roachboy

these questions are not disconnected from each other, obviously.
and there is a rationale for concentrating on the situation endured by palestinians as a way to talk about "terrorism" as it has come to be defined since the early 1970s.

the right of return is at the center of the conflict, really: and it is a good example of the kind of intractable issue that can give way to hardening of other lines: on the palestinian side, to the sense of being dominated without any possibility of redress, the sense that the palestinians are a poor, powerless, pulverized group of people who confront a regional superpower behind which there is another superpower...given that there would appear to be little hope of movement on the fundamental sticking point, and that the present state of affairs is totally untenable, recourse to violence would make sense, wouldn't it?
i mean, where are the good options?

then you compound this with other lovely actions like the israeli refusal to recognize hamas after the last elections--which effectively prevented hamas from moderating--which i think it would have done--and you can get an idea of how things go. it is a short jump from stuff like this to a view of israel as a single entity geared entirely around a logic in the occupied territories in particular that would result in the elimination of the palestinian population--i mean, if you factor in settlements that routinely divert water supplies away from palestinian areas, for example, it does not take a rocket scientist to see why folk would come to see themselves as trapped in the loosing position in a game they cannot win.

if you found yourself in such a situation, how would you react?
would you just roll over and accept whatever is given?
if it was clear to you that no conventional political mode existed that would enable anything like a redress of that situation to even get started?
and if you looked toward the future and saw nothing?

i dont know, folks: the pacifist side of me deplores the consequences of this type of action.....but i also understand why they would happen.
these actions are POLITICAL---they have definite causes, they are geared around producing particular effects---so the category "terrorism" does nothing but obscure things, make a rational consideration of what is going on even less likely to happen--who benefits from this? well, the place that sells weapons systems sure as fuck benefits.....


if you were in power on the israeli side and came to understand that the attempts to stomp out these actions were doing nothing by increasing the pressure within the situation that caused them in the first place.....what would you do?

the logic of this conflict is wholly self-perpetuating.
pretending it is otherwise seems to me delusional.
there is no clarity to be had here that does not include accounts of the self-perpetuating dynamics that are the conditions of possibility for "terrorist" actions.
and to my mind the ideological viewpoint that casts israel in the position of Victim and the palestinians in the position of Persecuting Other is nothing short of obscene.

that is why i participate with considerable reluctance in debates about this.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite