Five questions about terrorism: Responses: Replies
Walzer, Michael
I HAVE NO SERIOUS disagreements with Leo Casey or Michael Kazin. Casey's description of religious totalitarianism as the real enemy is persuasive. I will continue to argue for the condemnation...
...Their goal is the end of Jewish sovereignty in what they take to be Muslim and Arab territory...
...A just settlement would require roughly equal pressure on both sides...
...Bill Clinton's proposals and the agreement that seemed so close at the end of 2000 suggest clearly enough what such a settlement would look like...
...She wants military restraint and an "urgent quest for other means of engagement...
...I will continue to argue for the condemnation of terrorism, whoever uses it, and for a general "war" against it...
...it doesn't seem to me even remotely plausible (note that Rule has to redefine terrorism as coercion rather than murder even to begin his argument...
...But she offers no description of, not even a suggestion about those other means, hardly a clue, in fact, as to what they might be...
...the demand to "do something" about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is more likely, it seems to me, to function as an excuse for not acknowledging what those dangers really are...
...Understanding the pain of the others, resisting a coercive monoculture, taking action against disparities of wealth: that is a political program of a sort, I suppose (the last two points have been central to Dissent's politics from the beginning), but it doesn't have anything to do with terrorism...
...So I must attempt a general response...
...But we do have to focus first on the primary users, whom he has, I think, correctly identified...
...Not only don't I believe that...
...Snitow writes as someone who can't imagine taking responsibility for the lives of fellow citizens, but (however far we are from actual responsibility) that is exactly what we must imagine now...
...Kazin's argument for policy changes by the United States does not strike me as an argument for appeasement...
...Resuming the process, increasing the pressure: that would constitute the "defensible" policy that I pointed to at the end of my talk...
...But it seems to me delusory to think that this policy would make any difference to Islamic radicals...
...But what are the alternatives...
...Ifs not the most important thing we have to do, and maybe we are not doing it as well as we might...
...I disagree with her comments more because of what she doesn't say than because of what she does...
...Making it impossible to train terrorists and to plan future attacks in Afghanistan is a plausible beginning...
...The United States had good reasons for pressing Israelis and Palestinians toward a compromise settlement before September 1I...
...Our country faces real dangers, frightening dangers, and if we on the left claim to be politically serious, we have to look for ways of dealing with them...
...So, again, this isn't a strategy for coping with the dangers we face...
...But Snitow gets to peace-in-the-Middle-East in her second "tangential thought" and Kazin gets there too, at the end of his comment...
...I suspect that Yasir Arafat and some significant part of the PLO elite want the same thing...
...I agree that it's not, or not necessarily, "capitulation" to call for "other than military solutions," but there is no call here for anything that resembles a solution...
...Still, we should try to find out...
...Indeed, since success would require Arab recognition of Jewish sovereignty, it would only further enrage them...
...James Rule seems to believe that the world's primary problem,is Israeli wickedness...
...I fear she is on one of those mythical quests...
...it doesn't come close to the strategy of prevention that we urgently need...
...it would not constitute appeasement of bin Laden and al Qaeda...
...Ann Snitow stops too soon...
...I will say something about the specific case of Israel and Palestine in a moment...
Vol. 49 • January 2002 • No. 1
