The movie – nominated for an Oscar for best foreign movie – is about the Palestinian friends Khaled and Said who are ‘chosen’ to carry a suicide attack in Tel Aviv. After a last evening with their families, to whom they are not allowed to tell of their pending death, they leave with bombs on their bodies to the border post.
NB: on 17 January 2006 Paradise Now was awarded in Los Angeles with the Golden Globe for best non-English language movie.
(editor: Hany Abu-Assad, Netherlands 2005, 90 min.)
The Factory
Jan Sijbrandsteeg 12
1502 BA Zaandam, the Netherlands.
Tel.: (31-75) 6311993 Start film: 20.00 pm. Ending debate: 22.30 pm.
See further http://www.de-fabriek.nl.
Speakers:
– Bero Beyer, producer of Paradise Now
– Gidi Markuszower, representative of the Likud party in the Netherlands
– Caspar ten Dam, terrorism expert and chairman of ICHI
Here follows a summary of Caspar ten Dam’s contribution in the debate:
He defines terrorism as lethal, indiscriminate violence without warning against unarmed, defenceless people like civilians and soldiers who are off-duty. In the film a strike is planned on Israeli military in a civilian bus with also civilian passengers: ‘technically’ this constitutes a ‘half-terrorist’ attack.
Ethically it is a real act of terrorism, because the organisers are not troubled about causing civilian deaths as well. If the target had been a military bus peopled with armed soldiers only, then it would have been a non-terrorist attack, in the context of a possibly justified struggle. However, Palestinian movements like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have largely used violence against Israeli civilians; we therefore can designate them simply as ‘terror organisations’.
On the other hand, we must realize that even movements like Al-Qaeda do not commit always and only terrorist acts. Thus Ten Dam does not consider the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000 in Yemen to be a terrorist one: it was directed against a military target that was able to defend itself (if it had spotted the attackers in time). He thus strongly disapproves of the sentencing in Yemen of several culprits as being ‘terrorists’, and giving them the death penalty for it.
As chairman of ICHI Caspar ten Dam stresses that the Palestinians have good reasons to rebel: the occupation of the West Bank, the infringement of their rights and the daily humiliations are forms of repression and therefore justify an armed struggle against it. Yet a right reason does not make all means right, and certainly not terrorism. The goal does not justify the means. The means justify the goal – or vilify it.
If the Palestinian militants, for instance from the first Intefadah of 1988 onwards, had attacked only military and no civilians, then the Palestinans would have had their own state on the West Bank by now: because in that case they would have had much more support among the American public, and the lobby of the Israeli Colonists in Washington DC would have had much more trouble in maintaining their political influence.
The idea that terror-strikes are necessary for the militarily weaker party is wrong: Palestine fighters have plenty of Israeli military targets to choose from. Moreover, there are numerous examples of successful guerrilla against military sites to be found in history.
Finally: the expectation that terror-strikes would create such a sense of insecurity among the Israeli’s that they would seek a peace with the Palestinians beneficial to the latter, is misplaced: such strikes have actually driven many Israeli’s into the arms of the Jewish Orthodox, Colonists, and (other) extreme-right movements.