Especially when contrasted to other nations, terrorism doesn’t seem to affect Israel all that much.
America’s 9-11, Spain’s 3-11, and Russia’s 9-03 all had drastic affects on the populace and the country’s direction. Especially in Russia; Putin is even talking about the disintegration of the Russian society, and some have said that Beslan marked the rise of dictatorship in the former USSR.
Compare with Israel, who has suffered through decades of civilian atrocities, including the death / maimings of women and children. Yet despite the constant barrage of unexpected bombings, the country has not had a drastic political upheaval, people are not calling for fascism, the fabric of society is not unravelling, and basically the nation seems to be eking along in the same direction it has been since it was founded.
What is different about Israel that makes terrorism such a weak tactic against it?
I think the answer, unfortunately, is they are used to it. They have been attacked so often and so viciously that they are pretty well inured to it by now. In those other examples, none of those countries have been attacked anywhere as much…in fact I can’t think of ANY nation who has been attacked as much as Israel both externally and internally via terrorism…not in such a small time frame anyway.
In Israel’s case survival is a stake. Surrounded by countries that are not friendly - some of which have at various stages been determined to destroy it - they are both tougher and more willing to take the knocks.
I’m not too sure about the validity of your premise - the difference you’re pointing up probably has more to do with media spin than real social impact in the countries you cite.
Spain for example, has been living with terrorism as far back as I can remember - there are dozens of terrorist attacks every year (smaller attacks than the Atocha bombs) - in as much as it can be said that there was a ‘drastic reaction’ (debateable) to the Madrid bombings this Spring, that had more to do with the duplicity and opportunism of Aznar’s government than a real “terror effect”. The last time I can think of where Spain was fundamentally rocked by a “terrorist” act, was the assasination of Franco’s putative successor back in the 70’s ( name escapes me).
Russia has been drifting into its current mess for a while now, it might even be fair to say that the Breslan disaster was more a result of the political situation than any kind of catalyst.
I’ve lived in a couple of “terrorist hot-spots” over the years, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen any social/political upheaval - generally everybody gets a little skittish for a while, the movie theaters are half empty, but otherwise it’s business as usual.
I’d have to say that the US is the exception in this regard, rather than Israel. And the reasons for that obviously deserve their own thread (or hundreds of threads) !
I think the issue is that there is such a constant barrage of attacks, over such a long time, that it has reached an ugly sort of stability. If the attacks stopped altogether, you’d see a change, and in this way, terrorism is having an affect in Israel, just everyone is used to it.
I’m not familiar with DonMartin88, so I don’t know what his deal is. (I just hope he isn’t besmirching the name of Don Martin, “Mad’s Maddest Artist”.) It’s true that some of the founders of modern Israel, such as Menachim Begin, used terrorism against the British.
You could argue that terrorism has been quite effective in Israel, if the goal of the suicide bombers is to prevent any peace process from going forward. How many times has the process been derailed? There are those on both sides who would never accept a peace that doesn’t give them everything they want; since the insane extremists on either side want diametrically opposite things (e.g., some Palestinians will never accept Israel’s right to exist as a state; some Israelis believe all the land is theirs because God said so), this deadlock isn’t likely to ever end unless an Israeli prime minister devotes himself fully to a peace process, keeps going with it regardless of how many bombings take place, and makes a deal that includes a Palestinian state strong enough to provide law and order for its own people. (Of course, both the Israeli Prime Minister and the Palestinian leader might well be assassinated by one of their own people afterwards, but they’d be martyrs for peace.)
As it is, as long as there are suicide bombers on one side, and continued illegal occupation of the West Bank on the other, I don’t see it ending.
(Maybe I’m just a pie-in-the-sky idealist about this stuff. If there’s a single concept I could remove from the human psyche, it might be the idea that one’s people have a God-given right to a particular spot on the planet as one’s “homeland”. That kind of ancient tribal thinking may be the death of us.)
While I’d agree with xtisme that habituation has diluted its effects a tad, I’d argue that it certainly does - it at the very least influences political decisions and day-to-day negotiations and can cause shifts in the relative proportion of doves and hawks in the Israeli populace.
I might add with generally deleterious effects for the majority of Palestinians ( those now institutionally wedded to conflict excepted ).
Well, none of that has happened in the west as the result of terrorism either. Arguably, anyway - depending on how you want to define drastic political upheaval.
Spain for example didn’t undergo a drastic upheaval - at most the electorate shifted a few points, but that government had been declining steadily in the polls anyway.
Chechnya is only one of many sources of Russian instability - that country has been the new “sick man of Europe” ever since the Soviet collapse. Terrorism may contribute its woes, but the rhetoric surrounding it is probably as much to allow Putin to focus public attention elsewhere ( as the Arab states have consistently so used the Israeli/Palestinian problem ).
Where there has been a difference in degree of response ( especially in the U.S. )one can chalk it up, again, to the level of surprise and shock from having been finally targeted in such a dramatic fashion.
No, wait, DonMartin88 has a point. When there’s a terrorist attack in Israel or the Territories, the Israelis routinely retaliate by sending in some tanks or some planes and destroying some Arab homes at random. If that’s not terrorism, what is? Which raises the question: Why does Israeli state terrorism seem to have so little effect on the Palestinians?
Whether it can be defined as terrorism or not, retributive violence does have an effect on Palestinians, usually negative. Just as Palestinian terrorism has an effect on Israelis, generally negative.
If the questyion is why doesn’t the violence make one or the other side cave to the demands of the other, the answer is because the perceived stakes are too high, the attachement to causes too visceral. The Philipines doesn’t give a crap about pulling out a few advisors or military police in Iraq, because they have no stake in much of anything beyond the safety of millions of Filipino migrant workers. The Palestinians and Israelis don’t have that distance, so violence serves only to breed violence ( arguments about downgrading the effectiveness of violence by removing key figures isn’t the same as eliminating violence as a societal trend ).
But terrorism works in that inspires terror. And it has an effect in that incites further violence.
Having gotten to know several Israelis quite well (my boss for three years was an Israeli finishing her post-doc in the US before moving on to a tenured position at Bar-Ilan U.), I’d say habituation is really the answer to the question of how Israelis can function with such an outward appearance of normalcy, given their hostile environment. The people I knew literally grew up in a war zone, so dealing with that kind of threat on a day-to-day basis has made the Israelis very pragmatic when it comes to terrorism. I’ve heard some complain about the blase response some Israeli dignitaries offered to 9/11, but as my former-boss told me in an email, “well, now you know.” Per capita, they’ve been suffering a 9/11 about once per month since the beginning of the second Intifada (purportedly triggered by Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount).
I would argue there has been a terrible, though more subtle affect, however: Dehumanization of the enemy. Whatever capacity many Israeli nationalists may have had for sympathy towards the plight of common Palestinians has been beaten out of them. They are hardened, embittered, and quite ready to shut the door permanently on peaceful coexistence. As an outsider, I try to be tolerant; and after all, these folks are my friends. But the attitude now is so far from conciliatory or forgiving, it’s difficult not to be a little shocked. It’s a war, as far as the folks I know are concerned, one in which there will be winners, and losers. The losers will be the Palestinians, by life an limb if that’s the way they want it, and there won’t be many a tear shed ever again for their suffering. The Israelis themselves (or too many of them) have suffered too much to care.
Terrorism does work in Israel. A stated goal of Hamas and Islamic Jihad is destruction of the State of Israel; terrorism is the shortest route to this goal, unfortunately. If you cannot defeat an enemy militarily, you look for other ways.
Israel was quite dependent on tourism. Terrorism has thrown that industry into a tailspin. Israel is dependent on foreign dollars, both from US military aid and investment. Terrorism and the Israeli reprisals have caused grave concerns to be voiced about foreign, especially European, investment in Israel. Israel prides itself on human rights but as mentioned above, has undergone a dehumanization of the Palestinians, leading to actions in the territories that are distasteful to many around the world (and fewer and fewer within Israel, it sometimes seems…) Much like in the USA, it seems to have hijacked a lot of domestic political debate, to the point where even simple matters like strikes and budgets are defended as being anti-terrorism. Domestic debates like the role of religion in society have been relegated while the intifada is faced. So in all, it is easy to perceive that Israel has been weakened, much more so than in a direct military confrontation.
I agree that terrorism does work in Israel. Israeli terrorists have been very effective in pushing formal Israeli politics to the right, the brutal and the retributive. The state has co-opted their practices.
Likud, the IDF and the Israeli secret services have become the instruments through which Israeli terrorism is executed.
There are of course exceptions, where individual Israelis take on their own terrorist projects, but by and large these are sympathetic with the general drift of the State. And it is reciprocal. Take for instance the assassination of Yitzak Rabin. Does anyone believe that a Palestinian assassin would have survived the night, let alone made it to trial in one piece, let alone had his family undisturbed by instruments of retribution?
So in considering the net effect of terrorism within Israel you have to remember that Palestinian terrorism is far less well resourced and commensurately less influential.
On the other hand this may change. The IDF is clearly wargaming the real possibility that the Palestinians are supplied with an Iranian nuke. Given Sharon’s outright repudiation of the Roadmap for Peace on the grounds that it is insufficiently vile and unduly inhibits Israeli evil, there is a real likelihood that the balance of influence will shortly shift.
I can only speculate: I think a wise government would take the fact that its enemy is nuclear-armed into consideration. Whether Likud would do this I cannot say.
However Sharon is widely seen as an inflammatory influence. He is also committing Israel to policies that are both extreme and irreversible. Such an increase in tension is bound to precipitate a crisis of one sort or another.