This week, Osama bin Laden took down from the shelves an old argument from his radical Islamic library, namely that Israel is the reason why al-Qaeda is presently trying to attack the US. In an audiotape broadcast on al-Jazeera on January 24, bin Laden took credit for the attempted airline bombing near Detroit last month by the Nigerian terrorist, Umar al-Farouq Abtulmutallab. Then Bin Laden added: "our attacks against against you will continue as long as U.S. support for Israel continues." He explained that "it is not fair that Americans should live in peace as long as our brothers in Gaza live in the worst conditions."
This is not the first time that a link has been made between al-Qaeda's war against the West, in general, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, key figures in the West have bought into this argument. Michael Scheuer was the head of the "Bin Laden unit" in the CIA in the late 1990's. He wrote a book in 2004, while he was still in the CIA, in which he charged that U.S. support for Israel was one of the critical sources of the rage that motivated bin Laden and al-Qaeda. He spreads this view as a guest on the most high-profile American television shows, like "60 Minutes" and the evening shows on FOX. In recent years, Scheuer has become an extremist in blaming Israel for al-Qaeda, but even a mainstream Western official, like former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, argued after the July 7, 2005 al-Qaeda attacks in London that they their underlying causes were tied to the "ongoing conflict" in the Middle East. Blair's foreign minister, Jack Straw, was even more explicit in making this link right after 9/11: "One of the factors that helps breed terror is the anger which many people in this region feel at events over the years at events in Palestine."
But is it fair to argue that the operations of al-Qaeda are really motivated by the Palestinians' conflict with Israel? A brief review of al-Qaeda's history demonstrates that this argument is baseless. After all, when was al-Qaeda established--was it organized in 1948, 1967, 1973, as a result of Arab-Israeli wars or in 1987, as a result of the first intifada? No, al-Qaeda was established in 1989, in Afghanistan, thousands of miles away from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It was more focused on the conflicts in Kashmir and Chechnya. In fact, what happened in 1989 had nothing to do with Israel: the Soviet Union had been defeated in Afghanistan and withdrew its forces. The Arab contingent that joined the Afghan mujahideen felt that they had succeeded in defeating a superpower that reminded them of the conquests of the 7th century Islamic armies against the Persian and Byzantine Empires. The founders of al-Qaeda reasoned that if they had defeated one superpower, they could defeat the other one as well--namely the United States. What made al-Qaeda grow were its military victories against its enemies and its sense of historical destiny, not the Palestinian question.
If there was a link between the motivation behind al-Qaeda's attacks and the Arab-Israel conflict, then it might be expected that progress in the Arab-Israeli peace process would reduce the al-Qaeda threat. The decade of the 1990's was an ideal time to test this thesis. Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Agreement in 1993. They signed the Gaza-Jericho Agreement in 1994 and the Interim Agreement over the West Bank in 1995. Further agreements were reached in 1997--the Hebron Agreement--and then in 1998--the Wye Agreement, and the parties went to Camp David in 2000 to reach a final treaty. What happened to al-Qaeda while all this diplomacy was going on? The first World Trade Center attack in 1993 preceded Oslo, but in 1995 was the first al-Qaeda attack in Saudi Arabia, while in 1998, al-Qaeda blew up two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Mozambique. By 2000, al-Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in Yemen and at the same time was planning the 9/11 attacks. In short, there was no correlation whatsoever between the Arab-Israeli peace process and the attacks of al-Qaeda against the US.Peace has a value in its own right, but it won't stop bin Laden.
So why did bin Laden portray the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the core motivation for al-Qaeda's attacks, if this claim is so evidently untrue? The al-Qaeda leadership knows that there is an intense debate in the US over the future of the war on terrorism. The war against al-Qaeda's sanctuary along the Afghan-Pakistani border is unpopular, especially among President Obama's followers. They are also concerned that the US will enter the war against al-Qaeda in Yemen. For bin Laden, who wants to preserve his base of operations, as well as his Yemeni foothold in the Arabian Peninsula, it is important to distract the West with the Arab-Israeli issue and get the Americans to believe that Senator George Mitchell has the keys to stopping terrorism rather than General David Petraeus. In hunting, a red herring used to be dragged on the ground to get the dogs to follow the wrong scent. Bin Laden is gambling that the US will fall for his own red herring. Unfortunately there are always commentators and officials who will fall for this idea, even though what is needed today more than ever in the Middle East is political realism, rather than policies based on unproven assumptions.
Note: This article was originally written and published by Ambassador Dore Gold in Yisrael Hayom, on January 29, 2010.
