As everybody knows, but few remember, they were all vilified as "terrorists" by the British or American authorities.
Ronald Reagan branded Mandela's African National Congress a terrorist organization - and to be fair, it did commit some terrorist acts, while the ancestors of Likud blew up the King David Hotel, assassinated the highest British official in the Middle East during the war against the Nazis, and gunned down United Nations representative Count Folke Bernadotte for trying to negotiate a peace settlement.
I have been on several Fox and MSNBC shows recently where the hosts admitted that Israel is failing in Lebanon, and that it was a mistake to begin the invasion, not least because there is no exit strategy. But then they will round on me because I will not describe Hezbollah as "terrorist". In fact I use the same formula that British diplomats (in the better days of a more independent foreign policy) used: "A group that sometimes commits terrorist acts." Needless to say, this does not satisfy pro-Israeli anchormen - in fact, it gives them an excuse to grandstand their fury.
Their use of the concept illustrates the reason for my refusal. Words like "terrorism" and "terrorist" are no longer definitions - they are evasions, often deliberate, of vital issues, no more so than in the "war on terror".
This is not merely sloppy use of vocabulary. It is precisely targeted phrasing and intended to terrorize dissent. Especially in the binary, Manichaean mindset of the US and Likudnik Israel, once a group has been labeled "terrorist" it becomes the epitome of evil and to suggest that any of their arguments have any justice makes one a terrorist supporter. Using these words shuts down the higher cerebral functions of many of the listeners.
Of course, it is difficult to be dispassionate about blood and dismembered bodies, but in the interests of preventing more of the same, we should take a step backwards.
According to Kofi Annan, who was trying to get governments to agree on a definition at the United Nations last year, an act is terrorism "if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act." This was, incidentally, also the phrasing used by the first Chair of the Security Council Committee on Terrorism, UK Ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock.
It is concise and precise - and clearly excludes much of what Israel, the US and other governments have tried to brand as terrorism.
For years Israelis have called Palestinian leaders terrorists, because they did not want to deal with them or indeed with any of the claims of the people they represented. In recent weeks, Israeli forces have kidnapped some 38 elected Palestinian representatives, because they deemed them "terrorists". Hamas and Hezbollah are "terrorists" and no one should talk to them, no matter how many Palestinians or Lebanese vote for them and support them.
The abuse of the concept has reached its nadir in the amorphous "war on terror", which currently covers any military operations that the US, Israel, Russia, and anyone else trying to jump on the bloody bandwagon, should wish to undertake, not to mention any rolling back of civil liberties and international law that it entails. Dead dissidents, or even just passers-by, from Chechnya to Xinjiang, from Uzbekistan to Gaza, Abu Ghraib to south Lebanon, become posthumous terrorists as soon as their killing is reported.
It was under the guise of the "war on terror" that Iraq was invaded. The weapons of mass destruction were a legal distraction: for most Americans the real justification of the war was the absolute fiction that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks. And interestingly, under the fog of the "war on terror", American troops have now pretty much abandoned Afghanistan, the host country of uncaught Osama bin Laden and the one place where it was justifiable, and handed over operations to NATO.
Simply labeling groups as "terrorist" and demonizing those who stop to think more deeply about it stops odious comparisons that may challenge prevailing prejudices.
For example, I was on a radio show some weeks after the indisputably terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (WTC), which I had lived close to and watched in real time. The host asked about progress at the UN in adopting a definition of terrorism. I was explaining the difficulties and went out on a limb - "you know there were hundreds of brave firemen and police who died in the Center - and how many of them do you think had attended NorAid dinners, raising funds for bombings in London?" (NorAid advertises itself as "Irish Americans working for a united and free Northern Ireland.) Luckily he did not explode, but stopped in his tracks to think about it - "That means that they were supporting terrorism too!" he exclaimed as revelation hit him. Of course, if they had been raising funds for Hamas, they would probably have been in prison instead of rescuing people in the towers.
But even here, there is room for clear thinking. Under the prospective UN definition, IRA attacks against security forces may have been criminal, but they were not terrorist actions. A telephoned warning usually preceded even the IRA bombs on civilian targets. Sadly, however, the IRA made such a mess of the warnings so often that their campaign carried an inevitability of deaths and injuries that certainly put it inside Annan's definition.
So, while it certainly was not the cleverest action that Hezbollah has perpetrated, taking two Israeli soldiers prisoner was not terrorism, although raining Katyusha rockets indiscriminately down on civilians certainly is a form of it.
But how is that different from Israeli planes and artillery killing civilians in Lebanon or for that matter in Gaza? Israel claims that the civilian deaths are collateral damage of attacks on Hezbollah, but apart from the morality and legality, the math defies these excuses. Current Israeli deaths run roughly one civilian dead for one military. The far higher Lebanese casualties are running at around 10 civilian dead (including three children) for every claimed Hezbollah victim. The continuing nature of those casualties suggests, as Kofi Annan told the Security Council last week, that there is a "pattern of breaches of international law".
Committing terrorism takes a fanatical worldview: the casualties are either guilty by association - as implied by al-Qaeda for those working in the WTC, or sadly necessary sacrifices on the altar of a better world. Insofar as they have any rationality, acts of terror are often predicated on the stupidity of the authorities who can be relied upon to create support for the perpetrators with widespread repression and retaliation.
In that sense, Hezbollah's capture of the two Israeli soldiers, whether or not it was terrorism in the UN definition, has been spectacularly successful. Israel began the war on the moral high ground, in the West at least. It has taken a month of concentrated viciousness and incompetence to turn the tide of public opinion.
Israel's retaliation has brought overwhelming Lebanese and Arab support for Hezbollah, and has in one short month reversed Israel's diplomatic gains across the world while totally isolating the US and Tony Blair.
One might add that Osama bin Laden's bloody assault on the WTC has had precisely the same effect on a global scale. From a position of overwhelming global public sympathy and support, the Bush administration's reactions with the "war on terror" have alienated the rest of the world to the extent that China is now much more popular in many countries polled.
Mesmerized by the word "terrorism", as I said, it appears that the higher mental faculties, never really in top gear, of the US administration have been totally paralyzed. But that is no reason for the rest of us to succumb.
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