Israel: A Good Idea? the Effects Israel Has Had on the Middle East, the World,

Israel: A Good Idea? The effects Israel has had on the Middle East, the World,

And the rise of Terrorism

Paul Ludwig

        The defeat of Germany and end of the war in Europe in May 1945 allowed the world to see what had happened to the Jewish community. It created a terrible, overwhelming feeling of revulsion and horror, as well as a feeling of at least temporary guilt. Consequently, the Jewish people enjoyed the sympathy and political approval of a majority of the Western world. The commission of a crime as horrendous as the Holocaust was a disgrace on all civilized countries and this conveyed into a pro-Jewish sentiment that influenced the United Nations General As-sembly, in November 1947, to recommend the implementation of the “Partition Plan for Manda-tory Palestine” (Tress, 1994). The United Nations had tried to address the objectives and claims of two competing movements: Arab nationalism in Palestine and Jewish nationalism, known as Zionism. All this sounded pretty good on paper, and when the time came, the plan was accepted by the Jewish public, minus some fringe elements. However, Arab governments outright rejected the plan and indicated an unwillingness to accept any form of territorial division (“International Organization”, 1948) While the land of Palestine is the traditional homeland of the Jewish peo-ple, the establishment of a permanent state of Israel has led to the almost continuous spread of conflict and terrorism throughout the Middle East and in turn, throughout the Western world.

        The post-WWII conflicts between Jews and Arabs started as a civil war in 1947 and esca-lated into the First Arab–Israeli War in May 1948. Since then, hostilities have continued almost unabated. The hits just keep on coming with: the Suez War; the Palestinian insurgency in Leba-non; The Six-Day War in 1967; the 1973 Yom Kippur War; the Occupation of the West Bank in 1977; and numerous other minor clashes that just continued to fuel more dissention and mistrust

between Arabs and Jews. There are also the attacks attributed to anti-Israeli terrorist organiza-tions such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to be in-cluded and considered. Peace efforts such as the Camp David Accords (1979); The Madrid Con-ference (1991); the Oslo Accords (1993); The Jordanian-Israeli Peace Treaty (1994); The Taba Agreement (“Oslo II”) (1995); and the Roadmap for Peace (2003) brokered by United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations have all failed to create any semblance of a permanent solution or lasting peace.

        As a result of all of this, Palestinian secular movements such as Al Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) began to target civilians. After Israel defeated Arab forces in 1967, Palestinian leaders realized that they were unable to defeat Israel using traditional military tactics. They took notice of the revolutionary movements in Latin America, North Af-rica, and Southeast Asia and began to evolve from classic guerrilla warfare toward urban terror-ism. Modern communication and transportation systems have also helped to internationalize their efforts. They began launching a series of hijackings, kidnappings, bombings, and shootings, cul-minating in the kidnapping and deaths of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. These Palestinian groups have become a model for numerous Islamic extremists and Arab secular militants, and offered lessons for them to improve upon. The PLO and their off-shoot organizations created extensive transnational extremist networks tied into various state sponsors such as the Soviet Union, certain Arab states (i.e. Iran), as well as criminal organiza-tions. By the end of the 1970s, the Palestinian network was a major conduit for the spread of ter-rorist techniques worldwide (Gunaratna, 2001).

        The failure of Arab nationalism in the 1967 war with Israel resulted in the strengthening of both progressive and extremist Islamic movements. Islamic movements increasingly came

into opposition with secular nationalism, providing an alternative source of social welfare and education in the vacuum left by the lack of government-led development (Moore, 2002). Some examples are: the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda; Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM); and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Islamic groups were supported by conservative regimes, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, to counter the expansion of nationalist ideology. All of these have used, and continue to use their experience to support insurgencies in North Africa, Kash-mir, Chechnya, China, Bosnia, and the Philippines. Since 1989 the increasing willingness of re-ligious extremists to strike targets outside immediate country or regional areas underscores the global nature of contemporary terrorism. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, as well as numerous attacks throughout the globe are all representative of this trend (“National Consortium”, n.d.).