Between Terrorism and Civil War

The al-Aqsa Intifada

Clive Jones, Ami Pedahzur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415434539
• eBook ISBN: 9781136868115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This volume seeks to explore whether the current violence, its origins and dynamics can best be understood as a manifestation of civil war. In so doing, it considers how the use of violence by all parties has been conditioned and/or constrained by the domestic factors pertaining to their societies, how external actors have dealt with the violence internally, and how this has impacted on their relations with Israel and the Palestinians, and what does the conduct and scope of the al-Aqsa Intifada suggest about the broader issue of state boundaries and state legitimacy in the contemporary Middle East?

This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal Civil Wars.

A Framework for Analysis

CLIVE JONES

It has become almost an axiom among keen observers of the current violence between Israel and the Palestinians to understand the present through the prism of the past. Following the horrific Seder massacre in Netanya on 28 March 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon addressed the nation in sombre tones, and spoke of the Jewish state being at war with the Palestinians. The emotions stirred up by his speech reminded many of the national mood on the eve of the June 1967 War, when, faced with the animus of its surrounding Arab neighbours, Israel's very existence appeared to be at stake. This call to the barricades has a powerful resonance among a polity where defence has been the dominant totem around which national life has come to be organised.¹ For others, the map for reading the contours of what has come to be known euphemistically as the Al-Aqsa intifada is to be found in the events of 1947–48 when two communities battled for political ascendancy and territorial hegemony over the territory that was British Mandate Palestine.²

The comparisons, to be sure, are often disturbing in their exactitude. The indiscriminate use of terror bombings, particularly in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, was a prominent feature of the internecine violence between Palestinian and Jew between November 1947 and May 1948. Professor Yoav Gelber defined this period as a ‘civil war’ between Jews and Palestinians for control of land and resources, albeit one that ‘took place under British sovereignty and in the presence of British troops’. He goes on to note:

Throughout the civil war, [the] characteristic tactics were urban guerrilla raids or shooting attacks on isolated rural settlements, and ambushes on the opponents' transportation lines. No territory could be gained — even temporarily — and decisive determination of an outcome of hostilities was impossible. Lacking proper objectives, the antagonists carried out their attacks on non-combatant targets, subjecting civilians to deprivation, intimidation and harassment. Consequently, the weaker, less cohesive and backward Palestinian society collapsed under a not so heavy strain.³

Then, as now, such violence, often indiscriminate in its choice of targets, is seen as a strategic threat to Israel since at its heart lies the atavistic fear that such violence denies the legality, if not the reality, of the other. The contemporary refrain from Israeli politicians and the international community that the elected Rais of the Palestine National Authority (PNA), Yasser Arafat, must do more to control the Islamist militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, again, finds an uneasy echo in events over half a century ago. As leader of the pre-state Yishuv — the Jewish community in Palestine — David Ben-Gurion had a tense relationship with members of the right-wing militias Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Lehi. The extent to which Ben-Gurion was able and willing to control these two groups whose terror activities brought heavy retribution on the Yishuv from the Mandate authorities was only resolved to his satisfaction with the departure of the British Army in May 1948. Therein, perhaps, lies the moral in dealing with the present violence.

However prescient, analogies remain imprecise guides to understanding the present violence. Unlike the internecine conflict of 1947–48, a state of Israel exists and has recognised formally, under the 1993 Oslo accords, the legitimate national aspirations of the Palestinian people. In this regard, the violence occasioned (though not caused) by the insensitive visit of Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount/Harem al-Sharif in Jerusalem on 28 September 2000 appeared in concord with an inter-state conflict, albeit conducted between two parties whose military capabilities remain vastly unequal. Such a view, while parsimonious in explanation, denies the central role that borders, or rather the lack of them, play in how one can or should interpret the conflict. Israel, alone among the member states of the United Nations (UN), has never formally declared the exact location of the borders of the state, a legacy of the competing political agendas within the broad scope of Zionism.⁴

The Palestinian terror attacks have now forced the issue of borders to the fore of Israel's political agenda. While justified by the exigencies of securing the mass of the Israeli population inside the old Green Line, Israel's construction of a security fence just beyond its pre-1967 boundary with the West Bank exposes political cleavages that have always simmered between Israelis and Palestinians and among Israelis themselves.

For the Palestinians, the erection of a security fence is but another example of how Israel tramples on their sovereign rights as land is confiscated unilaterally beyond the Green Line. For the settlers, the fence represents the emergence of a de facto border that denies legitimacy to their eschatological claims to ‘Judea and Samaria’ as the state comes to sacrifice their world-view by reference to a casuistry that denies the very essence of what a Jewish state should be.

For the settlers, the security fence implies the acceptance of a border with its concomitant demands on sovereign recognition of a foreign entity.⁵

For them, ironically, viewing the conflict as a civil war, rather than just part of a broader global campaign against terrorism supports their world-view as it at least acknowledges that control over land and resources remains a contested issue, and that Palestinian claims to the self-same space can and should be challenged.

The Palestinians share the same sentiment over the erection of a border fence with the settlers but for profoundly different reasons. Aside from the expropriation of land, any border fence adds to the economic distress of Palestinians unable to travel into Israel proper in search of menial employment, while settlers will be allowed to exit and enter as they please along specially-constructed routes. Adding to their frustration, no plans have been announced for any of the settlements to be dismantled or abandoned.⁶

From a Palestinian perspective, little incentive therefore exists to support a cessation of violence against Israel, or indeed to restrict attacks only to the symbols of Israel's presence in the Occupied Territories, be they settlements or military targets. In this regard, the Palestinian strategy in this ‘war’ has proven to be a doubled-edged sword. On the one hand, attacks inside the pre-1967 border have, to use the parlance of nuclear strategy, imposed a balance of terror, however grotesque or inhumane this may appear to the outside observer. On the other, the retribution exacted by Israel has been costly, both in terms of lives lost, property demolished and infrastructure destroyed. This cycle of violence between two national movements appears more akin to an inter-, rather than intrastate conflict. Indeed, Israel's Operation ‘Defensive Shield’ was defined as a calibrated response designed to root out the ‘terrorist infrastructure’ in Palestinian-controlled territory.⁷ Defining the conflict as a war on terrorism, an asymmetric inter-state war, a struggle for national liberation or a civil war therefore tells as us more about the political position of those offering such definitions, than it does about the nature of the conflict itself. All have validity as explanatory paradigms, but equally, none can capture fully the dynamics of this conflict.

While conscious of such limitations, this collection frames its analyses of the Al-Aqsa intifada within the construct of civil war. With the end of the Cold War, much has been made of the shift in the very nature of ‘civil conflict’. Removed from the exigencies of superpower competition, civil war has become ‘neo-medieval’, where gratuitous violence in failing or failed states is motivated by criminal rewards rather than any overt ideological, let alone political, agenda. The extent to which the Al-Aqsa intifada correlates to either an ‘old’ or ‘new’ definition of a civil war or internecine conflict requires, in the first instance, an elaboration of those self-same definitions.

THE AL-AQSA INTIFADA AS CIVIL WAR

It has been argued that the ‘civil wars’ of the contemporary age are both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the ‘civil wars’ of the past. ‘Old’ civil wars were defined by a clear clash of competing ideological viewpoints seeking to impose their respective normative values over the same society or ethnic group in a given geographical space. Sometimes these wars attracted outside intervention but this did not change the essential dynamic of the conflict. The Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, the Greek Civil War, and even the Korean and Vietnam wars all exhibited to a greater or lesser degree, such variables. By contrast, the new civil wars, what Donald Snow has referred to as ‘Uncivil Wars’, contain little that is ideological and, by inference, noble.⁸

Oft-cited examples are the conflicts in Sierra Leone and Liberia where the simple pursuit of private gain in the form of controlling access to the raw — be it diamonds, timber or other natural commodities — of a failed or failing state deny any ideological motivation to the actions of the protagonists beyond pure greed. Such perceptions are merely reinforced by the arbitrary and savage nature of the violence meted out, including the horrific spectacle of forced amputations on a whole population irrespective of age, race or gender. In short, the main actors in the new civil wars are motivated by little more than greed, with little or no recourse to the need to ameliorate some collective grievance, be it ethnic or ideological.

This clear dichotomy between old and new civil wars has, however, come to be challenged. Stathis Kalyvas has noted that those who impute little political or ideological motivation to combatants in ‘new’ civil wars have failed to appreciate fully the diversity of factors that motivate and propel protagonists to engage in the most savage forms of violence. Kalyvas highlights the work of scholars such as Paul Richards who, contrary to the popular image of the rebels in Sierra Leone as a bunch of ill disciplined thugs bent purely upon terrorising the local populace for personal gain, noted the high level of political consciousness that underpinned their action. As Kalyvas notes, ‘Their ideological motivations are simply not always visible to observers looking for “Western” patterns of allegiance and discourse. They make the flawed assumption that organisations using religious idioms and local cultural practices to mobilise people — rather than easily recognisable universalistic appeals — lack any ideology.’⁹

The ethnocentric prism through which the current taxonomy of ‘civil wars’ is constructed is therefore flawed according to Kalyvas because it simplifies historical precedent and contemporary patterns of civil war. For example, ‘warlords’ are not the latest manifestation of the new civil wars but existed previously in Lebanon and China. Moreover, despite the pejorative connotations of the term, ‘warlords levy taxes, administer justice, maintain some degree of order, and generally assume the burdens of government in the areas that they control.’¹⁰

In short, the apparent transitory nature of groups that is so often portrayed in the literature concerning ‘new’ civil wars is often at variance with a reality Western politicians cannot, or will not recognise. This is not to excuse the extreme forms of violence and brutality that such groups inflict upon defenceless populations. Rather it is to highlight that while Western moral sensibilities determine only madness in the behaviour of rebel groups such as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, method can and does determine their bloody actions. The forced amputation of women and children in rural areas between 1995 and 1996 was seen as a form of particularly savage barbarism. In fact, it was a vicious attempt to prevent people coerced into the rebel movement returning to their villages to harvest crops. Once word spread that the rebels would forcibly amputate the limbs of defectors, people gave up trying to return and remained beholden to, if not captives of, the rebel agenda.¹¹

To date, the Al-Aqsa intifada has yet to exhibit the brutal extremes of the civil conflicts in West Africa, though incidents such as the lynching of two Israeli reserve soldiers in Ramallah in October 2000 by a Palestinian mob suggest that no conflict that is internecine in nature remains immune from such visceral spectacles. Following on from the arguments of Kalyvas, it is a conflict that demonstrates more continuity than perhaps change in the nature of civil war. It should be noted from the outset that the very term, intifada remains a contested issue.

Aside from its...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Biographical Notes
• 1 Introduction: Between Terrorism and Civil War: A Framework for Analysis
• 2 The Causes of Vigilante Political Violence: The Case of Jewish settlers
• 3 In the Shadow of the Al-Aqsa Intifada: the Palestinians and political reform
• 4 TIPH: Preventing Conflict Escalation in Hebron?
• 5 Jordan, the Palestinians and the Al-Aqsa intifada
• 6 The Al-Aqsa Intifada as seen in Egypt
• 7 ‘Stressing the Probable, Postponing the Improbable’: Hizballah in the shadow of the Al-Aqsa Intifada
• 8 Conclusion: Terrorism, Liberation or Civil War? The Al-Aqsa Intifada
• Index