In his article in yesterday's Guardian, Jonathan Steele starts by telling us (roughly) that Israel is very wicked; and goes on to announce that none of us (except the Swiss) have been nearly as nasty to it as we ought to be. In short, Israel is a terrorist state, and only the Swiss have the guts to stand up and say so. Much of what Mr Steele says is tendentious, and some of it is false. But in spite of the unpromising start and middle, the article ends by saying something which is truly interesting, and which is well worth further investigation. In telling us how, in his view, European governments ought to treat Israel, he says:
Governments have greater effect by being morally clear and politically firm. Condemnation and psychological isolation create "facts on the ground" which can alert electorates, if not immediately their governments.So let's get clear about Mr Steele's views on responding to (what he regards as) terrorist behaviour: he thinks that governments should stand firm and denounce it in clear moral terms. They should explicitly condemn it, they should practise psychological isolation on its proponents and those who support them, so that they feel alone and friendless in the world. To do all this is to show courage; to fail to do so is (he tells us) to show impotence.
Well, there's something to be said for this view. It involves holding terrorists responsible for their actions, and hence condemning them unreservedly; it also involves shaming them and treating them as outsiders, as other and different from the rest of us. Mr Steele makes no mention of seeking to understand them first, or investigating the root causes of their actions, and that is in some ways a refreshing change in the pages of the Guardian.
But we have to ask: does Mr Steele actually mean what he says? Does he really believe that this is how we should respond to terrorists? How does he think we should treat, for example, Hamas, a self-declared terrorist organisation? It turns out that in the case of Hamas, Mr Steele thinks that...
Refusing contact with Hamas was... mistaken, especially as Hamas had maintained a unilateral ceasefire for over a year (a point which Israel tries to suppress). The fact that Hamas is defined as a terrorist organisation need not have been a bar... But again, thank goodness for the Swiss. As non-EU members, they keep contact with Hamas and act as intermediaries for other European governments which have trapped themselves into not doing the same.So here it seems that it's perfectly OK to talk to terrorists, and to make sure that they don't feel isolated, and indeed to provide them with aid and support. Those who don't do so, says Mr Steele, are acting as an arm of the United States. Thank goodness for the Swiss.
How are we to account for this remarkable volte face, within the confines of a single article of approximately 1000 words? We can be fairly sure that Mr Steele does mean what he says about how we should treat Hamas, since he's been saying that kind of thing for some time - a year ago he said about Hamas's terrorism:
[T]he use of political violence on civilians, however brutal, always has a specific context. To respond by... condemning "this assault on civilised values" obscures the problem and makes the search for solutions harder.And six months ago he said:
Hamas's refusal to give formal recognition of Israel's right to exist should also not be seen by Europe as an urgent problem.So when Mr Steele thinks about Hamas, he's convinced that condemning terrorism is obscurantist and gets in the way of finding a solution to the problem which has caused the terrorism. But when he thinks about Israel, something else takes over, and he becomes convinced that condemning it shows courage and potency and moral clarity. Thoughts about context and the causes of violence have faded from view. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Mr Steele's opinions about how to respond to political violence (and indeed about how to describe it) are entirely dependent on whether the violence in question is being practised by the side he supports. (Eve Garrard)