Call It By Its Name

Israel is a terrorist state. We owe the dead the discipline of saying that out loud, in plain English, by the only standards we have ever agreed apply. There is no other word that fits the documented record of its conduct, and there is not much integrity left in any language that refuses to use the word when the record demands it.

What we mean by the word is not in dispute. The United States Code, at 22 U.S.C. § 2656f, defines terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets." The criminal code, at 18 U.S.C. § 2331, defines international terrorism as violent acts "intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" or to "influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion." The FBI's working definition is shorter and the same: the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government or civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives. The United Nations' draft comprehensive convention on terrorism gathers the same core. Strip away the lawyering, and the unifying principle is plain: violence, or the threat of it, against civilians, for political coercion. The framers of those statutes wrote them with non-state actors in mind, but the conduct does not change its nature when a state is the one doing it. A state can perpetrate terror. A state has. The only question is whether we have the nerve to say so.

Begin with the most recent case. On the seventeenth and eighteenth of September, 2024, thousands of pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies, ordinary handheld devices distributed across an entire country, were detonated at the same moment in Lebanon. At least 37 people were killed, including two children. More than 3,400 were injured. Israel later acknowledged the operation. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, told the Security Council that the "simultaneous targeting of thousands of individuals, whether civilians or members of armed groups, without knowledge as to who was in possession of the targeted devices, their location and their surroundings at the time the attack" violates international human rights law and the laws of war. He reminded that body that "it is a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians." That is the language of the statutes. That is the definition. Indiscriminate violence, against a civilian-mixed target, for the political coercion of an adversary. There is the word.

Some will say the pager attack was an aberration. It was not. It was doctrine. In October 2008, the man who would later become Chief of the General Staff of the IDF, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, gave an interview to Yedioth Ahronoth. He said, in plain words, "What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there." That is not an admission squeezed out of him. That is the doctrine, named for a Beirut neighborhood the IDF had leveled, published proudly, signed by a sitting general. To call its application terrorism is not editorial license. It is taxonomy.

Then comes Gaza, and the language has to follow the record. Since October 2023, the Gaza Ministry of Health and the United Nations have tracked tens of thousands of dead. UNICEF's executive director told the Security Council that more than 17,000 children have been killed and 33,000 injured, the equivalent, she said, of a classroom of children killed every day. Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in the strip, was besieged twice and left, in the words of the World Health Organization, in ruins, with hundreds of bodies found in and around it including in mass graves. Kamal Adwan, the last hospital in the north, was raided, its patients forcibly removed, the building set on fire. Bakeries, water systems, refugee camps, schools, universities, gone. On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice found, by a vote of fifteen to two, that South Africa's allegations involve "plausible rights" under the Genocide Convention, and ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of genocide. On November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, finding reasonable grounds to believe both bear criminal responsibility for "the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare" and "the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts." These are not pamphlets. These are the rulings of the two highest courts the civilized world has built.

But the years are the witness. In 1954, the Lavon affair: Israeli military intelligence recruited a cell to plant bombs inside American, British, and Egyptian civilian targets in Cairo and Alexandria, including a movie theater, intending to blame the violence on others. In 1973, in Lillehammer, Norway, Mossad agents shot a Moroccan waiter named Ahmed Bouchikhi thirteen times in front of his pregnant wife, having mistaken him for someone else, in the course of an assassination campaign that ranged across European cities. In 2008, in the Kafr Sousa neighborhood of Damascus, Imad Mughniyah was killed by a remotely detonated car bomb on the sovereign soil of another state. In 2010, in a Dubai hotel room, Mossad agents killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh using stolen and forged British, Australian, Irish, German, and French passports, triggering diplomatic expulsions across Europe. In 2020, on a road outside Tehran, the Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated by a remote-operated machine gun mounted on a parked truck. In 2006, in southern Lebanon, the United Nations Khiam observation post, a marked U.N. building that called the IDF liaison fourteen times to call off the bombardment, was struck by a 500-kilogram precision-guided bomb, and four unarmed U.N. peacekeepers, an Austrian, a Canadian, a Chinese, and a Finn, were killed. In 2022, in Jenin, an American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was shot in the head while wearing a vest that read PRESS. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented that Israel has killed more press members than any government since CPJ began keeping records in 1992. NSO Group, the Israeli surveillance company, was placed on the U.S. Commerce Department's Entity List in November 2021 for selling spyware used against U.S. State Department officials, journalists at the Washington Post, and the family of Jamal Khashoggi. On July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel's continued occupation of the Palestinian Territories unlawful, and ordering the evacuation of all settlements. Inside those territories, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has documented, in a report titled "Settler Violence = State Violence," that the IDF and police actively accompany or support settler attackers in nearly half of all documented incidents, while Yesh Din finds that fewer than three percent of investigations into ideological crimes against Palestinians ever end in conviction.

This is not a list of bad days. It is a pattern, sustained across seven decades, by sitting governments, in our names and on our money. Pattern is the legal definition of doctrine. Doctrine, when applied by a state against civilian targets for political coercion, is the legal definition of the word we will not use.

The category exists for a reason. We use it for Iran. We use it for Libya. We use it for North Korea. We use it for the men who fly planes into our buildings and the boys who strap on belts in Israeli marketplaces, and we are right to. Language is one of the oldest defenses a free people have against barbarism: the discipline of calling things what they are, even when the cost of naming is high, even when the named is a friend. To grant the word to one and deny it to another, not by conduct but by alliance, is not neutrality. It is the corruption that ends republics.

I am a father. I would like the country I leave my children to be one in which the law applies the same way to the powerful as to the weak, and language applies the same way to the friend as to the foe. We are not yet that country. We could become it. The first step is the smallest and the hardest: say the word the record has earned.

Call it by its name.