ABSTRACT
Ever since 11 September 2001, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon has taken advantage of President George W. Bush's 'war on terrorism' to ratchet up the colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people (Mansour, 2002; Gregory, 2003). It has done so by seeking to establish an identity between the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington and the increasingly militarized Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation of what remains of Palestine: Gaza and the West Bank. As a result 'terrorism' has been made polymorphous. Without defined shape or determinate roots, its mantle can be cast over any form of resistance to sovereign power. This has allowed the Sharon regime to advance its colonial project not through appeals to Zionism alone, to the Messianic mission of 'redeeming' the biblical heartlands of Judea and Samaria, but also - crucially for its international constituency - as another front in a generalized 'war on terrorism'. This has in turn sustained the neoconservative deception that political violence can somehow be ended without reference to the histórico-geographical conditions that frame it. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's repeated, racist insistence that 'the root cause of terrorism lies not in grievance but in a disposition toward unbridled violence' has been reaffirmed by both the Bush and Sharon administrations. It conveniently exempts their own actions from scrutiny and absolves them of anything other than a restless, roving military response (Netanyahu, 1986).
