The terror attacks of September 11 in the United States changed international reality clearly and unequivocally to Israel’s benefit.

The US established three central principles in its war against world terror:

1) Moral clarity. In his speech to the American Congress, President Bush stated that nothing justifies terror. No claim, either real or imaginary, of personal or national oppression can justify the use of terror. Terror is a deliberate strike against innocent civilians and is always a heinous act. There are no good terrorists and bad terrorists – they are all bad. Like Nazism, terror is an absolute evil that must be fought. This determination is of immense significance because it denies terrorists their major defense – the wavering response of their victims, who are exposed to incessant propaganda that terror fundamentally is justified, and that they must therefore submit to its demands.

2) Strategic clarity. The United States established that the main way to fight terror is to fight the regimes that are behind terror organizations, and not necessarily to concentrate the efforts on the terrorists themselves. After all, the terrorists do not float in space. They operate in immune areas run by certain regimes. Take away the support of these regimes, and the international terror structures will collapse. The United States is toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and al-Qaida is crumbling in its wake. It is now threatening Syria in the same way to stop Hizbullah operations, and so it will also act against other terror regimes.

3) The importance of victory. The United States views a military defeat of terrorism as the correct way to overcome it. This is not a trivial observation, because there is a school of thought that contends that terror is the result of the despair that the terrorists feel, and that the real way to fight terror is to replace this despair with hope. However, the United States maintains today the exact opposite: The way to fight terrorism is to sow despair among its ranks, to obliterate any hope on the part of its operators and activists that they will ever achieve their goals by means of terror. In the war against terrorism, victory generates victory, discourages the self-confidence of potential terrorists, and thins their ranks.

And so, the “fundamental reason” for terror is the totalitarian mentality of those who use it: Their belief that they are permitted to violate every moral norm to achieve the political or racial goal for which they are fighting. And thus totalitarianism and terrorism have been linked from Lenin’s time, through Hitler to the ayatollahs. Everything is permissible in the name of the sacred goal, including blowing up children, burning civilians, destroying skyscrapers and, if necessary, the annihilation of entire cities. This is also the reason why in innumerable genuine battles for national liberation and human rights that have been conducted by people with a democratic orientation, such as in the case of the French underground against the Nazis or the battles of the Afro-Americans for equality in the United States, terror has never been used.

And now the United States comes along and says: There is no point and no benefit in any attempt to soften, to persuade or to lobby such totalitarian mentalities. The only thing to do is to fight them – to the bitter end.

These three principles have great significance for us:

Moral clarity says that nothing justifies the Palestinian terror directed against us. This terror is nothing but a tool to achieve the Arabs’ intention to destroy Israel, which is the real reason for the ongoing conflict. It is what has motivated them to attack us time and again, before there were “refugees” and “territories,” and also after they were offered Judea, Samaria and Gaza and half of Jerusalem in Camp David. When we repulse Palestinian terror, justice, all justice, is on our side.

Strategic clarity says that the way to fight Palestinian terror is first of all to fight the regime that stands behind it. Only when Arafat feels that his regime is about to fall, as was the case recently, only then does he do something to rein in terror. This, of course, is tactical containment, and only temporary.

In order to eradicate terror from the world, or at least to reduce it to being negligible, Arafat’s regime must be eliminated. Only so will the Palestinian leaders who succeed him realize that there is a painful price to pay for their assaults against us (the Palestinian victims in themselves are of no interest to Arafat). Only thus will Israeli deterrence be restored.

I do not know what the government of Afghanistan will be like after the Taliban in another two or three years, but there is one thing that I am confident about – it will do everything in its power to prevent terror attacks from its territory, otherwise, it too will be replaced. The same principle should guide us in our attitude toward the Palestinians.

The realization of the importance of victory says that we must not stop halfway, but persist to the stage of victory. The United States was warned that if it bombed Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of Moslems would rebel and tens of thousands of Moslems warriors would rush to Afghanistan. The exact opposite happened. Just like the US overcame considerations of “coalition” to achieve victory in Afghanistan (and in other places soon), we too must overcome our misplaced fear about the United States’ attitude toward us.

September 11 caused an enormous shift in American public opinion. This is a moral people who will not tolerate double standards. The American public, its representatives in Congress and even its President, will understand very well that if the United States can topple regimes that dispatch terror from thousands of kilometers away, Israel has the right to do the same to a terror regime that dispatches terror from a distance of only a few meters from the centers of its cities.

With this in the backdrop, it is obvious that the negotiations being conducted by the foreign minister, with the consent of the prime minister, to establish a Palestinian state headed by Arafat, is a grievous error. Such negotiations send a message to the Palestinians that not only is there no price for terror, but rather they are ensured a great prize – a sovereign bastion of terror in the heart of the country. Not only are we not removing Arafat, we are giving him, in our consent to the idea of a “state,” all the sovereign authorities of a state (such as control of the borders and control of air space) that are implicit in this term and which give it the power to destroy Israel.

After eliminating the terror organizations and replacing the Palestinian leadership with a leadership that gives up the right of return and the other components of annihilation, a future agreement may be possible in which the Palestinians are given authorities for self-rule, but without those authorities and powers that have the potential to threaten our existence.

This article ran in Maariv on December 28, 2001

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