Bruce Hoffman
New York: Columbia University Press, 1998
296 pp., $17.95 pb
Richard Drake
History
UM-Missoula
Bruce Hoffman, the director of the RAND Corporation's Washington, D.C., office and a well-known authority on political violence, begins his book with an attempt to do something that has never been done before: to end the semantic controversy over the term terrorism. The literature on this subject has been notoriously self-serving, with those individuals whose violence we oppose labeled as terrorists. We never lack appropriate euphemisms, however, for the violence of our friends and allies. Even the exhaustive Oxford English Dictionary can do no more with terrorism than to say that it is a catchall term for abhorrent violence. The question begged by the dictionary is, abhorrent to whom: Maximilien Robespierre or Louis XVI, the Ayatollah Khomeini or Ronald Reagan, Yasir Arafat or Ariel Sharon, Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush?
In Chapter 1, "Defining Terrorism," Hoffman hopes to show how the term has evolved over the past two hundred years and exactly what it means today. His analysis does not lead to the promised definitional finality. At the end of a long historical survey, he concludes that terrorism is "the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in pursuit of political change" (43). Hoffman leaves unasked the crucial question of who gets to define the terms of the definition. For example, Sharon and Arafat routinely apply Hoffman's definition to each other, in much the same way that violent adversaries have throughout history. Some episodes of political violence will leave no reasonable doubt about their evil character, but in the history books and in today's newspapers there is a considerable zone of moral ambiguity about terrorism that Hoffman's theories will do very little to clarify. The clash between the Israelis and the Palestinians is a classic case in point.
With Hoffman's analysis of terrorism in the Middle East, in Chapter 2, he begins to make some headway toward the understanding that eluded him in the theoretical introduction. This is the best chapter because in it Hoffman satisfyingly approaches the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through an analysis of its real dynamics of power and resentment, scrupulously avoiding the selective moral indignation that is designed to take in the intellectually halt and lame and to promote the political cause of one side or the other.
For Hoffman, the fundamental realities of the Middle East today can only be understood by first recognizing that without acts of terrorism Israel never would have come into existence. The horrific July 1946 terror bombing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel, with ninety-one people killed and forty-five injured, "still holds an infamous distinction as one of the world's single most lethal terrorist incidents of the twentieth century" (51). Menachem Begin and Vladimir Jabotinsky were terrorist commanders in the fullest sense of the term. We do not find quoted or cited in this book Albert Einstein's 4 December 1948 letter to The New York Times, protesting Begin's visit to the United States. Einstein insisted that Begin and his followers were "a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties."
Nevertheless, Hoffman leaves us in no doubt about the terrorist character of the Begin-led Irgun. Begin was the model terrorist whose murderous tactics and propaganda about the moral legitimacy of attacking the British occupiers of Palestine "provided a template for subsequent anti-colonial uprisings elsewhere" (56). One hundred and fifty British soldiers were killed in retaliatory hangings and other acts of violence between 1945 and 1947. These tactics worked. The British withdrew, and Israel was born.
Among those who learned from Begin were the Palestinians. They applied his policies in a more extreme and systematic form. The Palestinians are the subject of Chapter 3, "The Internationalization of Terrorism." Hoffman shows how Palestinian violence evolved in a context shaped decisively by the success of Israeli violence. This chapter, however, is marred by his failure to deal adequately with the appalling conditions of the Palestinian refugee camps, which have functioned as incubators of terrorist violence since the early 1950s. For this essential part of the story, the reader is advised to consult the shocking reportage of the Israeli writer David Grossman in The Yellow Wind (1988) and Sleeping on a Wire (1993). Chris Hedges's article, "A Gaza Diary: Scenes from the Palestinian Uprising" (Harper's Magazine, October 2001), provides a wrenching update of the Palestinian tragedy. Although Hoffman refers to the camps, he is interested mainly in the tactics that made the Palestinians the first truly international terrorist organization in history, with training, financial, and logistical links to numerous other groups. The same end would have been better served with more attention to a historical rendering of the dialectic of mutual recrimination and violence that has transformed the Middle East into a charnel house.
The Middle East remains a primary theme in Chapter Four, "Religion and Terrorism." Here Hoffman provides a fascinating comparative study of violence in the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions. Religious fanaticism and terrorism have gone hand-in-hand for thousands of years. Hoffman argues that Jews and Christians, as well as Muslims, have much to answer for as fomenters of religious terror. He reminds us of the enormities perpetrated by Rabbi Meir Kahane, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, and Yigal Amir as well as the threat in America posed by William Pierce-inspired Christian supremacist movements. The Ayatollah Khomeini, Imam Sheikh Ahmad Ibrahim Yassin of Hamas, and Osama bin Laden have their counterparts in the Jewish and Christian worlds, but the Islamic fanatics have a much greater opportunity for mayhem because of the alienated hordes in the Middle East who see no hope at all in the status quo. The opportunity created by despair and rage, not the intrinsic elements of the religion itself, gives Islam the edge over Christianity and Judaism as a force for terror. If the Old Testament and the Christian Era be guides, Jews and Christians have shown little aptitude for pacifism, except when they hold the upper hand. Hoffman concludes the fourth chapter by correctly linking the cult violence of such groups as the followers of the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh in Oregon and of Shoko Asahara in Japan with the typical pattern of religious violence in history, save for the dramatic innovations made possible by weapons of mass destruction.
Hoffman's speculations in the fifth chapter, "Terrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion," lead nowhere. He wrings his hands over the sensationalistic coverage of terrorism by the media but furnishes no credible alternative to their existing practices in a free society. Anyway, since 11 September the question facing the media is not the one that he poses. Now the media have to decide whether they are going to be accurate or partisan reporters. To cite one notorious illustration of this dilemma, are they going to interview Osama bin Laden or shoot him, as Geraldo Rivera of Fox News threatened to do?
In Chapter Six, "The Modern Terrorist Mindset: Tactics, Targets and Technologies," Hoffman's theme is that "most terrorism is neither crazed nor capricious" (157). He illustrates his argument here with brief accounts of numerous ideologically motivated terrorist groups, principally the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in Germany, the IRA in Ireland, and the Basque ETA in Spain. Hoffman does a generally competent job in getting the facts of these complex stories straight. He did stumble, however, with Renato Curcio--the founder and leader of the Red Brigades--who is listed as Renato Curio (170 and in the Index). It is a shame that Hoffman did not get in this instance the editorial backup that every writer, however well informed, needs.
The final chapter, "Terrorism Today and Tomorrow," serves as a conclusion. Writing in 1998, Hoffman predicted that the problem of terrorism would soon worsen because of "the dramatic proliferation of terrorist groups motivated by a religious imperative" (201) and the growing availability of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The tragedies of 11 September 2001 have brought the first part of his prediction to pass. As for the best means with which to oppose terrorism, Hoffman judiciously calls for the amelioration of "both the underlying causes and the violent manifestations" (212). We are currently heeding only the second part of his call. On the basis of the way Hoffman has structured his book, we can assume that with these recommendations he has the Middle East primarily in mind. Terrorism can never be eliminated entirely there, but it has only grown worse with what he calls in another context "the myth of military retaliation" (193). Such a strategy becomes hopeless when a politically significant audience identifies with the terrorists. Taking terrorism seriously in the Middle East would entail the untried measures of statesmanship that prevent such a bonding from taking place.