These are particularly dark days in Israel and the Occupied Territories. First there was Thursday night’s deadly stabbing at Jerusalem’s annual Pride parade, perpetrated by a man just released from prison for committing the same crime a decade earlier. Then, on Friday we woke to the unspeakable news that an 18-month-old child had burned to death in his bed. That his parents and brother were now in hospital with severe burns, fighting for their lives. On Monday, the cycle of violence continued with a firebomb thrown at an Israeli car in Beit Hanina.
In the first two incidents, the attackers were Jews with a hateful ideology, and Israelis had no one to blame but themselves. Politicians from across the spectrum rushed to make public condemnations. Something that united statements on the arson in the West Bank village of Douma was that the word terrorism was used to describe it. In his first statement on Ali Saad Dawabshe’s death, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it as “a reprehensible and horrific act of terrorism in every respect.” The Israel Defense Forces also quickly described it as terrorism.
“Terror,””terrorism” and “terrorist” are loaded terms. Their nuance and definitions change depending on user and context (see this great The Guardian piece on how vague the definitions are). They are so loaded that they are judgment calls of sorts. In Israel certainly, “terror” and its derivatives are part of an “us and them” rhetoric. We, the good, rational guys, who only use violence when we really have to, who always try to minimize harm to civilians, and them, they are the bad guys, the terrorists. The guys you can’t negotiate or reason with.
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