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And even if peace were attainable, terrorism would outlive peace for another reason: the Arab-Israeli dispute is not the sole -- the root -- cause of terror in the Middle East. There are at least two other fundamental causes of instability, war and murder. One is the anti-Western, antimodern, antisecularist movement that is sweeping the Islamic world and has already wholly captured Iran. As Daniel Moynihan has said of the United Nations, the anti-Zionist campaign there is but the leading edge of a larger anti-Western campaign. Israel, as the most vulnerable Western outpost, becomes the most convenient target. Israeli territory, however, turns out to be well guarded, and thus a dangerous and inconvenient target for terrorists to attack. So the imperialist demon is confronted at other, easier points: European planes, ships, discos -- wherever Westerners, preferably Americans, preferably civilians, are to be found.
Anti-Western terrorism -- from the seizure of American hostages in Tehran to the blowing up of Western embassies in Kuwait to the killing of American G.I.s in Germany -- is not primarily concerned with Israel. It is concerned with expelling an alien and corrupting West from the Islamic world. The Ayatullah has had much to say on the subject.
The other great fuel for Middle East terrorism is also anti-Western, but modern and secular, and is thus often at war with Islamic fundamentalism (sometimes quite literally, as in 1982 when President Assad of Syria killed an estimated 30,000 of his own people in putting down the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in Hama). Principally, however, this form of terrorism is at war with the West or, more precisely, with Western influence in the Middle East. This anti-Western strain is nationalist. The grievance is that after centuries of ascendancy, the Arab world has in modern times been subordinated by the West, first by naked colonialism, now by the more subtle devices of political, cultural and economic neocolonialism. This complaint echoes "anti- imperialist" sentiments felt in other parts of the Third World. And, as with anti-imperialism elsewhere, the issue is not Israel. Eradicate Israel and you have not eradicated the grievance.
Nor the terrorism. Grievances, after all, need not result in terror. Many groups have grievances. Occasionally, a few issue in terror. In the Middle East, however, the resort to terror is ubiquitous. Think only of the numberless atrocities of the Lebanese civil war, now twelve years old. Revolutionary violence in the Middle East, whether Palestinian, Islamic or pan-Arab in objective, routinely turns to terror as an extension of war by other means. First, because terrorism as an instrument suits those who are otherwise not equipped to challenge superior power in direct military confrontation. Terrorism thus becomes a kind of appropriate technology for the warfare of the weak. But terrorism must not only fit the struggle; it must fit the political culture. "To speak of solving the problems of terrorism is an illusion," argues the West German Middle East expert Helmut Hubel. "Over the past three centuries, terrorism has been regarded as a legitimate instrument of policy and is part of Middle Eastern political culture."