Christopher Schwartz (23) attempts an unorthodox form of investigative journalism and finds himself embarking on an intellectual sojourn into the realm of ideas underlying guerilla warfare and political/ideological violence. He pursues the elusive answer to the riddle, ‘What is the difference between freedom-fighting and terrorism?'
Jumuah, November 12th, 2004
On the morning of Friday, November 12th, 2004, I slipped into the West Bank from Highway 6. A monstrous Caterpillar bulldozer was shoving around the concrete blocks that served as the checkpoint on the abandoned ramp, and some young Israeli soldiers were loafing about. I approached one and said, "Hey. I'm a journalist. Can I go through?"
He eyed me up and down, noting my shabby reporter's appearence complete with backpack and long, unkempt hair, then said, "Where to?"
"Beit Sira," I replied, "the one near Maccabim," the illegal Israeli settlement just outside of Modi`in, "with the really big mosque."
He shrugged and apathetically said, "Okay."
Happily shocked but remaining the epitome of journalistic calm on the outside, I strolled by the goliath bulldozer and began walking down the abandoned Palestinian road. ‘That was too easy,' I kept telling myself, and I nervously glanced around for any sign of a sniper. Soon one of my contacts in Beit Sira came in his car, picked me up and took me to his house.
It was the last day of Ramadan, but his wife had gotten me some coffee, which I drank eagerly.
"Tomorrow," my friend began, "is Eid al-Fitr, the end of our fast. But tomorrow there will be no party, and my wife will serve coffee without sugar."
I wanted to ask him if he really believed that was a good idea. Eid al-Fitr, after all, is supposed to be a holiday of rejoicing, and if Arafat was truly worth his salt as a national icon, he would have wanted Palestinians to celebrate despite their loss. After the long month of fasting—as a Jew would put it, an extended excercise in "practicing being dead"—Muslims are supposed to gather together to celebrate the Biblical and Quranic story of Abraham's greatest test, when God demanded that the prophet sacrifice his son but then stopped him in the nick of time before he could go through with the dreadful deed. It is a legend with many meanings: the virtue of fidelity but also the soul-shaking exasperation that is an essential element in the experience of faith, relieved only by the deep revelation that such sacrifice, while courageous, is only required for one's salvation insofar that the believer realizes death is ultimately a power belonging solely to the Almighty and should not be toyed with by Mankind—a realization which is itself a wisdom attained only when the believer sees himself through the eyes of the offering, his victim. The author of the legend of Abraham's holocaust, be that scribe celestial or terrestrial, was certainly a genius, for She chose a father and son as Her characters, an incisive illustration of the corrupting effects of fanaticism: a man turning against his own progeny in the name of belief, and the redemption attained by both fanatic and victim when the zealot surrenders to the fundamental truth that is breathing, thinking, conversing, fucking, sweating, eating, warring, praying, hoping humanity. And so every year Muslims unknowingly each become Abraham during the torturous month of Ramdan, and every Eid al-Fitr they become son and prophet, fused in an ecstatic realization of each other's organic and spiritual personhood, and rejoicing in their renewed chance at life, a life lived individually and together.
But I decided not to ask him for he would not have been able to answer me. His eyes stared unseeing at the floor. Perhaps the white tiles seemed to stretch out before him into a vast oblivion, expanding into a pitiless mental wasteland of house demolitions, rock throwing, gunshots, checkpoints, and the slow python's strangle of military occupation and apartheid—or perhaps his was not just a vision of the present, but a prophetic gaze into an all-too-possible permanent future. After a while he blinked, and we chit-chatted a bit. Then suddenly it was as if a jinn had possessed him, for his eyes suddenly burned with energy and he said in his peculiarly eloquent semi-educated English, "Life is a circle. Everyone who is on top—you know, first the Islam, then the British, then the French, and now the Americans and Israeliens—eventually go to the bottom. One day, it will be better." And then his voice raised, began to soar, as though he had become an ancient Arabian oracle seized by the logic of words not his own: "Maybe a hundred years, maybe only three, but it will happen." Then he began to fade, slouch, fall back into his previous state.
At that moment Yasser Arafat's body was received in Cairo by the Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi leaders who had ignored his pleas for more than mere rhetorical moral support, who had exploited his cause for their own corrupt domestic agendas, and who had used the desperate Palestinian refugees, whom Israel had trapped within their borders, rotting for fifty years in decrepit ghettos, as a migrant labor force completely bereft of their natural human rights. A few hours before he had been flown in from the Paris hospital where he had died in the care of a racist French government cynically attempting to exploit the Palestinian cause to defuse Arab nationalist and Islamist anger at the anti-Islamic Head Scarf Ban now being enforced all across France by the reactionary Chirac administration. The hypocrisy made me want to vomit, but my friend, and for that matter all the Palestinians, especially the Muslims, were too wound up in grief to notice this last slap in the face of their leader by his supposed allies. It was then that it occurred to me that Arabic Sunni Muslims in general and Muslim Palestinians in particular have a rough spiritual situation. You see, since the days of the philosopher al-Ghazzali, whose fatalistic and supremacist vision of Islam became the state and societal ideology of almost all the Arab Middle East when the Turks rose to power, Sunni Muslims are the willing sufferers, indeed the willing victims, of a tyrannical belief system: everything is a product of Allah's monarchial (or should we say mercurial?) will, especially death and disater. Since there is no metaphysical space given for chance, free will and chaos—that is to say, there is no opportunity given for the divine plan to go awry, even seemingly, and there is also no opportunity for humanity to respond by anything other than predetermined, meta-computerized decisions—Sunnis essentially disregard the idea of resurrection, the notion that from even death there is an opportunity for life.
Moreover, with the recent Saudi-sponsored (thanks to American oil dollars) proliferation of the evangelical and puritanical philosophy of al-Wahab, free will—a central aspect of the human being as conceived in the overall Western religious tradition and especially in the Quran—has been conceptually reduced to just performing the salat [ritual prayers] and, in a Barthian logical spin1, declaring one's faith, shahada, or in the Wahabi conception of faith, blind belief, self-enslavement to an unseen, unfelt, unjustified divine authority (that is to say, the commands, no matter how assinine, of one's imam [minister] and local ulema [religious jurists].) Wahabbism, with its psychological enforcement of a very fragile facist/supremacist ideology in which all Muslims must debase themselves, obliterate the foundations of their own individual spiritualities, eradicate their unique God-given personalities in a satanic quest to manhandle themselves into becoming imaginary, romanticized Bedouin Arabians from the 7th Century, has eviscerated the Sunni identity of all its conceptual guts, an identity which was once splendorously cosmopolitan but now can no longer tolerate any substantial or trivial sameness between itself and other religions. One critical result, overlooked by most analysts and scholars, has been the almost complete repression, if not elimination, of the idea of resurrection from the Sunni worldview.
Wahabbism thus contradicts the essence of Islam, as evidenced in Islamic history (the emergence of Islam saved Arabian society from collapse and more, revitalized it and transformed the primitve Arab tribes into an intercontinental empire) and demonstrated annually in Ramadan, and more importantly, as a concrete principle of iman, true Islamic belief, that is to say, a tenet writ by the hand of God in the Mother of All Books, the Quran. Routinely Allah [God] speaks in the Quran of not only possessing the power of raising the dead, literally, but also occassionally excercising this ability: in one chapter, God kills a man, then resurrects him a millennium later, just to prove His point; and then there's Jesus Christ—Yeshua Christos in the original Aramaic/Greek, Yasiya al-Masih to the Arab Christians, and Isa al-Masih ibn Maryam to the Muslims—but he's a much more difficult exegetical figure, requiring an essay unto himself.
Today grief for the Muslim Palestinian is a wound slit into the very pits of the soul that never scabs, never heals, not even scars. It just bleeds and festers, grows infected, becomes gangrene with the putrid puss of nihilism. During the four-hour wait and two-hour ceremony of Arafat's funeral, I noticed, with much dismay, that no muadhin sang the call to prayer, not even for the communal Friday prayer the performance of which is required by Islamic law of all Muslim men; not even a single solitary rakat was performed, not a single person prostrated toward Mecca, bowed their whole self to the hidden sublime order of the universe. No, not one person turned toward God, the spirit, the cosmos and the company of their fellow sufferers for refuge, for restoration, for wisdom and consolation, and this complete and utter isolation of the individual and the community is the ultimate result of the heresy that grips the Muslim Palestinian psyche today, a result which itself breeds two final results: for most Palestinians, pessimism and submission to the status quo of military occupation, suffering and low-wage survival; but for some, suicidal self-loathing and—because one cannot hate himself absolutely—an apocalyptic hatred for their oppressors, the Israelis.
It is that state of total alienation from humanity—one's inner humanity, the humanity of their society, and the humanity of their victimizers—that propels the al-Aqsa Intifada on and on, inevitably toward catastrophe, for at the core of the Palestinians' rebellion is a corrupted intrepretation of the Muslim notion of shaheed, martyr: the boy has come to view himself completely and utterly as a lamb, an inhuman creature; he seizes the dagger from the prophet, drives it through his own backside until its tip breaks through his belly, and with the last of his strength, grabs the man and impales him upon the blade. The man survives, as the boy knew he would, because there was not enough of the blade to puncture his vital organs, but he is scarred forever, and the boy is quite pleased with this, having achieved his revenge; and he is also content with his own extinction, for he had surrendered all his hope of survival, and he believed, mistakenly, that God truly desired a blood sacrifice. This is the concealed conceptual essence of the "martyrdom mission," the suicide-bomb.
But the suicide-bomb achieves nothing for anyone, not for the Palestinians, not for the Israelis, not even for the God in whose name the gory acts are committed. So, why: why do so many continue to resort to this nihilistic self-sacrifice? As even most Israelis readily admit, the answer to this question has blatantly obvious socioeconomic seeds. However, because human beings are not brutish animals responding only to the mechanistic needs of flesh, those seeds must actually be planted into a soil composed of certain ideas, or rather, the void remaining after the repression of certain ideas; and the roots which grow forth from the seeds are the Palestinians' dangerously unremitting grief; and the inevitable bloom of such a sprout is the fiery and bloody red of the suicide-bomb.
Yet, there hides amidst the crimson foliage of Palestinian martyrdom a second question: what exactly is the essence of the present shaheed ideology, not in the individual suicide-bombers themselves, but in those who engineer the "martyrdom missions," the kamikaze-legions currently waging war against Israel? To answer this question we must scrutinize those who engineer the suicide-bombings: the Shuhada al-Aqsa, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.2
The Muqata, 12:00 PM
Soon, my friend and I rode to Ramallah via the mountain passes which these days overflow with Palestinian traffic thanks to the Israeli checkpoints on every major highway and junction in the West Bank. From every car window, from every house wall, from every inch of the West Bank, Arafat stared out into forever, sometimes with his fingers extended in a victorious "V," sometimes with the Dome of the Rock at his back3. Here and there he gazed not into eternity but was hunched over, in the darkness of the decimated Muqata, pouring over some book, perhaps the Quran, illuminated by a golden flashlight. And everywhere quivered and danced the blank black banners of mourning.
By noon I was walking along the walls of the Muqata with another close friend from Beit Sira, who I'll call Sidiq. A nearby hotel exploded with reporters and television cameras, and a few intrepid journalists roamed the streets, hunting and snooping for anything newsworthy but only finding each other, empty-handed, videoless and ignored by the thronging mass around them. What they did not understand was that today was a special day, a private day, and the camera was an intruder, a rapist: ‘Take your photographs,' I sensed were the unspoken words of the crowd, ‘but don't ask us to play the whore in your peepshow game today. Not today, please not today. Just give us this one moment alone.' I was glad I did not readily possess my camera; I had forgotten it in Beit Sira.
Time eked by like an old Bedouin listlessly strolling the streets of ancient Jerusalem. The heat of the sun was gruelling, the dust a thief, siphoning the moisture from my mouth, and since it was Ramadan, there was no food or water (I snuck an apple I had stored in my backpack, but was gently, and not a little bit facetiously, reproached by Sidiq and ridiculed as a khaffir by a passing presumptious ten-year-old.) The unrelenting parade of mourners, marching along the walls of the Muqata, provided few entertaining spectacles. Once, a band of Communists passed by, raining leaflets from the general secretary's desk of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (of Leila Khaled fame.) Sometime later, two men strode through the human river atop horses, the rider in the rear bearing the black, red, white and green of the Palestinian flag while the rider in the front bore the French banner with the distinguished posture of a medieval Burgundian knight. ‘Congratulations Chirac,' I said inside myself, ‘your charade worked.' Eventually the horses began to panic, as overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of the mass as the journalists were by its subdued emotions and vast boredom, and so before anyone was hurt the riders quickly vacated the compound.
Sidiq and I, alongside an Irish photojournalist determined to uncover a sensational tale—blind to see that all around her was that tale, written in despondent sighs and glares but profoundly history-shaking—slipped into the Muqata courtyard. I noticed a few Hamas, Iraqi and Canadian flags. The Irish lady vanished into the crowd, pursuing the distant sound of drums beaten by a band of mourners, telling me, "That's where there's got to be some action!" Eventually Sidiq and I wandered near to that band; there was no "action," only more of a nation tired of pounding the drums of war and sorrow but not knowing any other instrument to play. The Irish lady was nowhere to be seen, vanished, lost in the mass, drowned by the undertow of her lust for spectacle in the middle of a sea of people exhausted by dazzle and glory and seeking the tranquil sleep of peace with the self-defeating delirium of an insomniac.
Suddenly the ocean of sun-dried tears, hissed curses and half-hearted laughter quaked as the security services, like Moses parting the Red Sea, cut a swath to make way for various VIPs: members of the Palestinian majlis [parliament], Orthodox priests, European diplomats—and the Shuhada al-Aqsa representatives, garbed in black mechanics' suits, their faces hidden behind ski masks, their foreheads wrapped in Fatah bandanas, proudly brandishing exotic Japanese kitanas, silver-plated handguns and Kalashnikov automatic rifles lovingly polished until the metallic onyx of death gleamed hungrily. At the sight of this militia, some Palestinians cheered, alot in fact, but not a majority, because a great many simply ignored the militants, and some even sneered at them or sighed with exasperation.
Later, when the helicopters carrying Arafat's coffin finally landed and the mob surged forward, the militants began to fire their guns into the air to salute their hero. Many Palestinians stared at each other with disgust, and a huge portion of the throng turned and walked away. They had come to pay their respects, indeed, to cry, seeking a final communion with their beloved leader. This was not just anyone's special moment, not the intercontinental mass-media, not the international community, not even mine. We internationals were all there somewhat voyeuristically, "to witness history happen," to grab a scoop or to experience their sorrow, as though the Palestinians were characters in a Hollywood epic enacting some drama for our own catharsis. Some of us, including myself, were there to express solidarity with the Palestinian people. I had my own very secret agenda: to try figuring out this controversial man, this liberator and murderer, statesman and despot, Yassir Arafat.4 No, this was not anyone's special moment but the Palestinian people's—and the militants' display of barbarous praise to their chieftain was not only repulsive to many of the Palestinians, but an insult.
You see, in all quarters of the Holy Land, from Tel Aviv to Ramallah, controversy swarms around the Shuhada al-Aqsa: are they guerilla freedom-fighters or terrorists?
The militia specializes in targeting the military and illegal settler presence within the West Bank. Their weapon of choice is not the kitana, handgun or AK-47; it is the suicide-bomb. Their focus on West Bank targets sets them apart from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, even the Communists, because they are fighting not for the re-conquest of Mandatory Palestine, but for the liberation of those territories promised to Yassir Arafat in the days of Oslo as a future sovereign Palestinian state. Rarely do they launch an operation beyond the Green Line. A few months ago they vowed to launch an as yet unrealized attack on Tel Aviv, and recently they detonated a young man at a bus stop in the French Hill section of West Jerusalem, a traffic point frequented by settlers and soldiers.
Whether you define them as either guerillas or terrorists depends on several factors, the most obvious (but not, it turns out after reflection, the most important) being whether you consider Israeli settlers civilians—ordinary folk just trying to get by like anyone else, with a God-given right to their property (disregarding, of course, how they came to possess their property), or foolish but well-meaning believers in an ideology that claims all the lands of the Bible for Jews and Jews alone—or instigators, an all-too-willing vanguard for an imperialist military-industrial complex whose heart beats thunderously deep in the chest of one Ariel Sharon, who seized the initiative for the settlement movement from the Avoda [Labor] Party back in the 1970s and for thirty years has been the champion of colonization in all of Israel's 1967 conquests.
The next factor is the unsual nature of the attacks, that is to say, whether you consider assymetrical warfare to be too messy, duplicitous and inherently immoral. Moreover, almost all Israelis (and for that matter, Americans) are under the mistaken belief that because a) they and their nemeses are in an undeclared state of war; b) there is no "official battlefield;" and c) due to either a lack of resources or an "ideology of hate," their attackers prefer unconvential methods, in particular the suicide-bomb,5 Palestinian warfare is therefore essentially criminal and terroristic. Considering its premises, this conclusion is inapporpriate, not only because it places too much emphasis on officiality in the conduct of war (an officiliaty which, upon close inspection, lopsidedly favors the IDF), but also because it doesn't concord with the very sound theories and philosophies of war that have been developed over the centuries.6
Then there is the tricky but truly important factor of the soldiers themselves. First, the reason, morally right or not, that Israeli buses and railroads are targeted for attacks is because the State of Israel uses its civilian transportation to move many of its soldiers to and from their stations (for its part, the IDF targets Palestinian ambulances because insurgents use these vehicles to slip past the military—and despite strong claims to the contrary, there does exist some evidence supporting this assertion.) Second, except Palestinian citizens of Israel, female consientious objectors, the Khabadrim (Russian Jewish mystics), and the ultra-orthodox/ultra-nationalists (the backbone of the settlement movement), all Israeli youth are required by law to serve in the military—mass conscription. Whenever a society fills the ranks of its military from its total mass and not, as America has learned to do, from the impoverished margins, the symbology of the soldier becomes imbued with deep emotions of attachment as well as more elusive but undeniable sentiments. The result is that no matter what the soldier was doing when he died "in the line of duty"—he could have just been inspecting passerbys at the checkpoint, it is true, but he could have also been beating bystanders, threatening them with his automatic rifle and confiscating their personal property, all the while excusing himself by claiming "security concerns;" he could have just been an army engineer, but he could have also been the mechanic, if not the driver, of the bulldozer which razed an entire Palestinian neighborhood and crushed to death a young child—his death is a crime, but not because he had been forcefully mutated into a killer and then eagerly sacrificed by an inhuman socioeconomic-political machine which has seized control of the Jewish People, but because only a genocidal sociopath would have been the the type of person to murder that sweet young man who wouldn't harm a fly, that best friend, that beloved son. It is hard to explain, but many Israelis, especially this country's equivalent of the American soccer mom and baseball dad, do in a way stubbornly conceive of the young soldiers as civilians, as though time in the military was the equivalent to two or three years in the Peace Corps. Perhaps this is because everyday most soldiers come home in time for dinner with the family, especially the "jobniks," those 9-5 office and warehouse workers who aren't on support duty for khavrim ["fighters," combat units] and who comprise at least a third if not half of the entire IDF. Perhaps this is because it is difficult for the everyday Israeli, who was likely to have been a jobnik or a khavrim in a support assignment, to admit that their children—indeed, themselves, if they were unlucky enough to have been an enforcer of the Occupation—for almost thirty years have been purposefully warped into oppressors and murderers. Strange? If what I describe is accurate for the common Israeli, it would be no different for anyone, be they American, European, Arab, who has never engaged in combat, never enforced occupation and experienced the insidious spiritual corruption of absolute power over other human beings.
Yet, despite all that which I have just described, ultimately it is the function of fear in the militia's agenda that defines it as terroristic and not as a guerilla force.
The Guerilla
Legendary freedom-fighter Ernesto "Che" Guevera, basing his ideas on his experiences in the Cuban Revolution, understood the individual guerilla and the guerilla force as a catalyst that inspires the masses themselves to take up arms and overthrow the established regime. In essays and his manual La Guerra de Guerillas, Che wrote that without the support of the common people, a guerilla force is nothing more than a roving gang of bandits. He noted that both have the same characteristics: membership united around a common goal, either an alpha-male-esque or pious respect for their leader, intimate knowledge of the terrain, and appreciation of the correct tactics to employ against numerically superior opposing forces. However, they differ in one fundamental respect: guerillas have the support of the common people while bandits do not. The guerilla force can only win the support of the masses by championing their grievances, and to do so they must become crusaders intent on righting the injustices of the prevailing socioeconomic order.
Richard L. Harris, an American expert on politics, economics and revolutionary change in Africa, Asia and Latin America, in his work Death of a Revolutionary: Che Guevera's Last Mission,7 writes,
Che also believed that any revolutionary guerilla force must be the conscience of the people, and the moral behavior of each guerilla must be such that the people regard him as a true priest of the social reforms that he advocates. According to Che, the guerilla must always exercise rigid self-control and never permit himself a single excess or weakness. This means that the guerilla must be an ascetic whose moral behavior earns him the respect and admiration of the local population.
Since one of the most important aspects of guerilla warfare is the relationship that exists between the guerillas and the local population, Che believed the guerillas should conduct themselves at all times in the most respectful manner toward the civilian population. For this reason he advocated that they always pay for goods taken, or at least give a certificate of debt to be paid at some future date. He also emphasized that the zone of guerilla operations must never be impoverished by the direct action of the guerillas, and that the local inhabitants must be permitted to sell their products outside the guerilla zone, escept under extreme circumstances. As the guerilla effort progresses, and the whole area of a country comes under their control, then, according to Che, the guerillas must assume responsibility for governing the civilian population and regulating economic activity in the areas under their control. [All italics in these quotes and subsequent citations are mine, but make sure to take note of the larger themes in these paragraphs]
Furthermore, it is the duty of the guerillas to give technical, economic and social assistance to the oppressed population, which helps the guerillas to win the people's trust and confidence. Once this relationship has been established, it then becomes the task of the guerillas to inculcate their supporters about the fundamental importance of armed struggle against their overseers.8 If the guerillas are successful in uplifting the hopes of the masses they shall bring into existence a true people's revolution and the inevitable destruction of the existing regime.
Harris again:
One of Che's most original contributions to the literature of guerilla warfare is his discussion of the qualities of the guerilla fighter... Che seems to have been describing himself without knowing it when he listed the personal qualities that the ideal guerilla soldier should have. He stressed audacity and a readiness to take an optimistic attitude at times when an analysis of existing conditions does not warrant it. He also indicated that the guerilla fighter must be ready to risk his or her life on an almost daily basis and to voluntarily give it up if the circumstances require it. This of course demands a high degree of devotion to the cause for which the guerillas are fighting, and, according to Che, such devotion can be sustained only if the guerilla movement is based on an ideal or ideals that are meaningful to each guerilla fighter. He concluded that among nearly all campesinos [Latin American peasants] such an ideal is the right to have a piece of land as their own, while the ideal of adequate wages and better social conditions plays a comparable role among guerillas from urban working clases, and more abstract ideals, such as political freedom and social equality, motivate students and intellectuals.
To some extent Che was also describing his friend Fidel Castro, with whom he battled the American-backed dictatorship of Batista from atop the Siera Maestra mountains. I have found no better description of those early days of the Cuban Revolution than that found in "An Open Letter to Fidel Castro," written by American novelist and cultural critic Norman Mailer and printed in his classic anthology, The Presidential Papers: 9
Back in December, 1956, you landed near Niquero in the Oriente of Cuba with 82 men and a few arms. Your plan was to ignite an insurrection which would rid Cuba of Batista in a few weeks. Instead, you were to lose all but 12 of these men [Guevera was among those who survived] in the first few days, you were to wander through fields and forests in the dark, without real food or water, living on sugar-cane for five days and five nights. In the depth of this disaster, you were to announce to the few men still with you: ‘The days of the dictatorship are numbered.'
‘This man is crazy,' one of them admits he said to himself.
It took you more than 20 days to reach the summit of the Pico Turquino, the high peak in Cuba, high in the Sierra Maestra. You reached it on Christmas Eve. There you stayed for two years. For much of that time you were no more than a symbol.
Through Cuba passed the word that 12 men lived on a mountain top, 12 men who had sworn to destroy the tyranny. It was incredible. What that token of resistance came to signify! Day after day, month after month, grew a spirit of rebellion in Cuba.
Che wrote meticulous instructions for the tactics of proper guerrilla combat. He believed that war responds to a series of scientific laws, and those that disregard these laws are destined to be defeated. Since Che conceived of guerilla warfare as a revolutionary war of the people in which the guerillas serve as a catalyst and initial frontline, then the moral/strategic guide once a people's army is established, he repeatedly emphasized through his writings that the support of the masses was crucial to the success of any guerilla insurgency. Thus, he addressed the issue of targeting civilians, within and without the zone of guerilla operations. Harris again:
Although Che felt sabotage was one of the most effective tactics available to a revolutionary guerilla movement, he was opposed to terrorism per se. He believed that terrorism is a negative weapon that can turn the people against a revolutionary movement. Moreover, in his opinion, the results of terrorist attacks are not worth the cost in lives that they entail. On the other hand, he distinguished sabotage (the destruction of essential industries and public works) from terrorism (the systematic use of viloence to coerce the population) and advocated the destruction of nearly everything necessary for normal, modern life (e.g., telephone lines, electrical power stations, water mains, sewers, gas pipelines, railroads, radio and television stations, etc.). Yet even in the case of sabotage, Che pointed out that a guerilla force must consider the social consequences of each act of destruction so as not to cause unnecessary suffering among the urban and rural masses.
Let's take a moment to focus on this term "terrorism." The Internet-based Free Dictionary warns us that,
There is no universally accepted definition of terrorism... At its core, the definition of terrorism is not so much a description of a particular kind of violence, like bombing or assassination, but a way to characterize an act of violence relative to the speaker, and their point of view... [There] are large divergences between the legal use of the term, and the polemic use, which carries with it some common distortions: 1. The early characterization of an act as "terrorism," and 2. The classification as "terrorism" of actions by those considered "terrorists." For example, the assassination of individuals, if committed by "known terrorists," will be called "terrorism." Because of the above distortions, the distinctions between types of actors (military, paramilitary, unlawful combatant) in the laws of war tend to be less than the definition of the act of violence itself... Because it is impossible to define the term "terrorism" in any neutral or objective way, the term "terrorism" is inherently and inescapably political in nature—always defined and used politically.
Harris already provides us the beginnings of a workable definition for that gruesomely sly concept of terrorism: the systematic use of violence to coerce the population. However, the question arises, ‘Why?—to what aim is the coercion?' The Free Dictionary argues,
"Terrorism" is a term that attempts to define, as a separate phenomenon, a philosophy of coordinated violence which tends to have a high degree of social impact on the target society... The "terror" or pronounced state of fear that is manifest as a result of an act of terrorism is limited in terms of its immediate threat, but causes enough of a general disturbance to threaten the existing social order. Thus, terrorism can be loosely defined as the use of violence to bring about a change in a particular social order. It is violence as a means to get political attention for causes that are out of, or contradictory to, the established agenda—which may itself also use asymmetrical and immoral violence to enforce its established political and social order.
The United States Department of State concurs: it defines terrorism as "the calculated use of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or intimidate governments or societies in pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious or ideological." But there is another aspect to terroristic philosophy which these definitions overlook. In her essay, "The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky," published in her anthology The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, Arundhati Roy defines terrorism thus:
Unfortunately, in these nationalistic times, words like ‘us' and ‘them are used loosely. The line between citizens and the state is being deliberately and successfully blurred, not just by governments, but also by terrorists. The underlying logic of terrorist attacks, as well as ‘retaliatory' wars against governments that ‘support terrorism,' is the same: both punish citizens for the actions of their governments.
This seems to be why Che Guevera was against terrorism: deep within himself he recognized that, ultimately, in an unjust situation, everyone is a victim, everyone is twisted, contorted and mutated away from the person they should be, the person they can be if they were to experience true existential freedom. Thus, he strove to destroy the presence of evil within the world by combating its very real socioeconomic and ideological roots, destroying the system which breeds injustice. In this way, while he may have differed tactically in important ways from such other liberators as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., because he refused to demonize or belittle his opponents (the unenlightened suffering masses, and to some extent even the tyrants ruling over them10 ) and actually sought to help them, even giving his life in pursuit of this objective, he was a kindred spirit to these two men and others like them—and intrinsically different from such conquistadors and demagogues who play-pretended to be liberators, such as Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush and Ahmed Yassin.
Here are Che's own words, from his 1965 essay "Socialism and Man in Cuba":
There is no life outside the revolution. In these conditions the revolutionary leaders must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth, to avoid falling into dogmatic extremes, into cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses.
Let me say, at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a true revolutionary without this quality.
Each and every one of us punctually pays his share of sacrifice, aware of being rewarded by the satisfaction of fulfilling our duty, aware of advancing with everyone toward the new human being who is to be glimpsed on the horizon... The road is long and in part unknown; we are aware of our limitations. We will make the twenty-first century human being, we ourselves!
Let me summarize the fundamental characteristics of the true guerilla fighter, as enumerated by the truest guerilla himself—characteristics which, in truth, describe a prophet and, indeed, a true martyr:
• he is an optimist, empowered by a love for life and humanity, imbued with determination, mercy and humility;
• he fights for ideals dictated to him by the needs and desires of the oppressed, not from his own prejudiced considerations and agenda (even if he himself is a member of the oppressed group);
• he treats civilians within the zone of his operations with courtesy and dignity, even directly assisting their various private economic endeavors;
• he strives to makes sure that never as a result of his actions shall the zone of his operations be impoverished, and when employing potentially dubious tactics such as sabotage, he dutifully calculates the full social impact of his actions so as to avoid inflicting unneccessary suffering upon the people;
• very importantly: he seeks the maximum liberation for the maximum amount of human beings, and refuses to write off any person, no matter how despicable they may be, as unsalvagable;
• very importantly: he is willing to die for his cause but does not actively seek death;
• most importantly: he is the embodiment of the alternative, revolutionary social order he seeks to establish;
It is this last characteristic which is of the utmost importance, for the fighter's symbology is the gateway to his whole self: understanding the type of belief, indeed the type of humanity that he represents is to understand his nature.
The Terrorist
They stalked the streets of Ramallah with the triumphant gait of David conquering Jerusalem or Muhammad retaking Mecca. They strode through the crowds of mourners in the Muqata with the egotism of a baalim, demanding adulation from the cosmos and threatening cataclysm if they did not receive it. Masked, their eyes burning with unsympathetic certainty, menacing all they saw with their carefully polished tools of destruction and murder, everywhere the representatives of the Shuhada al-Aqsa went a thick and oppresive smog of intimidation and dread settled upon the crowd and a shiver snaked through us all—I even sensed the tremor in those who praised them, their cheers just a little too ardent, their applauds just a little too strident, desperate. At the time I could not recognize the strange anti-matter electricity which flowed wherever they walked, but now, looking back, I snicker, for theirs is not just an agenda of eye-for-an-eye nationalism, injecting fear into Israeli society "to make them suffer as we suffer." They know full well who are those soldiers at the checkpoints, the settlement gates, the bus-stops: the children of Israel. And they also know full well who are those they send to die by kamikaze: their own children, usually no older than 25, some as young as 16, 17, and one only 10 years old.11 They are working with all their hearts and souls to instill terror within their own society. They are modern-day pharaohs, self-appointed god-kings of their bantustan, rulers of a necropolis, and they are hungry for the fear-induced awe and mind-numbing reverence of the paganized masses. When they flashed their guns and glared at us from beneath the black cotton of their masks, they were saying, ‘I was once completely weak but now I am all-powerful. I wield the power of life and death in my hands. Worship me.'
And what has been the result of their thanato-idolatry? What is the world the Shuhada al-Aqsa offer the destitute Palestinian people? Eternal war, chaos, poverty, fear, and more grief, so much more soul-shattering grief, so many more tears...
Endnotes
The principal emphasis in Barth's work, known as neoorthodoxy and crisis theology, is on the sinfulness of humanity, God's absolute transcendence, and the human inability to know God except through revelation. He defined all religion, including the various Christianities, as "defiance of God." Human beings, he argued, had only the free will to defy the Almighty or submit. Presumably the paths the defiant wretch and pious believer follow thereafter are already writ for them.
Barth's theology is at the core of Evangelicalsim or "Born-again" Christianity, a movement that emphasizes a soldieresque loyalty yet buddyish intimacy to Christ and the authority of the Bible. Evangelicals believe that each individual is born into this world a bastard of destiny, as Martin Luther put it we are but "shit with snow sprinkled on top," so despicable that only through the mercy of a terrible God can the believer be saved from an earthly and then posthumous inferno of confusion and dejection. The grace of this God can only be attained through faith—rather through certitude in his atoning death on the cross, a certainty which is in truth a tautological acquiescence of all independent judgement that can be achieved only through a specific, deeply personal (i.e., needs to be confessed in public repeatedly) conversion experience. Born-agains, especially those throngs who sit piously before the television set every night to watch the 700 Club's spectacle of wrestlers-for-Jesus and juandiced-plastic-surgery-whores-for-the-Lord, reject institutional Christianity while emphasizing strict orthodoxy on cardinal doctrines, morals, and especially on the authority of the Bible, in particular subscription to a traditional, precritical interpretation (i.e., what their preacher says) of the holy book, which, they insist, is untainted by error.
1 Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhb (1703-92), as one Western encyclopedia puts it, "was faithful to the Koran, the supreme body of Islamic law, and to the Hadith (or Sunnah), a second body of Islamic law comprising the actions and utterances attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam. He rejected, however, all innovations and also the principle of consensus (Ijma) of the Muslim community on any text of Islamic writ and on customs compatible with the Koran or Hadith." In other words, he was a primitivist in line with Luther's (and Calvin and Barth's) thinking, and by rejecting the principle of consensus he essentially rejected the free-reasoning democratic spirit which had been a trademark of Sunni Islamic religiosity, leaving behind only a populist and militaristic authoritarianism. Exactly like Born-agains, Wahabis consider it a religious duty to prosletyze (dawa in Arabic), and prefer a strongly literal but choosey reading of the Quran.
2 I wrote this essay in the weeks following Arafat's burial, during which time Abu Mazen ascended to the top of the Fatah leadership. Since then, the BBC has reported that Abu Mazen is beginning to integrate the various Palestinian militias, in particular the Shuhada al-Aqsa, into a prototype national army. I'm told by Palestinians that the end result of this shall actually be positive, for now the militants shall receive stable salaries, have opportunity for moving up a new social ladder, and will be more under the direct authority of the Palestinian presidency than ever before, bringing the Palestinian people closer to self-governance and their state closer to democratic transparency. On another note, I choose to analyse and critique the Shuhada al-Aqsa and not other militias, in particular the armed wing of Hamas, because I have as yet had no interaction with either ardent Hamas supporters or Hamas militants, for I've not gone to the heartland of Palestinian Islamism, the Gaza Strip, and in my experience West Bankers tend to be lukewarm about Hamas. Moreover, because of their presence on key geographic areas which are the clashing point of conflicting ideologies and national aspirations, and their proximity to the power centers of Israel, I believe West Bankers are presently the most important group of all the Palestinians (with the arguable exception of those Palestinian citizens of Israel). Therefore, it is much more reasonable to discuss the Shuhada al-Aqsa, the main West Bank militia, rather than Hamas, Islamic Jihad or even the PFLP, which has been of minor importance since its meteoric rise to fame in the 1970s.
3 Palestinians want to ultimately relocate Arafat's grave to the Haram as-Sharif in the Old City of Jerusalem. That would be truly a petty act. The Old City does not belong to Jew or Arab or gentile—it belongs to all nations and all three religions. Bury him in East Jerusalem, but the Haram Assharif should be off limits to tribalism. At the time of this article's drafting, I am also working on another article in which I shall propose that the Old City and Kidron Valley be established as a sovereign independent city-state, a la the Vatican in Italy.
4 It was during my time in the Muqata that my understanding of Arafat first began to take shape, eventually expressing itself in my article, "The 21st Century Palestinian," currently published on Thinking-East.Net.
5 Contrary to popular belief, most suicide-bombers are not religion radicals, nor are they from the most destitute sections of the population.
6 See the entry for terrorism in TheFreeDictionary.com. Recommended reading: the just war theories as laid out by Maimonedes, Thomas Aquinas and others, as well as The Art of War by Sun Tzu. For more current thinking, try 9-11 by Noam Chomsky, the writings of former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley C. Clarke, and resources in the United States War College of Washington, D.C.
7 I use the millenial edition of Richard L. Harris's Death of a Revolutionary: Che Guevera's Last Mission, in particular the second, third, fourth, twelfth and seventeenth chapters. I want to thank my dear friend Khaalid Allen for this wonderful birthday present, and an apology that I only got around to reading it two years after he first gave it to me.
8 Harris, page 57: "The final objective of a revolutionary guerrila war according to Che's perspective, is the defeat of the enemy's army and the seizure of political power in the name of the people. However, he made it quite clear that guerilla warfare cannot in itself bring about victory. He emphasized that it is important to remember that guerilla warfare is only the first phase of a war of national liberation and that unless it develops into a conventional war, the enemy cannot be completely defeated."
9 I am quoting from the 1963 edition of The Presidential Papers.
10 For example, after the debacle involving the publication of Che Guevera's Bolivian diary, Fidel Castro gave refuge to a remorseful Atonio Arguedas, who had been Bolivia's minister of internal affairs during the guerilla insurgency and shared complicity in Guevera's defeat and execution. See Harris, Death of a Revolutionary, chapter 15.
11 See this website
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