Above: A Syrian Democratic Forces soldier stands at the Baghuz camp in Syria. Image provided by the New York Times.
This article is published under the Opinions Section of The Skidmore News.
Content Warning: Descriptions of state violence and death.
It is March 18, 2019; a United States military drone circles over a crowd in Baghuz, Syria. Moments later, two American jets drop 4,500 pounds of explosives on the crowd, killing 80 people. The US military confirmed that only 16 of those who were killed were ISIS fighters.
On November 13, 2021, The New York Times brought the Baghuz strike into the public eye for the first time— something the US military has historically avoided. This airstrike is but one example of state violence being used against civilians with little accountability. Still, many narratives about terrorism in the Middle East attempt to make a moral distinction between nonstate and state violence which they categorize as “terrorist” and “counterterrorist,” respectively. The United States and Israel, for example, often attempt to claim the moral high ground over “terrorist” groups like Hamas to justify their own use of violence. These narratives create a false dichotomy between the violence of “terrorist” groups and the violence of “counterterrorist” states in the Middle East.
The terrorist-counterterrorist dichotomy relies on a clear standard for determining whether a political actor uses terrorism. Terrorism is hard to define precisely, but conventional definitions often highlight the use of violence against civilians for political goals. The terrorist-counterterrorist dichotomy as it is applied in the Middle East would tell us that “terrorists” (like Hamas) use violence against civilians to achieve their political goals while “counterterrorist” states (like the US and Israel) do not use violence against civilians to achieve theirs. If there was a dichotomy between two groups that did or did not kill civilians, we would be inclined to say that the group which does not kill civilians is more ethically upstanding.
However, historical and contemporary evidence shows that this dichotomy between self-proclaimed “counterterrorist” states and the groups they label as “terrorist” is false. Both entities continue to engage in violence against civilians, muddying the waters of who exactly are the “good guys,” if there are any. In saying this, I do not aim to justify the violence against civilians committed by groups such as ISIS-K (Islamic State in the Khorasan Province), but rather to advocate that, if Israel and the United States really want to be seen as fighting terrorism together, they should use methods that do not resemble it so closely.
Israel and the United States provide good case studies of this phenomenon due to their high reliance on rhetoric surrounding terrorism in the Middle East and their history of using violence against civilians. The formation of Israel was marked by instances of nationalist violence being directed at civilians by both Palestinians and Jewish settlers. Zionist and Israeli forces used violence against civilians at the massacre of Deir Yassin in 1948, at Kafr Qasem in 1956, and at on numerous other occasions. This violence was applied to increase Israel’s control over the territory that Zionists believed to be theirs. The massacres are clear uses of violence against civilians for political goals.
Israel has changed since the mid-20th century, but the worrying use of violence against Palestinian civilians remains. Vox reported that between 2000 and 2014, Palestinians were killed disproportionately in the Palestine-Israel conflict at a rate of 15 to 1. That rate has increased to 23 to 1 since 2005. The sheer number of deaths occurring in the last war between Hamas and Israel in the summer of 2021 is also notable. Human Rights Watch and the UN reported between 62 and 129 Palestinian civilian deaths and 10 Israeli civilian deaths.
The United States commits the same violence against civilians through its airstrikes in Afghanistan. In 2001, American planes mistakenly bombed a Red Cross facility in Kabul, then destroyed the facility’s supply stockpile ten days later in a separate strike. Twenty years later, on August 29, 2021, the United States carried out a drone strike in Kabul that killed Zemari Ahmadi, an aid worker, and nine of his family members—seven children among them. Research by the Cost of War Project shows that the US and its international allies were responsible for the majority of nearly 6,000 civilian casualties committed in Afghanistan since 2001. It is unclear, due to the American military’s withholding of data, whether the United States killed Afghan militants more often than civilians in this time period. In a related study, the non-profit Airwars estimated that US Coalition forces have killed between 8,150 and 13,174 civilians in Syria and Iraq since 2014. Among them, about 2,000 were likely children.
The structural (or indirect) violence that the United States and Israel inflict through sanctions and blockades in Iran and Gaza can be considered as well. While some could argue that these sanctions don’t truly harm civilians, the Gazans who face artificial obstacles to accessing vaccines in a pandemic might disagree.
One may question whether civilians were intended to be targeted in airstrikes or through sanctions, concluding that counterterrorist violence is more justified because it is not conducted with the express purpose of harming civilians. However, Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo admitted that sanctions in Venezuela, for example, were meant to increase the pain and suffering in a country so much that the instability caused would result in a governmental collapse. Pompeo’s admission makes clear that the express purpose of US sanctions is to use structural violence against civilians.
Regarding airstrikes, let’s assume that they are not meant to target civilians, even though they end up killing them. In this case, does it matter what the intent is? If not, then we see the dichotomy between the United States-Israel and “the terrorists” break down—I cannot imagine that the surviving members of the Ahmadi family find the United States’ use of violence any more legitimate because the US didn’t mean to kill Zemari and his children. Also, why then did the US military try to hide the incident from the American public?
If intent does matter, then we accept that it is more desirable to kill civilians if it is done in order to stop perceived “terrorists”—we accept that the ends justify the means. But, this concession does nothing about the fact that “counterterrorist” entities are continually making the conscious choice to use tactics that are known to cause the civilian violence that they claim to wish to end. A single airstrike that kills civilians may not be conducted to achieve political gains, but the decision to use airstrikes as a consistent tactic does exactly that. The decision to use a military strategy that both (a) kills civilians sometimes and (b) advances a nation’s foreign policy goals is a decision to sometimes commit violence against civilians in order to attempt to achieve a political goal. States as powerful as the United States and Israel have plenty of options available for foreign policy. Their continued reliance on terrorizing their weaker opponents makes this violence all the more inexcusable.
It is now clear that the US and Israel’s practicing of “counterterrorism” is quite similar to actual terrorism, even though we seldom see this military policy described as such. Perhaps then, as similar cases are argued by Citations Needed podcast hosts Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, “terrorism” is not being used in our current context as an objective description, but rather a way for “counterterrorist” states and their allies to label a group as “the enemy,” even if the group’s tactics aren’t too different from their own. This usage is further problematized by its propensity to create a racialized “other” that Americans feel less shame in executing from across the ocean.
If the United States and Israel are fundamentally opposed to terrorism, they have two ways to rectify this situation. Their first option would be to accept that the label “terrorist” is not being used accurately to describe all groups that commit violence against civilians for political ends. They would acknowledge that practicing “counterterrorism” has become synonymous with practicing “anti-enemy” foreign policy, a policy stance that is no more virtuous than any other country’s prioritization of its own interests.
If this first option is not desirable, then the United States and Israel should refute the notion that “terrorism” ought to be used in a one-sided way, acknowledge the terrorist or quasi-terrorist actions which they practice, and actually commit to eliminating terrorism from their own militaty strategy.
Without these changes in behavior, the United States and Israel will have a hard time making the case that their efforts to fight “terrorism” are distinctly different (and more admirable) than the actions of “terrorists” themselves. Members of Generation Z currently entering politics are no longer buying it.