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edenfenixblogs · 1 year ago

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I honestly expected to find antisemitic dogwhistles in here, but I didn’t. As for my qualifications in evaluating this: I majored in political science in college for a while (I did change my major. But that was not due to anything other than becoming disillusioned with some of the processes by which governments operate. But i did maintain a perfect 4.0 GPA in all my courses on both National and international political systems. I have also been actively learning about this conflict firsthand and in academic settings since I was seven years old and have engaged in moderated formal debates with fellow Jews as well as Muslims and non-Muslim goyim for both sides as a part of this process. Additionally, I am Jewish and pro-Palestine and am intimately affected by the conflict in Gaza. I also have family in Israel who are very frightened for their lives right now. And I have friends in Israel who are literally risking their lives to bring resources to Palestinian civilians and to protest the Likud government, Netanyahu, and the current military response from Israel.

Pros of this document: This is a very balanced, well-sourced, and thoughtful guide on how to approach discussions about war. I read through all the shortcut guides linked as well as the full-length pdf and the bibliography/works cited in order to be sure this was a reputable source worth sharing, and I find it to be credible. I find it has the intent of lowering the temperature and finding mutual humanity, and I believe the approach laid out here has the potential to achieve its goal. Some especially standout aspects of this document that show good faith intent:

Laying out the difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide. They are very similar to each other in many ways. But they differ in important ways too. What is going on in Gaza is an ethnic cleansing paired with a callous disregard for human life and civilian death. This is not a softening of language or a refusal to condemn genocide. Ethnic cleansing is terrible and an affront to humanity. There is nothing soft about it.

Clearly stating that criticizing a nation (Israel or Palestine) or its people (Israelis or Palestinians) is not OK. Ever. The actions of a nation’s military are the responsibility of its current government and not an indication of the character of the nations citizens.

Cons: Very slightly limiting. This is overall a much better document than I have seen used in this way almost anywhere else. That said, I take issue with exactly three terms they say to avoid. I don’t think they are wrong to say to avoid this words. But I think that, specifically with regard to Gaza, there is more nuance in speech with regard to the terms than the document allows for.

Terrorist/Terrorism:

There’s a lot to unpack here. First and foremost, I want to acknowledge that calling people with brown skin or people of SWANA/MENA descent or nationality who happen to be upset about a political issue is unacceptable and an act of pure racism and Islamophobia. That is not up for debate. If you share a picture/video of a brown person being upset and use that to paint them as aggressive, that is awful.

Calling brown people who disagree with you terrorists or assuming that violence against Jews in diaspora is happening because of “Muslim terrorists” is patently false and a dogwhistle that I will not tolerate on my blog. Any post I see engaging in this behavior will be blocked and reported. The vast majority of violence against diasporic Jews is not caused by Muslims (who are not all Arabs) or Arabs (who are not all Muslims). Most violence against Jews in western countries is carried out by white Christians or culturally Christian extremists.

The document is correct that most people should avoid using the term terrorist/terrorism. I think that it is very valid to air on the side of not using it.

That said, not everyone you see using the term terrorist/terrorism is uninformed and here is how you can identify a trustworthy person discussing terrorism from someone using it as a dogwhistle. I encourage you to refer to this when evaluating discussions that use this term. Because while most people are woefully uninformed on the topic, some of the most thorough insights you’ll find come from people with a working knowledge of terrorism—even though it is a nebulous term.

People using the term terrorism should be able to tell you what it means without hesitation and that definition should come with caveats and not be straightforward.

Even legitimate experts in terrorism and counter terrorism do not have a full and fixed understanding of the term. It is nebulous at best.

People using this term should be able to tell you why they insist on using the term and are aware of the potential harm of misusing it.

People who use this term should be operating with their own fixed meaning or set of tenets that cannot be redefined down the line without an explicit notice to the community with which they are engaging. For instance, if I suddenly encountered a new source or study and chose to change my definition of terrorism, I would pin that information to my blog and explicitly introduce my definition of terrorism every time I use the phrase in every interaction until a norm on my blog was established.

With all that being said, I do plan to use the term terrorist/terrorism on my blog for several reasons: I have extensively studied the subject academically, stochastic terrorism is a legitimate factor in the ongoing conflict that affects all communities in diaspora (especially, but not exclusively, diasporic Jews) and I have a clearly understood set of principles by which I define terrorism. My definition is based on academic experience and lectures and discussion with counterterrorism experts. All of these points must be met without exception in order for me to consider something terrorist in nature.

Terrorism is illegal and non-governmental. State sponsored violence exists. Israel is currently carrying out such violence. But it is not terrorism. Terrorism does not involve an official national military.

Terrorism targets civilians to achieve political goals. Activism targets political issues, education, awareness, and policy change in order to achieve its goals: This point is what distinguishes terrorism from activism in MANY cases. Harming children and civilians as a primary method of achieving any sort of political goal—even one related to a specific policy—is terrorist behavior. Legitimate activism should target policies or even politicians (for instance, removing Likud politicians and Netanyahu specifically) from office. If that activism includes causing active physical harm to any of those politicians, their families, or even those who vote for them, then that behavior has taken on aspects of terrorism and is no longer legitimate activism. I am happy to elaborate on this upon request, but this post is long enough already so I’ll cut this off here. However, even if civilians are targeted by non-governmental violence by people attempting to achieve political goals, that alone is not terrorism. That is violent political extremism. To be terrorism, it must adhere to the next and final point:

Terrorism is cell-based: While violent political extremism is unacceptable, it is not terrorism. A fundamental aspect of terrorism that makes it insidious and hard to root out is that they are not operated centrally like a government. They are instead operated by a network of decentralized cells. I won’t get too deep into this, because it could be and has been a subject of many a dissertation. But basically, if one entire cell (or group of terrorists) were wiped out, another cell from the network would arise to replace it as the primary leader of the terrorist network. (Again, this is a very simplified summary of what I mean by cell based). It’s why killing Osama Bin Laden didn’t suddenly end Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Osama was, for a time, a recognized leader of the terrorist movement and organization, but murdering him and everyone close to him only briefly destabilized the power of the those terrorist groups. Because there were other groups ready to fill the void of his absence and ultimately able to do so in a relatively short span of time. However, being violent and operating a network of cells is not terrorism in itself. Its primary goals must be political in order for it to qualify as a terrorist organization according to the definition I was taught. It is for this reason that drug rings, gangs, mafias, and smuggling rings are not terrorist organizations.

Given all that information, and despite the fact that Hamas members were legally elected to office in Palestine, Hamas is a terrorist organization. Why is this? Because Hamas won 74 of 132 seats in the 2006 Palestinian elections. At the time, the Middle East Quartet stipulated that all future Palestinian governments must be “committed to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements”. These were called the Quartet principles. Since then, Hamas has engaged in state-sponsored extremist violence against Palestinians, suppressed their right to vote, repeatedly cancelled elections—none of which fits my definition of terrorism. HOWEVER, it is still bad. But the parts that make it terrorism still hold true. Hamas controls Palestine, but its near-totalitarian hold on the state is not a reflection of the will of its citizens—as the right to vote freely has been intimidated away and elections have not been held regularly or even throughout all of Palestine.

Also, there are terrorists within the Palestinian government because they are members of the Hamas terrorist organization. But the Palestinian government itself is not a terrorist organization.

As for illegality and violence against civilians to achieve political goals? In addition to elected government officials refusing to recognize Israel as agreed after the elections, Hamas terrorists have repeatedly been the first to break ceasefires by bombing Israeli population centers as well violently suppressing resistance within Palestine. Even on 10/7, that was a terrorist attack that illegally violated the ceasefire agreement that was brokered in May of this same year. Indeed, Hamas even violated ceasefires they initiated, negotiated, and brokered themselves as well as ceasefires negotiated and initiated by Israel and ceasefires initiated by Egypt as well as those with widespread international support and those with widespread support within The Arab League. They have even rejected offers of extended ceasefire from Israel repeatedly and with with violence, including bombs.

What about cells? Hamas is not solely operating within governments or even just the government of Palestine. There are/have been confirmed cells in Lebanon, and a variety of regional capitols—including but not limited to Doha, Qatar, and Cairo.

Their tactics include traditional military attacks (rockets, grenades, other long and short range bombs, air defense missiles, grenades, antitank missiles, etc.) as well as more personal/individual violence such as kidnapping, suicide vests, gun violence, and sexual assault. They also engage in cyber espionage and computer-based violence. And these attacks have primarily targeted individual civilians.

I will not call Hamas members “militants” because I don’t believe it serves their victims to ascribe them military-backing or legitimacy. Their desire for political outcomes is reliant completely and only on causing terror and death among their opposition.

If that means you find yourself unable to engage with my blog, so be it. And I’m sorry. I respect your boundaries and understand if the misuse of terrorist is too much of a dog whistle for you to engage with me on this. Lord knows many innocent people have been baselessly called terrorists based solely on their religion, skin color, or sympathy for Palestinian civilians. I promise to never use the term in such a manner or to demonize people I disagree with simply due to disagreement.

However, Hamas is a terrorist organization by every definition I’ve ever encountered. And I will not soften my language about Hamas and Hamas members. I also don’t believe that most Palestinians support Hamas. Palestine is not Hamas. Palestinians are not terrorists. But Hamas members are terrorists.

So that is my stance on the matter and how I will use the term on my blog. I still do not condone and will not discuss the “war on terror” as that is a separate issue from terrorism itself. I understand that this is more nuance than a typical online discussion has, so if you are not actually familiar with terrorism, I’d still endorse avoiding the word.

Defense spending: My objection to avoiding this is a lot simpler than my objection to avoiding mentioning terrorism or terrorists. Rather, considering every single discussion of defense spending as a topic we should avoid does remove some of the most important usage of the term defense spending. Again, I’m only talking about Israel/Palestine right now. I am not referring to US defense spending. Specifically, much of Israel’s defense spending is actually defense. The Iron Dome not only fires bombs (which is not defensive and is violence). It also intercepts rockets that Hamas fires into Israel and which also target civilian population centers. International aid sent to Israel does in fact support the function of intercepting rockets without any civilian casualties at all. We should be allowed to discuss this. And we should be allowed to investigate exactly how much of Israel’s military spending is actually spent on defensive rather than offensive tactics. We can’t answer those questions if we don’t talk about it. And if we don’t talk about it, it paints all rockets fired by Israel as offensive, which is false. We all deserve to know how many rockets are fired offensively vs. defensively. So, I’d say to avoid using “defense spending” as a replacement for military spending, but proceed with caution and use it sparingly when contextually appropriate.

Targeted Attacks: Like the usage of “defense spending” avoid usage of this term unless you are doing so in a specific and contextualized manner.

I agree that you should avoid terms like “surgical strike” or “enemy target” which both imply the only victims of an attack are “bad guys.” This is almost never true. Civilians are almost always killed in targeted attacks. And any discussion thereof should acknowledge this.

That said, I do think it is important to distinguish between Israel or Hamas bombing a specific target versus either force dropping bombs indiscriminately. Anyone who has been studying this conflict for more than a year knows that Hamas builds bases under Palestinian community buildings (hospitals, pre schools, libraries, etc) in order to make civilian death very difficult to avoid and then cast the Israelis as indiscriminately bombing children and injured civilians. This is a part of how Hamas terrorists use violence to achieve political goals. Additionally, Hamas terrorists also target Israeli buses and community centers when attacking. HOWEVER, it is absolutely just and correct to condemn Israel’s bombing of civilians and community buildings as well as to not allow the government to minimize the murder their bombs inflicted upon civilians during targeted attacks. Just because the attack “targets” a terrorist cell known to be hiding under a school, that does not make the bombing right or just. It does not mean there was no way to stop Hamas without it. It doesn’t even mean there is no way to kill Hamas terrorists without it. Israel has a famously skilled and respected intelligence community. Why are they not instead deploying field agents to target individual terrorists? Why do they not use field agents to arrest and try terrorists rather than just kill them? These are things that we must be able to discuss if we ever hope to reach peace between Israel and Palestine. Why would a “targeted” attack ever involve dozens of civilian deaths? We must interrogate this. We must question the efficiency and effectiveness of any system with such large targets and margins of error. “Targeted” does not mean targeted well or fairly. But it is very different than indiscriminate intentional death specifically and only to civilians. As always, nuance is key. Proceed with caution. And verify everything three times before opening your mouth on any subject here.

If you feel a little crazy looking at news coverage of Gaza or any other military operations, I HIGHLY recommend looking at the Words About War guide which provides lists of misleading phrases commonly used by governments and the media to obscure the realities of war. Sitting down with a news article with this guide and replacing things like "enemy noncombatant" with "civilians" will change the entire way you look at war news and the media as an agent of the military machine. They also have a special guide on Gaza!!

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