Nir Rosen on "Terrorism"

Now that Israel's heroic massacre of Gaza is over, the article that we present below is totally out-dated and irrelevant, but we'll pass it along anyway, on the off chance that at some point in the future a native population fights back against their oppressor.

Nir Rosen, writing in the Guardian, argues that "the term 'terrorism' has proved a rhetorical smokescreen under cover of which the strong crush the weak." His analysis is more precise and eloquent than this blog is capable of producing, so we quote him at length, and highly recommend reading the whole piece.

"Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles.
...
Just as the traditional American cowboy film presented white Americans under siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the opposite of reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors and not the victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed, and their land was settled by colonists, who went on to deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world. Every day, more of Palestine is stolen, more Palestinians are killed. To call oneself an Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession of entire people."