Defining Terrorism

In order to discuss terrorism, we first must define it. Here’s my proposed definition:

“Terrorism is the deliberate, reckless or negligent maiming and/or killing of innocent civilians in pursuit of a military or political objective.”

If you accept this definition, at least for purposes of discussion, you can see what a global swath terrorism has cut through our species in just the last half century.

For us Americans—and possibly for the world—the most terrible act of terrorism was Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks. Using two hijacked aircraft, it utterly destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City. Other near-simultaneous attacks damaged part of the Pentagon (where civilians also worked) and crashed United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, PA, killing all aboard. Together, these four deliberate attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, the vast majority of whom were innocent civilians. So 9/11 was likely the single most “successful” act of terrorism in modern history.

Although not quite in this century, the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7, 1998, certainly qualify as terrorism, although their objective is still not clear. Those blasts killed 224 people, including twelve Americans, and wounded more than 4,500 people.

Back in America, and further back in time, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 killed 168 people, injured 680, and caused an estimated $652 million of damage. Domestic anti-government extremists and white supremacists planned and carried out that one. The ringleader was executed; his accomplice was sentenced to life in prison; and another person in on the plot got twelve years in prison for failure to warn.

Then there are the cases of what I would call “chronic” terrorism. In those, the terrorists make up in volume what their attacks lack in death and destruction individually.

Chief among them is “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, which lasted about three decades. It was basically an ethno-religious conflict between Irish Catholics and England-sympathizing Protestants in Northern Ireland, focused on the city of Belfast. It involved conventional battles between paramilitary and military forces, but it also involved plenty of bombings, fires and small-scale terror shootings of civilians. About 3,500 people were killed, 52% of them civilians, until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 mostly put a stop to it.

A second and similar situation involves the ethnic Kurdish population of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. For historical reasons, the Kurds, although a distinct ethnic group with their own language, have never had a state of their own. They have been steadfast allies of the United States, as well as clever and effective fighters in local civil wars.

But Turkey has outlawed a group of them called the “Kurdistan Workers’ Party” (initials “PKK” in Kurdish) as a terrorist organization. Over the 45 years since its founding, members and affiliates have undoubtedly committed serial acts of terrorism, including bombings and military-style attacks, against civilians as well as military forces. Turkey is now citing the refuge of PKK members and other Kurds in Sweden as an excuse to delay or prevent Sweden’s accession to NATO.

A third example of “chronic” terrorism is repeated air assaults on the civilian population of Israel from paramilitary forces in Southern Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Northern Gaza (Hamas). These assaults use home-made missiles and drones and, increasingly, missiles and drones made by Iran and supplied knowingly for that purpose. While Israel’s “Iron Dome” air defenses have shot many of these aerial weapons down, some inevitably get through. When they do, they damage property and occasionally kill or maim innocent civilians at random. The effect of these attacks, so far, has been to make civilian life in Israel a bit less safe and a lot less happy, and to motivate Israel’s population to shift politically to the right.

While terrorism is less of a general scourge in Asia, that continent has not entirely escaped the plague. Military and paramilitary forces have committed terrorism against innocent people in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and the Philippines. These acts of terrorism have definite religious overtones: in Myanmar they involve persecution, massacres and displacement of Rohingya Muslims by majority Buddhists; in the Philippines they include acts of terrorism by Muslims against (national) majority Christians, and vice versa, especially in the south where Muslims predominate.

This dismal list is necessarily incomplete. But it shows how widespread terrorism has become in just the last half-century. It can strike anywhere at any time.

Terrorism makes civilian life precarious and fearful, even in nations that, unlike our own, refuse to put automatic weapons of war in the hands of many civilians. Even where firearms are controlled, easy availability of the ingredients of bombs and poisons, including airborne poisons, makes terrorism possible and sometimes likely. Even ordinary appliances of modern life, such as cars and trucks, have become instruments of small-scale terrorism. So there is no doubt that terrorism is on the rise globally.

Before concluding this definitional essay, I’d like to focus on the key words “reckless or negligent” in my proposed definition.

The traditional view of terrorism is that it involves deliberate killing or maiming of civilians to make a political point, or sometimes to provoke a military overreaction that might trigger a general uprising. This view sees terrorism as an act of “asymmetrical warfare,” in which disgruntled civilians or a rag-tag rebellious military have no alternative in fighting an overwhelmingly superior conventional military force.

But in my view there is another side of terrorism that has received too little attention, in both the press and academic thinking. Increasingly, dominant military forces have used overwhelming air superiority and massive and catastrophic bombing from the air to cow civilian populations and control or suppress popular uprisings. Increasingly these air attacks have involved massive civilian casualties and massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, including housing, hospitals, civil police stations, and distribution centers for food, water and electricity. Among the objectives of these wantonly destructive acts are to cow a rebellious civilian population and suppress legitimate civic dissent.

Perhaps the most egregious terrorism of this kind was the conduct of Russian and “loyalist” Syrian forces in the recent Syrian civil war. Massive aerial bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure—not just rebellious military and paramilitary forces on the ground—reduced some towns and cities virtually to rubble, including much of Aleppo.

That city became the modern equivalent of the bombing by Nazi warplanes of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, so starkly depicted by Pablo Picasso in his famous painting of the same name. But the destruction wrought on innocent and defenseless civilians and their infrastructure by modern aircraft and modern bombs—not to mention missiles, drones and “bunker-busting” bombs—was and is incomparably worse.

Is this “terrorism”? I would argue emphatically “yes.” Loyalists to brutal Syrian dictator Bashar el-Assad, and his Russian backers, would argue that “there were probably enemy soldiers and weapons somewhere down there.” But I think that argument strays not far from the words of an unnamed major in our first losing war, in Vietham. He reportedly said of the nearly obliterated Vietnamese village of Bén Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it [from our Viet Cong enemy].”

That kind of argument, it seems to me, is not just illogical but inhumane. Carried to its conclusion, it would make civilian life not just insecure, but untenable, in every place where political disagreement turns into war, civil or otherwise. It’s a slippery slope that has no end: it justifies the massacre of civilian noncombatants.

And so we come to the last point of this essay. How should we describe Israel’s current massive air assault on Gaza, in an attempt to root out and destroy a relatively small number of Hamas terrorists, hiding among Gaza’s two-million-plus civilians?

The Hamas terrorists were responsible for the October 7 Massacre in Southern Israel. That ground-based terrorist attack killed about 1,200 Israeli civilians. As of December 20, Israel’s massive air assault in response has killed at least 20,000 civilians and destroyed a large fraction of the civilian infrastructure of Gaza’s densely populated cities.

Let’s not get bogged down in assessing whether this air assault is “proportionate.” It’s not. The proper measure of proportionality is not the ratio of civilians killed in Gaza to civilians killed in Israel on October 7. At least I hope that human civilization has progressed beyond the eye-for-an-eye Code of Hammurabi.

The proper measure of proportionality in an operation like Israel’s is the ratio of innocent civilians killed or wounded in Gaza to guilty terrorists killed or captured there, i.e., to killed or captured Hamas militants that were involved in the October 7 Massacre, whether directly or in planning, financing, supporting or supplying it. In short, the proper measure of proportionality is the human ratio of “collateral damage” to military “success.”

In the case of Gaza that ratio is not precisely known. News reports suggest that Israel has killed or captured only a few dozen Hamas leaders. Even if that number is as high as 200, the proportionality ratio would be 100, or the success-to-collateral-damage ratio only about one percent. That’s not, in my view, sufficient to justify such massive civilian killings.

I make this numerical point because I’m a “quant” at heart. But the “optics” are terrible, too. Under the continuing, massive aerial assault, all of Gaza is beginning to look like Aleppo after Russia’s air force, urged on by bloody dictator Assad, obliterated it. Is that something that Israel, let alone the US and the “West,” wants to bear on its or their consciences?

The ghosts of Guernica and Aleppo cry out, “No!” So how ought international law and diplomacy address this situation?

Israeli military strategists will argue that the prospect of stopping the massive bombing will give individual Gazans a strong incentive to serve up the Hamas terrorists among them. That may be so, although I’m skeptical. But even if the massive aerial assault does have that desired effect, doesn’t it amount to collective torture of Gazans? Isn’t that saying, in effect, “If you want to stop the wanton killing of your family and neighbors, as well as the devastation of your cities, then give up the Hamas terrorists in your midst”?

If so, is it reckless or negligent to expect a large population held captive by terrorists to give them up when threatened with death from skies, when the terrorists have lived among them for decades, have completely free reign to dominate civilian society, and when the leaders urge them on from afar where no ordinary Gazan civilian can reach them, either for talks or more persuasive measures? I think so.

Lets be clear about one thing. Israel has every right to “avenge” the October 7 Massacre by destroying the militants who perpetrated it, including their leaders abroad and those who participated indirectly, through supply, planning, financing and external (foreign) support. But Israel has to identify and find them first.

In this difficult practical task, Israel has three distinct disadvantages. First, Gazans distrust and hate its armed forces and its soldiers even more than the Hamas bullies in their midst, who make their day-to-day lives miserable and willingly sacrifice them to shield military assets or for small military “successes.” Second, Israel’s ground soldiers, by and large, don’t speak Arabic, let alone like natives. They don’t understand or practice Islam. Therefore, they have no basis for establishing rapport even with Gazans who hate Hamas and might like to turn its leaders in. Finally, by waging such an asymmetrical war among a largely civilian and innocent population, Israel will quickly turn those pliable Gazans, and many world leaders, not to mention sympathetic Muslims, against it. (If I, an American Jew and erstwhile strong supporter of Israel, have grave doubts, you can image what the leaders and “people on the street” in the Arab and Muslim worlds think.)

As a retired law professor, I would describe Israel’s air massacre of Gaza’s civilians today as “reckless.” It’s culpability is more than mere negligence, defined as the failure to take reasonable care to avoid civilian casualties.

Without useful knowledge of who and where the Hamas October 7 Massacre’s leaders and perpetrators are, Israel’s massive air assault will have two sure effects: it will kill and maim a lot of innocent Gazan civilians and destroy much, if not most, of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. Those certain practical effects in turn will have three sure political effects: (1) they will drastically reduce political support for Israel in the United States and throughout the world; (2) that reduction in support may, in time, reduce the military and technical assistance that tiny Israel needs to survive in a hostile neighborhood in the long term; and (3) the “shock and awe” that Arab populations feel on seeing Gaza’s devastation will slow, if not halt, their recently increasing acceptance of Israel as a powerful, technologically advanced and potentially helpful neighbor.

No doubt the Hamas militants who planned and perpetrated the October 7 Massacre were aware of, and hoped for, all these effects. If so, they are accessories to terrorism, not just in Israel (where their culpability is obvious and direct), but in Gaza, too.

Yet in Gaza, where the toll of death and infrastructure destruction is considerably higher, the Israelis are directly responsible, either recklessly (in my view) or at least negligently, i.e., failing to use reasonable care to limit civilian Gazan casualties in their assault. In other words, Israel’s massive air assaults on Gaza today are a poster child for my view that the definition of “terrorism” should include not just willful and deliberate acts, but acts of recklessness and negligence that have the same effect.

It’s no answer, in my view, to cite the similar acts of Russian air power in Ukraine. Nor is it sufficient to argue that Israel made some attempts to warn Gazans of the air strikes in advance, even giving some warnings of the attacks’ general locations. Ukraine, in which no warnings at all were given, is a huge country with lots of open space, while there was nowhere for many, if not most, “warned” Gazans to go. And in any event significant aspects of Russia’s air campaign in Ukraine, including the apparently deliberate targeting of power stations, apartment buildings, hospitals, theaters, and cultural centers, ought in my view be considered terrorism, too.

Gaza is a tiny, densely populated flat land with little open space or safe areas of lodging in which to hide. After years of external blockade, it also has few resources to accommodate civilians fleeing zones of conflict and warning, which in some cases included the most populated portions of Gaza. So many, if not most, of Israel’s warnings were practically incapable of saving civilians from the start. They were litle more than “window dressing” on indiscriminate slaughter from the air.

It took English common law centuries to come to the conclusion that murderous and destructive acts of recklessness and negligence deserve legal condemnation and punishment much like deliberate acts. With the deadliness of weapons and tools of terrorism literally exploding before our eyes, and with planetary heating threatening our species’ survival if we get distracted, we don’t have that kind of time to recognize reckless and negligent terrorism as a threat to our species’ survival and happiness. Just as the common law once recognized reckless and negligent acts as torts and crimes, so the international community should recognize reckless and negligent slaughter of civilians as “terrorism” when it has similar motivations and produces similar results.


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