Daniel Benjamin of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network in Chicago writes:
I’ve taken great interest in the developments in General Petraeus’s position on Palestine as a strategic liability, and the Palestinian question as a root cause of anti-American terrorism. I agree that this is a significant turning point and I’m interested in what enabled the opposite position ever to have sway.
Well, I found an answer when reading Jacqueline Rose’s excellent The Question of Zion, on Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1996 book Fighting Terrorism and the 2nd conference of Netanyahu’s Jonathan Institute, published as Terrorism: How the West Can Win:
"[Netanyahu] argues that Israel was decisive in transforming the prevailing view of the 1970s and 1980s that "terrorism was the result of political and social oppression, [leading to] the inescapable conclusion that terror could not be eliminated without first bringing these conditions to an end. My colleagues and I rejected this view out of hand." In his contribution to the conference, [former US Sec’y of State George] Shultz credits institutions like the Jonathan Institute with influencing the policies of the "free world" on terror: "Can we as a country, can the community of free nations, stand in a purely defensive posture and absorb the blows dealt by terrorists?" This should lead us to revise or at least partly modify the view that Israel is simply hijacking Bush’s "war on terror" in order to carry out its policies in the West Bank and Gaza with impunity, to the more disturbing view that Israel has partly determined those policies, playing an important role in persuading the United States to adopt its stance against terror long before 9/11. " (n65, p.182).
Rose’s broader argument is that Zionism denies even the existence of political and social grievances as the cause for anti-Israeli terrorism, because Zionist elimination of terrorism is really not about the Palestinians. "At times, reading this history is like watching a dog chasing its own tail. Arab aggression is not provoked by Jewish settlement of the land; it is not a response to dispossession. It is a challenge to the Jewish people not to capitulate to their own past" (p.132). Rose makes a very compelling argument that the Zionist commitment to violence is rooted in reconstructing Jewish identity from Holocaust shame, at the cost of completely denying the actual victims of Zionist violence.
But regardless of whether you accept this broader argument, it’s very interesting that Netanyahu might himself have helped to create the discourse on terrorism that Petraeus is now moving away from. And this several decades before the "War on Terror."
