“My image reflects in the enemy’s eyes and his image reflects in mine the same time.”
Mos Def
It stands to reason that doctors benefit from disease, private
prisons from criminality, car mechanics from engine malfunction and journalists
from bad news. Thus I wasn’t surprised by the conspicuous absence of any
serious discussion on the causes of terrorism at the 13th World Summit on Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya. Should
terrorism choose to disappoint everyone and vanish, most of those
self-proclaimed experts would be out of a job. To expect them to provide
solutions would be like trusting the CEO of Los Pollos Hermanos to be against
the War on Drugs™.
But notwithstanding my cynicism, I can be quite an optimist depending
on the time of the month. So I decided to go and see it for myself. I harboured
the secret hope to dispel my belief that counter-terrorism is an eternally
reflecting mirror keeping terrorism replicating Escher-like.
Don’t get me wrong here. I don’t want to pull that academic trick of
using words and abstraction to make tangible reality ungraspable and endlessly
up for discussion. I don’t mean to say terrorism is imaginary – no, it is
sometimes real and should be fought. But while it’s clear that terror and its
counterpart wouldn’t live without each other, it is less clear which one is the
chicken and which is the egg. In my quest for the origin of that particular
poultry, I figured I should endure the terror fest and look at it with
positive, constructive eyes. And I tried. I swear I did. But reality kept
intruding.
The first shocking thing about that conference was my being accepted
to attend it less than two hours after I sent a very perfunctory email
requesting to participate. This was a summit that boasted the presence of two
ex-heads of Mossad, a few ex-chiefs of Shin Bet and a multitude of army
officials and private contractors, mostly from the USA and Israel. If you threw
a proper nail-bomb during coffee-break probably half of the Middle East
problems would be solved. Still, the only reference I gave in my request was
the name of a Brazilian newspaper for which sometimes I write, without any
evidence to my claim, not even a link or a published article. Of course they
could have just googled me, but in that case they’d have found out that I am
the author of a novel whose main character advocates the assassination of corrupt
politicians and businessmen.
In Eudemonia, the main character – a female journalist, no less –
defends the morality of assassination and dabbles in the idea of whacking the
VP of the Pale House, Duck Chainy ,and the mercenary Eric Pauper. She thinks
that killing one of her interviewees is her way “of helping straighten the
world.”
But if my acceptance was surprising, the real shocker was yet to
come. At what is known as one of the most prominent counter-terrorism
conferences in the world, the security guards surrounding the Israel Navy
Defense building let everyone in without any type of check. Nada. Then they
thought better of it and asked everyone out, X-raying people’s bags on their
way in while politely asking every visitor if they were “carrying a gun for
self-defence.”
I found that quite amusing – we hadn’t even gotten inside the
building and we were already adopting their terminology. In the universe of counter-terrorism, a gun could only be
used as a reaction, a counter-action as it were. But even that was only on day
one. After you hadn’t tried to self-defend or blow up the place on the first
day of the conference, you were good to go on the next ones – not a single time
again did they check me or my bag. And then I asked myself, quite rhetorically:
“But what about terrorism?” Shouldn’t a conference in Herzliya, with all those
big names attending it, be the ultimate terrorist dream? Isn’t such laxity
incredibly reckless for people who believe the next suicide bomber is just
waiting around the corner? You could almost be forgiven for thinking those
counter-terrorists don’t actually believe terrorism exists.
Well, yes, we know terrorism exists.
“Terrorism exists and the line outside is just one of its
consequences,” said one of the first speakers.
Que?
I was stumped. The thing would have sounded like an orchestra, if
the instruments weren’t so poorly tuned. If that X-ray line was an evidence of
terrorism, the case for it seemed extremely weak. But wait. There was, indeed,
a much bigger case for it, and his name was Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian president was the boogieman du jour, at least at the
beginning of the conference. Assad was compared to Hitler by more than three
speakers on the first day alone. Some went further and expanded the metaphor,
comparing the American “hesitancy” in attacking Syria with the US’s reluctance
in joining the Allies against Germany. This went on and on, Nazi Germany being
the easiest-to-grasp allegory, the simile of choice. Even Qanta Ahmad, a doctor
whose specialty is in the field of sleep disorders, had something to say
against Bashar al-Assad.
Qanta, who as a woman and a Muslim helped fill two quotas with one
plane ticket, complained about Barack Obama’s “reluctance” in attacking Syria.
For her, the fact that Syria has not been invaded proves “how jaded we are
against tyranny.” Ahmad, perhaps unsatisfied with her diminutive role of movie
extra, went beyond her script and praised Israel’s religious tolerance, saying
she didn’t see anything that “prevented the flourishing of the Muslim faith” in
the country. Who cares about truth at a conference on counter-terrorism? As it
turns out, very few people.
More speakers yet joined in bashing Assad, and then another one came
on stage and acted like the voice of reason: “Syria is not Nazi Germany.”
Whoa.
That platitude came as a blow at that point. Fellow lecturer Uzi
Arad agreed: “Bashar is not Hitler.” Ok, we were getting somewhere, I thought.
Yes, that’s how bad the thing was. But it was still too early for Logic to
start celebrating. After a few words remembering the holocaust, the next Voice
of Reason proposed another boogieman: Iran. The race now was tight between
those two, making it impossible to guess who would win this year’s title of
Hitler. It was not an easy contest, even with the replacement of hawkish
Ahmadinejad by the moderate Hassan Rouhani. No, that friendly outreach recently
performed by Rouhani was not going to discourage the likes of Yuval Steinitz.
The Likud member, who holds a three-title position in the Israeli cabinet,
managed the incredible feat of transforming a conciliatory gesture into an act
of aggression. For him, Rouhani’s favourable words to Israel were “an attack of
niceties to win public opinion, and he will laugh all the way to the bomb.” He
said he didn’t trust Iran or Rouhani. “We must judge Iran by deeds, not words.”
Steinitz then mentioned the words Beetles, and the group of words “give peace a
chance.”
Not that anyone cared, but Amos Gilad came right after and said the
very opposite –
“I believe in everything Iran says.”
Oops.
Gilad was obviously still stuck in the mistranslated “wipe Israel
off the map.” But there was no need to worry – though his premise was the
opposite of Steinitz’s, the conclusion remained the same: The world should wipe
Iran off the map. This is what is most conspicuous at such gatherings: experts
usually come up with the conclusions first, and gather the premises that
(pre)corroborate their decisions later. Facts are mostly irrelevant. They are
just picked, shuffled and presented essentially for public consumption, a
digestible explanation for a motive too ulterior to disclose.
Meanwhile, in a galaxy not far away, the Wall St. Journal hinted at real purpose reporting that “in response
to a possible attack against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Raytheon stock
prices have skyrocketed, reaching a 52-week high.”
Yes, folks: As it turns out, many of those experts lecturing us on
security and defense work for insecurity and attack firms, from military
manufacturers to defense contractors and consulting LLCs.
By and large, I abhor generalisations, including this very one. When
people criticise the police, for example, as if they were all thugs, I cringe.
There are good and bad policemen, and putting them all in the same basket is
less a disservice to the good apples as it is a service to the bad ones. But when
it comes to the misnamed defense industry, I’m left like Diogenes fumbling about
with my lamp in search of an honest man.
But there was, to be fair, at least one dissenting voice at the
conference. The one I heard speaking against an attack on Syria (and I have not
heard all the speakers nor could I attend all the simultaneous panels) was
Tarek Fatah, author of the book The Jew
Is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism. Fatah
had the most bombastic, counter-current line in the conference: “If Syria is
invaded, it will become the next Afghanistan, and Lebanon will follow.” He also
tried to show that a focus on Iran’s nuclear weapons was a bit incongruent
when, “just one kilometre east of Iran, Pakistan has 200 nuclear missiles.”
Those 200 deterring factors may explain, of course, the reason why no one
threatens Pakistan, but the cold rationality of Mutually Assured Destruction
was never discussed at the conference. Not once.
Another topic that was never broached was potential motivations for
terrorism. According to the very experts attending the conference, terrorism
needs two main things to materialise: motivation and operational capability.
You’d think it would be a huge neglect to ignore 50 per cent of that equation.
But ignore they did. While capability was extensively debated, motivation was
nowhere to be seen. Throughout the panels I attended, there was absolutely no
talk about the situations that spur terrorism and give it (or are purported to
give) its moral ground. Other than the facile scarecrows of anti-Semitism and
the Koran, little or nothing else was explored – which is weird, if you take
into consideration the studies conducted by Robert Pape, for example. Pape, a
terrorist specialist who compiled every known suicide attack from 1980 to 2003,
concluded that there is "little connection between suicide terrorism and
Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions.” What suicide
attacks have in common, he says “is a specific secular and strategic goal: to
compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the
terrorists consider to be their homeland.” To illustrate a point that no one at
the conference tried to make, in the suicide attacks in Lebanon against French,
Israeli and American targets between ‘82 and ‘86, only eight of the 41
perpetrators were Islamic fundamentalists. One of the attacks was in fact
carried out by a girl who was Christian and Marxist.
It soon became clear to anyone with a few active neurons that the
whole Herzliya conference was a gigantic circle jerk with men helping each
other’s clandestine motives, the legitimate destruction of terrorism not one
among them. Even Boaz Ganor, the organiser who appeared more sober than most
speakers, looked rather lonely defending the theory that attacks on military
targets cannot be considered terrorism. Later on, Boaz’s daughter came on stage
to sing Paul Simon’s Sound of Silence, giving me the chance to finally applaud
someone.
“Hello darkness, my old friend,” she sang.
One of darkness’s closest friends decided to make an appearance
later on. Richard Kemp, former commander of the British Forces in Afghanistan,
is described on the Military Speakers website as being “in great demand as a
motivational, keynote and after-dinner speaker, covering topics including
leadership, decision-making, crisis management, terrorism, intelligence,
conflict and the challenges facing the Middle East.” Looking very much the
(counter) part, Kemp was well-dressed, perfumed, clean-shaven. And he focused
on the challenges faced by Israel, more specifically the Qassam attacks from
Hamas. Referring to them as “lethal rockets,” Kemp said thousands of them were
sent into Israeli territory. Israel’s reaction, he said, was writing “more than
20 letters to Ban Ki Moon.” That’s cute. And Kemp was right – lethal rockets were launched. But he
chose to leave the precise lethality out of his speech. According to the
numbers compiled by B’Tselem, “from June 2004 to April 2013, 24 Israeli
civilians and one foreign national were killed in Israel by Palestinian rocket
and mortar fire.” Just for context, between January 2009 and July 2013, 519
Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces.
The best friends Darkness could have asked for.
Next (sometime when
boredom hits): How I was approached by the Mossad, and how an ex-Navy official,
one of the few men with a real radar for danger, rushed out of the conference
room as soon as he saw me going to the toilet and leaving my backpack behind.
The first part of this series was published on +972 Magazine:
