My Take | Is Hamas really a terrorist group?
- The answer is, of course, yes, but that itself tells us very little; actually worse. Since many of us know little or nothing about the history and nature of the phenomenon of modern terrorism, such a simple answer puts us at the mercy of propagandists
“Terror the order of the day”
The French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle
What is the nature of political legitimacy? That, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is the key question of politics. If he is right, and he is, then what haunts legitimacy like an inescapable shadow, is political terrorism. What can be more illegitimate than violence with a political agenda?
Somehow, however destructive and heinous, the terroristic methods of the modern state – the original understanding of modern terrorism from the times of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror – have been legitimised and so, as we have come to understand or misunderstand it, only rogue states as sponsors of terrorism and non-state actors can be terroristic. Consciously or unconsciously, that is how most of us use words like “terrorism” and “terrorists”.
As a result, modern states have successfully cast themselves as the embodiment of legitimacy. So by definition, those non-state agents who resist their rule must be illegitimate. And since on certain political theories, the state alone has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, non-state actors who resort to violence – there has only been one Martin Luther King Jnr and only one Mahatma Gandhi – can only be agents of terror, that is terrorists.
In the world today, perhaps the purest portrayal of this fundamental dichotomy has been Israel and the Palestinian struggle. The one is the perfect legitimate state; the other is made up of non-state actors who fight against the legitimate state, and therefore, by definition and by practice, are a movement of terrorism. But if non-state actors or movements are nationalistic, does it not also mean they are fighting for statehood and the legitimacy that comes with it?