This article has been updated.
Since the start of October, the world has heard no end to pronouncements from Benjamin Netanyahu alleging perils of international terrorism and great battle between civilisation and barbarism, as the IDF and their enablers treat the world to the spectacle of genocide in real time. Netanyahu purposes counterterrorist conspiracism to rationalise the genocide in Gaza, the exact same kind neoconservatives shoved down the throats of humanity post-9/11 to try to rationalise international aggression and petrodollar imperialism in the Middle East.
Unfortunately for the Butcher of Gaza, his claims are showing their age—if not for his own genocidal state terrorism currently streaming to the world on social media, then in light of the way the application of counterterrorist conspiracism he was, as we will see, instrumental in developing as ideological cover for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The reader will recall this produced new non-state terror groups (e.g. Al-Qaeda in Iraq). If the grandiose claims associated with counterterrorist conspiracism now widely understood to have been false, have taught us anything, it is that it tends to produce all the outcomes it purports to oppose in the destruction of life and freedom.
This lesson was hardly at odds with history. In much the same way as abusers in private life covet control instead of cooperation in trying to force causality to fit the demands of our ego, so too have aggressors and imperialists generally tended to problematise reactions to their own abuse and blame people for being in the way of their designs on supreme power generally.
As the paradigm example during the 20th century, Hitler long articulated a desire for “living space” to the East before discovering a pretext for conquering it in an alleged racial threat to ethnic Germans in Poland. Likewise, the U.S. had long articulated a desire to control Middle Eastern oil before discovering a Soviet plot to do the exact same, necessitating intervention to overthrow democracies throughout the region in the name of saving them.
In recent times, such purposes have been most infamously captured in Rebuilding America’s Defences, a report from the Project for a New American Century, hoping for ‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor,’ that might present a pretext for the carving out of lebensraum for petrodollar imperialists.
The project of Zionism reflects this pattern, having long articulated colonist designs on Palestine, and then concocting any number of pretexts for “emergencies” that, in nominally pushing back against barbarism and antisemitism, facilitate the expansion of criminal settler colonial occupation and illegal settlements.
What many do not know is the central part Netanyahu has played in developing the counterterrorist conspiracism he now invokes to rationalise crimes against humanity. As we will see, Netanyahu’s claims are of particular note to the extent that his attempts to distinguish himself from the barbarism Arabs he despises not only do not reflect well on his own criminality, but reflect a historical continuity in the absurdisms imperialist state terrorists invoke to rationalise their atrocities and supremacist belief systems.
Problems of definition
The historical context for counterterrorist conspiracism coalesced during the 1970s, in reaction to worsening geopolitical developments in the Middle East. At that time, a nascent counterterrorist conspiracy theory viewed various developments unfavourable to western elites through the lens of the Cold War, adopting its characteristic binary logic and all that involved in terms of the habitual tendency to conflate the interests of elites with the moral Good.
Borrowing from communist conspiracy theory, a terrorist conspiracy theory began to emerge, “moral entrepreneurs” (literally traders in public morality) of the new existential threat stoking fears of a demonised Other in the classic manner of what Hofstadter famously called the Paranoid Style. Despite the self-assuredness of counterterrorist ideologues, however, terrorism as a concept has been notoriously hard to define. Attempted definitions have been plagued by issues like:
- Attempting to introduce moral judgement into empirical processes designed to establish objective reality;
- A tendency to conflate strategy and identity such that terrorists are defined not by what they do but by who they are (and are not), and
- Pervasive double standards.
Even the RAND Corporation, not noted for habits of challenging conventional thinking, acknowledged that ‘definitions strongly reflect political points of view’ (Stampnitzky, Disciplining Terror, 102).
As a case in point, the US State Department tried to develop a workable legal definition of ‘terrorism’ during the 1970s as the basis for law pertaining to ‘material support for terrorism,’ a project it eventually had to abandon when it could not find one that did not equally apply to material support the United States provided to the Contras in Nicaragua, death squads in Central America, ‘sub-fascist’ military dictatorships in South America, and the apartheid regimes of South Africa and Israel, amongst others (Herman and Chomsky, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, 1979).
Indeed, as former counterterrorism official under Reagan, Edward Peck, eventually conceded in a 2006 interview with Democracy Now,
In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, they asked us … to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and [in] each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities (Zalloum, Oil Crusades: America Through Arab Eyes, 2007).
Despite failing in its original project, the State Department had nevertheless succeeded in highlighting the difference between ‘terrorism’ as a historical phenomenon and ‘terrorism’ as an ideological construct—one referring only to the violence of the weak, establishing double standards based on a concern for peace only where terrorism failed to serve elite interests.
Where terrorism did favour elites, as US support for state terrorists like Augusto Pinochet made apparent, counter-terrorists were perfectly happy to embody all they claimed to despise. This was readily apparent during the War on Terror, when the deeply fragile neoconservative habit of conflating of independent development and hatred of civilised values on the one hand, and being criticised and being attacked on the other, enabled international aggression and domestic authoritarianism—as it continues to do.
A short history of counterterrorist conspiracism
As noted, the historical impulse to counterterrorist conspiracism can be traced to airline hijackings in the 1960s and 70s, during which time Palestinian militants tended to take Israeli passengers hostages and let the rest disembark, using the violence of the weak against a state terorrist oppressor as unwelcome pushback. These developments tended to indicate that the chaos in the Middle East, reflected in the radicalization of Palestinians by the Israeli occupation of their territories, was having geopolitical ramifications (Naftali, Blind Spot, 2009).
Authorities at the time that sought to ‘avoid over-dramatizing hijacking’ (New York Times) lest, in the words of Carter-era Federal Aviation Authority Director Najeeb A. Halaby, the ‘many discontented, maladjusted people’ who exist ‘in every country . . . get the wrong idea.’ Knee-jerk reactions from officialdom could all too easily be interpreted as evidence of their effectiveness, and be taken, entirely unintentionally, as encouragement.
Such encouragement was all too often forthcoming, reflecting conspicuous disinterest amongst policymakers for addressing root causes—calling attention to which being part of the purpose of the hijackings in the first place. And so they continued. Four years later, in 1972, a militant group called Black September, took eleven Israeli athletes hostage at the Summer Olympics in Munch, demanding the release of several hundred Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.
Clad in ski masks and clutching automatic rifles, Black September presented an intolerable challenge to the imperialist monopoly on violence, and the process of framing crises in terms serviceable to elites more generally. Munich precipitated bitter denunciations from the political establishment, who in sensing an existential threat suddenly discovered pacifist leanings not so evident at that moment to the Vietnamese, any woman, any indigenous American, any trade unionist, any social outcast—anyone not part of the dominant European propertied male imperialist experience trying to pass itself off as Universal Humanism, in other words.
In June 1976, two members of the PLFP-External Operations (PLFP-EO) took control of an Air France flight en route from Tel Aviv to Paris. Diverting the flight to Entebbe, Uganda, they separated the 94 Israelis on board from the rest of the passengers, who were released and sent home, and issued demands for the release of 40 of their comrades in Israeli jails, threatening to kill the Israeli hostages if these demands were not met.
Israel dispatched 100 commandos to Entebbe, who wiped out the hijackers. The IDF only suffered one casualty, Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of the future Prime Minister. The latter would later attribute the wrath attending his own ‘hard line against all terrorists’ to his brother’s death—the vicious cycles and self-fulfilling prophecies invoked thereby guaranteeing the deaths of many more brothers in the process (Gordon. Gideon’s Spies, 145).
Benjamin Netanyahu played a critical part in developing this ‘hard line,’ founding a think-tank named after his brother in 1976. In 1979, the Jonathan Institute convened the first Conference on International Terrorism in Jerusalem. Closed to points of view not serviceable to elites in monopolising terror, this conference brought together neoconservative academics, journalists, politicians and militarists to refine the tenets of and propagandise counterterrorist conspiracism.
Enjoying close ties with the Israeli political establishment through the active support of committee members like Menahem Begin, Ephraim Katzir, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres and Ezer Weizman, and tasked with defending Israeli settler colonialism, the founding of a public relations think tank was an implicit admission that world opinion had turned against the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Devoted to what Stampnitzky calls ‘the politicisation of expertise’ on terrorism as a reaction to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Jerusalem Conference defined state terrorism solely as an indirect product, through sponsorship, of the violence of the weak—the Palestinian struggle for self-determination framed of necessity then through the self-serving lens of counterterrorism as a Soviet conspiracy. By the same token, the Conference endorsed as a basic operating assumption the violence of the strong, the actual historical context for terrorism as such and basis for the Zionist occupation of Palestine in particular.
Neoconservatives from both Israel and the U.S. in attendance. The conjuncture this facilitated between practitioners of the old anticommunist conspiracism and the new counterterrorist iteration was reflected in the collection of reports the Jonathan Institute published in 1979 as International terrorism, challenge and response : proceedings of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism.
Double standards associated with traditional imperial habits of thwarting independent development in imperialist dependencies in the name of thwarting threats to democracy appeared in audacious style in commentary from Richard Pipes, Snr, who associated terrorism per se with the same political milieu that produced the Bolsheviks. ‘The roots of Soviet terrorism, indeed of modern terrorism,’ he argued, ‘date back to 1879.’
This year marks . . . the founding of that organization which is the source of all modern terrorist groups, whether they be named the Tupamaros, the Baader-Meinhoff group, the Weathermen, Red Brigade or the PLO. I refer to the establishment in 1879 of a Congress in the small Russian town of Lipetsk, of an organization known as Narodnaya Volya, or the People’s Will (Netanyahu, ed, International Terrorism, 58).
Strangely enough for this approach to counterterrorist conspiracism, Pipes pointed out that the terrorism of the weak was successful insofar as it had the double effect of demystifying ‘Russian rulers in the eyes of the people, but it also caused the government to overreact.’
From 1879 onwards, the Imperial government introduced a series of extremely harsh countermeasures meant to prevent terror, but which had the effect of alienating moderate groups in Russia. In the long run this made it impossible for the regime to ever secure the support or moderately conservative and liberal elements in Russian society, and so it was left to fall, isolated and alone, in 1917 (Netanyahu, ed, International Terrorism, 60).
The sympathy Pipes held for the Russian Tsar says much about who counterterrorist conspiracism serve in practise. Poor mistreated aristocrats notwithstanding, Pipes claims this as the basis for convergence between the communist and terrorist existential threats, having ‘left an indelible imprint on the minds of the Soviet leadership.’ Thus ‘nearly all the elements of Soviet global strategy are essentially an adaptation to foreign policy of methods which had been learned by the Bolsheviks and their allies when they were in the underground fighting the Imperial regime.’
Paradoxically however, such were also the methods employed by Menachem Begin throughout his campaign as leader of the Irgun to expel the British from Palestine in the years following WWII, though Pipes was not so indecorous as to embarrass his hosts by saying so (Pedahzur and Perliger, Jewish Terrorism in Israel, 11-15). Indeed, Pipes’ allegation that ‘their violence’ was terrorism and that this reflected the evils of state sponsorship again highlights the double standards and circular logic at play—if not the fallaciousness of the mythology of state sponsorship as a means of effecting convergence in general, itself an effect of the False Dilemma logic of ‘if you think for yourself, the terrorists win.’
Netanyahu’s personal contributions
The fall of the Bolshevik empire left a challenging gap in the theory of Soviet state sponsorship of international terrorism. This was not a major obstacle for Netanyahu as a central player in the development of counterterrorist conspiracism—particularly as second Jonathan Institute-organised conference in Washington, DC in 1984 further coproduced terror panic and conspiracism.
In addition to the reports from the 1979 conference, Netanyahu published ‘Terrorism: How the West Can Win’ (1986)—an edited version of essays from 1984 Jonathan Institute acolytes playing down the Soviet angle in the shadow of its decline, concordantly playing up the threat from Islam—and ‘Fighting Terrorism’ (2001) which somehow managed not to notice the Soviet role in international terrorism much at all. In all of these works, Netanyahu also somehow manages not to notice the difficulties the US State Department experienced in developing a definition of terrorism that didn’t at the same moment apply to their own activities.
In an introductory essay from the 1986 collection entitled ‘Defining Terrorism,’ Netanyahu again describes counterterrorism as part of ‘a much larger struggle, one between the forces of civilization and those of barbarism,’ one that would ‘continue to spread with disastrous consequences if left unchallenged’ (Netanyahu, ed., Terrorism: How the West Can Win, ix). In the name of resisting barbarism, he asserts the right to define terrorism in his own favour, alleging that, in the ‘war against terrorism,’ free societies must reject ‘absolutely the notion that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,”’ in needing ‘clear ways of distinguishing terrorists.’
Netanyahu’s association of ‘clarity’ with the right to dictate truth was classic fear-mongering in presupposing the right to control meaning in political discourse, and one that, as a ploy perpetrated in defence of democratic freedoms, had a precedent in the Red Scares. As the basis of anti-communist conspiracism, the Paranoid Style was also reflected in Netanyahu’s theory that attempts to ‘legitimise criminal actions’ and ‘divert public attention from the real forces behind terrorism’ were a cunning form of manipulation based on presenting a point of view he disfavoured, as was acknowledging ‘desperation’ on the part of those responsible for ‘terrorist’ outrages.’
We in the West, after all, are accustomed to believe that there is always anther ‘point of view’ worth looking at, even when it comes to terrorists. Before we know it, the hijackers and killers have spokesmen and commentators of their own, and the terrorists have been transformed into merely another type of political activist, which a grievance that has to be ‘considered,’ even given equal time (Netanyahu, ed, International Terrorism, ix).
The horror of associating democratic processes with examining all sides of an issue recalls the comment from Argentinian dictator Jorge Rafael Videla describing a terrorist as someone whose ideas were problematic (Feitlowitz. A Lexicon of Terror, 24). It is not hard to figure the value of shutting down the points of view of targets of demonisation and ‘Othering’ if they are also victims of state terrorist excess and crimes against humanity as perpetrated by counterterrorists in Gaza.
The circular logic evident here problematised ideas as the basis for the ‘terrorist’ label, then justified the label with moral opposition to terrorism in the abstract, conflating the two on the basis of a self-serving double standard; to question Netanyahu’s judgment on this count was to undermine democracy and give aid to terrorism. Under this usage, critical thinking and heterodoxy were enemies, rather than vital components of, democracy—the latter being reduced to whatever serves Zionist imperial interests.
The usefulness of this autocratic mentality in shutting down criticism and dissent of fascism, imperialism and genocide by associating it with a demonised ‘Other’ is again not hard to miss; the supremely fragile imperialist proclivity for associating criticism and opposition with anti-Semitism is indicative of global bullies who can dish it out, but can’t take it.
Netanyahu’s apparently habitual tendency to conflate being criticised and being attacked, and the sophistic mangling of words and ideas as grounds that result, became the basis for a further claim, based on assuming the right to dictate truth in defence of freedom, that the West was the target of the violence of the weak in the form of armed struggle against illegal military occupation because its values were the antithesis of terrorism, and since ‘legitimacy is derived from the consent of the governed . . . the government’s power is limited by the strict observance of fundamental human freedoms.’
Such allegations are odds with Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories in general, much less to say the genocidal crimes against humanity it has perpetrated since 7 October. The vast expanse between values as alleged in speech, and those manifest in crimes against humanity, does not really reflect concern about consent of the governed or fundamental human freedom (Netanyahu, ed, International Terrorism, 5). It does set the stage for the victim-playing, victim-blaming and associating of doubt with support for the enemy that would become stock in trade of the permanent victim complex necessary for Zionists to avoid historical responsibility for their human rights abuses.
It is not surprising then to find a conspicuous tendency amongst counterterrorist conspiracists to attribute to the enemy behaviours and attitudes on display in the attributing. For the terrorist, alleged Netanyahu, ‘there are no such restraints on either legitimacy or power.’
Legitimacy is derived from whatever cause he is fighting for or professes to be fighting for. There is no need to ask the people. He, the terrorist, is the self-appointed arbiter of what is just and necessary. If others do not quite see it that way, they will be forced to submit to the terrorist’s will be a fearful violence that knows no limits, and which claims everyone and everything as a legitimate target (Netanyahu, ed, International Terrorism, 5).
This is, of course, a perfectly apt description of the conduct of the Zionist state; the inadmissible shame of the imperialist oppressor can be named and projected onto the victim. The West, in its alleged ‘humaneness and its emphasis on the rule of law’ makes it ‘uniquely vulnerable’ to terrorist atrocity, as permissive liberal saps are taken in by ‘protestations of innocence’ through which terrorists hoped ‘to escape punishment.’ On this count, Netanyahu by his own account is as clean and pure as the white driven snow.
Indeed, much of ‘Defining Terrorism’ puts Netanyahu and the Zionist project squarely in the state terrorist category. ‘Most people . . . instinctively recognise one distinct aspect of terrorism when they see it . . . violence directed against people who have no connection with the alleged grievance the terrorists purport to remedy’ (8). The current death toll for Palestinian children in Gaza is approaching 9000, placing Israel squarely in the terrorist camp by Netanyahu’s own account.
On the same count, while anyone with ‘an inkling of moral feeling would consider such attacks outrageous,’ the terrorist chooses innocent victims precisely because they are innocent. By attacking them, he wilfully breaks down the limits of acceptable conduct and broadens it to include anyone, especially victims chosen at random. By such actions, the terrorist tells the world that he will go to any lengths to achieve his purpose, which is to make governments cave into his demands (9).
Again no shortage of evidence can be found to demonstrate this mentality as a defining feature of the Zionist project. Not least of these can be found in Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents, which documents Sharett concluding that
This State has no international obligations, no economic problems, the question of peace is non-existent…. It must calculate its steps narrow-mindedly and live on its sword. It must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no-it must-invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge.. . . And above all -let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space. (Such a slip of the tongue: Ben Gurion himself said that it would be worth while to pay an Arab a million pounds to start a war.) (26 May 1955, 1021)
In light of this statement, the enthusiasm of the Zionists for the Hamas incursion of 7 October as a pretext for imperialist mass murder recalls the enthusiasm of the U.S. for Osama Bin Laden as an excuse to accept his invitation for imperial overreach in Iraq and Afghanistan, the National Socialists for Marinus van der Lubbe, and Stalinists for counter-revolutionary, petit-bourgeois Trotskyist terrorists. ‘I won’t take bait or be provoked if it means not having an excuse for outrages against human rights in service to my own power,’ said no state terrorist ever.
By contrast, refusing to be baited into vicious cycles of terrorist violence precludes engaging in it as a matter of definition. To the victim complex underwriting terrorist conspiracism, however, refusing to defend elite terror monopoly is as good as supporting the conspiracy—as was judging political leaders based on what they do, rather than what they allege to represent. The monsters of history have always depended on double standards and ‘ends justifies the means’ morality that permits human rights abusers to carry on with business as usual while casting themselves as solutions to problems of their own making.
Conclusion
That this logic has never, and does never, overcome terrorism does not and will not figure; it has ever been designed for anything other than perpetrate it. In his critique of counterterrorist conspiracism, Herman points out that ‘state military resources are vastly larger, and the power of even small states to intimidate is much greater than that of non-state terrorists.’
Only states use torture extensively as a means of intimidation, and if we use as our measure of the scale of terrorist violence either political murders or incarceration accompanied by torture, retail terrorism pales into relative insignificance. State terrorism is also much more important than non-state violence because it is rooted in relatively permanent structures that allow terror to be institutionalized, as in the case of Argentina’s numerous and well-equipped torture centres. Retail terrorist are frequently transitory, and they are often produced by the very abuses that state terror is designed to protect (The Real Terror Network, 83)
Netanyahu’s own commentary demonstrates these realities as well as anything else in intellectual history. The 7 October Hamas incursion was as useful to Zionist state terrorism as previous nominal emergencies in offering a pretext for blaming their victims for existing; the historical continuity of Apology and Utopia (Koskenniemi) as means of trying to legitimise crimes against humanity through blame-shifting is reflected in Netanyahu’s framing of geocide in Gaza as a war of civilisation against barbarism per European Civilising Mission narratives.
As Chomsky has pointed out, Israeli genocide in Gaza the final stage of European Colonialism—a fact again reflected in the continuity of Zionist imperialism with those of its European forebears. It has been said that that fascism is the result historically of the return of the Civilising Mission of European Colonialism as a lived practise of totalitarianism to the metropole and global core; to the extent that this is the case, Netanyahu’s framing of geocide in Gaza as a war of light against darkness and civilisation against barbarism constitutes the true face of the European Civilising Mission, which has only ever aged badly. His invocation of it at all does tend to beg the question as to the veracity of Zionist claims to indigeneity.
