with brilliance edward said explains the anti-narrative nature of terrorism, an enveloping cloud that obscures/obliterates history and logic in order to justify “us” and dehumanize “them.” applicable to palestine, of course, but also generally to the war on terror. “permission to narrate” is an excellent essay made public for a limited time by the journal of palestine studies:
Edward Said: As first articulated during the late months of the Carter administration, and amplified in such books as The Terrorist Network and The Spike, as unrestrainedly used by Israeli – and now by American – officials to describe “enemies, “terrorism” is the vaguest and yet for that reason the most precise of concepts. This is not at all to say that terrorism does not exist, but rather to suggest that its existence has occasioned a whole new signifying system as well.
Terrorism signifies first, in relation to “us,” the alien and gratuitously hostile force. It is destructive, systematic and controlled. It is a web, a network, a conspiracy run from Moscow, via Bulgaria, Beirut, Libya, Teheran and Cuba. It is capable of anything. One fervent anti-Communist Israeli has written a book revealing the Sabra and Shatila massacres to be a plot engineered by Moscow and the PLO to kill Palestinians (using Germans) in order to frame democratic Israel. Most of all, terrorism has come to signify “our” view of everything in the world that seems inimical to our interests, army, policy or values.
As such, it can be used retrospectively (as in the cases of Iran and Lebanon), or prospectively (Grenada, Honduras, Nicaragua) to justify everything “we” do and to delegitimize as well as dehumanize everything “they” do. The very indiscriminateness of terrorism, actual and described, its tautological and circular character, is anti-narrative.
Sequence, the logic of cause and effect as between oppressors and victims, opposing pressures-all these vanish inside an enveloping cloud called “terrorism.” Israeli commentators have remarked that the systematic use by Begin, Sharon, Eitan and Arens of the rubric “terrorist” to describe Palestinians made it possible for them to use phrases like “terrorist nests,” “cancerous growth” and “two-legged beasts” in order to bomb refugee camps. An Israeli paratrooper said that “every Palestinian is automatically a suspected terrorist and by our definition of the term it is actually true.” One should add that Likud’s anti-terrorist language and methods represent only an increase in intensity over previous Israeli policies, which were no less callous about Palestinians as real people with a real history. More (for a limited time) here.