JEFFREY HERF
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problems. The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in
June 1914 by the Serbian terrorist Gavrillo Prinzip, which was the
immediate but not deeper cau e of World War I, illustrates this endur–
ing feature of terrorism. Ferdinand was among those in the Hapsburg
empire who sought a negotiated solution to the dilemma of nationalism
within a multinational empire. Hence, it was key to murder him to rule
out all but the most radical possibilities.
Probably the single most consequential assassination of recent history
was the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin by a right-wing
Israeli religious fundamentalist. Rabin's murder, as well as the earlier
murder of Anwar Sadat by precursors of the al Qaeda terrorists in
Egypt, illustrate that the terrorist's traditional preference for apocalypse
and destruction in place of diplomacy, compromise, and reform has
become a sad fixture in the Middle East as well. Through the delivery
of violent and apocalyptic shocks to the world of reason and discussion,
terrorists hope that it will retaliate in new waves of repression and/or
simply collapse under the weight of tragedy. Should it strike out in rage,
as the Austrians did in August 1914, the repression will, the terrorists
hope, radicalize the masses, leading to further war and violence and the
eventual overthrow of the existing order. In Western Europe and Japan
in the 1970S and 1980s this terrorist tradition continued in the hopes
that by revealing the "fascist" core behind the "illusions" of liberal
democracy, a revolutionary apocalypse would ensue.
Terrorism's murderous hostility to reform must be kept in mind to
understand the atrocities of September
11, 2001.
Like the murderers of
Sadat and Rabin, the al Qaeda planners, following the policies of their
counterparts in Hamas and Hezbollah, began their planning in the period
in which the Labor government of Ehud Barak in Israel was making
unprecedented offers of a Palestinian state to Arafat's PLO in the context
of the Oslo Peace process. A negotiated settlement to the Israeli–
Palestinian conflict would have been a devastating blow to Islamic funda–
mentalists.
It
would lend Arab legitimacy to the very existence of the
Jewish state in the Middle East, something which Islamic fundamentalists
find intolerable. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda propagandists claim that
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza are one source of the
attacks of September lIth. Yet, like European and Middle Eastern prede–
cessors, bin Laden and al Qaeda launched the attacks to further under–
mine any efforts at a negotiated peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Another possible political rationale recalls the apocalyptic scenarios
which Sorel envisaged and links the mass murder of September 1Ith to
past terrorist practices. It is the hope that the United States would treat
