such a predicament. This was probably

the case until they were displaced as children, lived in an environment of

fear, had their movement curbed, saw their houses demolished, their orange

groves ploughed under, their brothers and sisters going hungry and their

proud father kicked, insulted and spat on by Israeli soldiers in front of

family and friends. Many people have survived a bomb attack, albeit with

physical and psychological scars, to tell the story. No human bomb will

ever come back to tell us why or what it was like to be torn to pieces by

explosives for a cause. The function of the armed struggle for national

liberation has consistently been to raise the cost of military occupation

beyond the limits of tolerance for the occupying power. This is precisely

what Palestinian human bombs are doing. In time, the resistance will get

even more sophisticated.

In his historic appearance before the United Nations General Assembly in

November 1974, Yasser Arafat concluded his address with the rhetorical

statement that he had come to the world body with a gun in one hand and an

olive branch in the other. He pleaded with delegates not to let the olive

branch drop from his hand. Twenty-seven years later, it is still premature

to drop the gun.

* The writer is a former correspondent for Al-Ahram in Washington, DC. He

also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.