Wisdom Lies in the Outcome, So Close Ranks on Terror

Releasing Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid without any reciprocal liberation of Israeli and Western prisoners and hostages would be a formidable victory for terrorism. Those who advocate this course evoke understandable sympathy when they speak in the name of their personal kinship with hostages. But those who are charged with concern for international civility and public interest should look a few moves ahead, before suggesting action that would weaken the anti-terrorist cause.

International terrorism takes its victims and opponents into a world of difficult choices. There are no easy ways. The terrorist enemy has his hand on the throat of humane mankind and is not constrained by any of the compassions that cause tremors of uncertainty on the civilized side of the barricade.

There are only two solution. One of them is to snatch the endangered victims from the clutches of their captors by physical force. There have been occasions on which this approach has succeeded, as it did in Entebbe. In other instances it has been tried with heavy price as at Maalot in 1974 (when many Israeli children were killed by terrorists during an attempt by Israeli forces to rescue them by military action). Sometimes there has been tragic failure, as in Munich in 1972 when German assault forces tried unsuccessfully to liberate the Israeli Olympic team.

On most occasions, hostages are inaccessible to military rescue. In such contingencies there are only two possible courses. One of them, practiced by the United States, is to stand fast and let matters take their course. This involves a rigorous subordination of individual interest to an overriding principle. Israel does not go as far as this. When there is no possibility of forcible extrication, we have not excluded negotiated exchanges.

But negotiation implies deterrence and incentive. Efforts by Israel and the Western powers to secure the release of prisoners and hostages from Shiite groups in Lebanon have been made fruitlessly over several years. The capture of Sheik Obeid, an active and enthusiastic terrorist, was designed to create an incentive for the Shiite movement to enter the bargaining context. There was certainly no such incentive before.

The capture itself is not eccentric, nor is it an Israeli copyright. The United States bombed Libya with British cooperation, forced down an Egyptian aircraft carrying the hijackers of the ship Achilles Lauro and intercepted the terrorist Fawaz Younis on the high seas in order to bring him to trial in the United States. The bombing of Libya had graver human effects in terms of American and other lives than the temporary removal of Sheik Obeid from his home, but there were no senatorial cries of anguish then or since.

The desire to avoid a unilateral capitulation to a terrorist leader is quite independent of any particular judgment on the original decision to capture him. The problem is how to emerge from the dilemma, not how to hold premature inquiries on how it arose.

Those of us who have known the anguish of participating in decisions on anti-terrorist resistance have learned that a “wise” decision is simply one that turned out well in the end. The judgments of historians depend on consequence, not on intention, and the media now take the historian’s role. In these terms, a split second of reaction by Ugandan forces would have convicted the Entebbe decision of “rashness” and a little luck in Tehran would have crowned President Jimmy Carter as a champion of anti-terrorist “efficiency”.

Under these conditions of incalculability, there is only one rational course. It is for the defenders of civility in the free and rational world to close their ranks and maintain their solidarity, in all conditions and despite all vicissitudes, in success or in adversity. The lines are drawn between the perpetrators of terrorism and their opponents, not within the anti-terrorist family itself.