State and Oppositional Terrorism: The Case of Israelis and Palestinians

Abstract

This chapter challenges the political and intellectual position that has failed to recognize the dialectical connection between Israeli state terrorism and Palestinian oppositional terrorism, and demonstrates the inability of global powers to facilitate the resolution of this conflict because of their lack of objectivity and neutrality due to their economic, political, and strategic agendas in the Middle East and beyond. The Jewish and Palestinian peoples have been fighting for several decades over the sovereignty and land of historic Palestine that today includes Israel, Eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The competition and struggle over historic Palestine and its economic resources emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the land was under Ottoman colonial rule; these processes gradually led to the development of Jewish and Palestinian contending nationalisms and the associated state and oppositional terrorism. As the Palestinians developed their nascent nationalism and started to fight against Ottoman authorities and to prevent the dominance of the Jewish people, Jews in the Middle East and the Diaspora began to consider the possibility of having a Jewish state to expel the Ottoman authorities, to defeat the Palestinians, and to have an exclusive sovereignty over Palestine.