What we talk about when we talk about terrorism — in Israel and right here at home

Was the attack by Hamas militants on Israel last Saturday terrorism, or was it an act of war? More than 1,300 Israeli citizens were killed in the Hamas attack. By far the majority of those killed were civilians, including babies, young children, women and the elderly. Using the yardstick of who was killed alone, the Hamas attack was outside the rules of war. Under international treaties, targeting civilians is a war crime. Looked at from here, or from Israel, or from any nation that considers itself a part of the civilized world, the Hamas attack was terrorism, pure and simple.

The attack differed from what we think of as terrorism only in scale — by the number of Hamas militants engaged in the attack, how well they were organized, and how many were killed. President Biden and others have said that the Hamas attack was the bloodiest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, and that appears to be true. But thousands of Israelis have been killed in terrorist attacks over the last 50 years. I couldn’t find a figure for the total number of Israelis killed by terrorists, but a story in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency estimated that more than 1,000 Israelis were killed in the Second Intifada alone, which lasted from late 2000 to mid-2005.

I was assigned by the Village Voice to travel to Israel in November of 1974 to cover a war that was predicted to start over the signing of the Golan peace accords. That war didn’t happen, so there I was in Israel having already spent about a thousand dollars of the Voice’s money on plane tickets and a hotel, and I had nothing to write about. Or so I thought. A few days after I arrived in Israel, there was a terrorist attack along Israel’s border with Lebanon. A friend and I drove up there a few hours after it happened. Members of a Druze family living on a farm close to the border had been murdered by a lone Palestinian who sneaked through the border fence and shot them. So I wrote a story.

Then I started seeing in Israel what wasn’t being reported in the United States – terrorist attacks of one kind or another happened all the time. A half-dozen terrorists came ashore in Tel Aviv one night in a rubber boat and were killed by the Israeli police before they could launch their attack. Another night, a terrorist threw three grenades inside the Chen Cinema on Dizengoff Square. He killed two patrons and injured 58 more. He had concealed the grenades by taping them to his chest under his jacket, and from that night forward, there were body searches at every cinema or other theater in Israel. A friend and I had intended to go to the showing at the Chen Cinema the same night that the terrorist blew up three grenades, using another to kill himself. Only a last-minute invitation to dinner at my friend’s girlfriend’s apartment saved us from being there. 

A few weeks later we were in Beirut, where radical Palestinian groups were attacking each other with bombs and machine guns nightly. Terrorism wasn’t limited to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. I wrote a story in the Voice called, “Holy War and Ritualistic Murder” about what I came to see as a war of terrorism against Israel and also between splinter groups among Palestinians. Dozens were being killed, largely out of sight of the rest of the world because one death here or two deaths there didn’t amount to enough carnage to get in the newspapers.

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But it was a war, and a long one. Recently, I found a site called Jewish Virtual Library that listed all deaths in Israel from terrorist attacks, going back to 1994. I didn’t go through the entire list and count the bodies, but there were more than a thousand. A partial list from the Jewish Virtual Library:

• On Nov. 30, 1994, Liat Gabai, 19, was axed to death in the center of Afula.
• On Oct. 19, 1994, 21 Israelis and a Dutch national were killed by a suicide bomber on the No. 5 bus on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv.
• On Oct. 9, 1994, two people were killed in downtown Jerusalem in a terrorist attack. Hamas claimed responsibility.
• On April 6, 1994, eight civilians on a bus in the center of Afula were killed in a car bomb attack. Hamas claimed responsibility.
• In all, from 1993 to 1999, 43 Israeli civilians were killed in terrorist attacks and 567 were wounded.
• On Nov. 21, 2002, 11 people were killed and 50 were wounded by a suicide bomber on the No. 20 Egged bus in Jerusalem. 
• On Oct. 21, 2002, 14 people were killed and 50 were wounded when a car bomb was detonated next to the No. 841 Egged bus from Kiryat Shmona to Tel Aviv. Islamic Jihad claimed credit.
• On Sept. 19, 2002, seven people were killed and 70 were wounded by a suicide bomber on the Dan Bus No. 4 in Tel Aviv. Hamas claimed responsibility.
• On July 21, 2002, nine people were killed and 85 were wounded when a bomb went off in the cafeteria in the Frank Sinatra student center on the Hebrew University’s Mt. Scopus campus. Hamas claimed responsibility.
• On July 16, 2002, nine people were killed and 20 were injured in a terrorist attack on Dan bus No. 189. Hamas terrorists were wearing Israel Defense Forces uniforms and opened fire on the bus with automatic weapons.
• On March 31, 2002, 14 people were killed and over 40 injured in a suicide bombing in the Matza restaurant in Haifa. Hamas claimed responsibility. 
• On March 27, 2002, 30 people were killed and 140 were wounded in a suicide bombing in the Park Hotel in the coastal city of Netanya, in the midst of the Passover holiday. Hamas claimed responsibility.
• On Oct. 4, 2003, 23 people were killed, including four children, and 58 were wounded in a suicide bombing carried out by a female terrorist from Jenin in the Maxim restaurant in Haifa. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.
• On June 11, 2003, 17 people were killed and over 100 wounded in a suicide bombing on the Egged bus No. 14 on Jaffa Road in the center of Jerusalem. Hamas claimed responsibility.
• On March 5, 2003, 17 people were killed and 53 wounded in a suicide bombing on the Egged bus No. 37 in the Carmel section of Haifa. Hamas claimed responsibility.
• On Jan. 5, 2003, 23 people — 15 Israelis and eight foreign nationals — were killed and 120 were wounded in a double suicide bombing near the old Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. A Palestinian terrorist splinter group aided by Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.
• On March 14, 2004, 10 people were killed and 16 wounded in a double suicide bombing at Ashdod Port. Hamas and Fatah claimed responsibility.
• On Jan. 29, 2004, 11 people were killed and more than 50 wounded, 13 of them seriously, in a suicide bombing of the Egged bus no. 19 in Jerusalem. The Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and Hamas claimed responsibility.
• On Feb. 25, 2005, five people were killed and 50 wounded by a suicide bomber at the Stage club in Tel Aviv. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.
• On April 17, 2006, 11 people were killed and over 60 wounded in a suicide bombing during the Passover holiday at the Rosh Ha’ir shawarma restaurant, near the old central bus station in Tel Aviv. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.
• On March 6, 2008, eight students in Jerusalem were killed when a terrorist armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle walked into the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva and opened fire in the library where about 80 people, mostly teenagers, and teachers, were gathered for religious study. 
• On July 2, 2008, three women were killed and another 50 people were wounded in a terror attack in Jerusalem by a terrorist driving a bulldozer who plowed into cars, buses and pedestrians on Jaffa Road.

Were you aware of any of these terrorist attacks in Israel — which, taken cumulatively, caused the deaths of more Israelis than the total killed last Saturday? I wasn’t — and, generally speaking, because of my interest in Israel and in the military, I pay quite a bit of attention to what goes on over there.

What does this say about us, that we missed the level of tragedy endured over the decades by the Jewish people of Israel? Does one attack have to kill so many to get our attention?

And then there is our own country. The Anti-Defamation League reported in February of this year that 25 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks in 2022, nearly all of them by white supremacist extremists. But that figure does not include the 19 children and two teachers killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May. According to Education Week, there were 51 school shootings that resulted in deaths or serious injuries last year. A total of 40 people were killed, 32 children and eight adult school employees. 

Which raises a question: Must a school shooting, or any other shooting for that matter, have a political purpose or a connection to extremism to amount to a terrorist attack? Here is another figure for you: Axios reported on Sept. 17 that there have been more than 500 mass shootings so far this year in the U.S., defining that term as any shooting  in which more than four people are killed or wounded, not including the shooter. There were 645 mass shootings last year, and 689 in 2021, according to the authoritative Gun Violence Archive.

According to a recent study by KFF, one in six Americans has personally witnessed someone being shot. Firearms cause the most deaths among children — more than cancer, car accidents or any other cause. According to the journal Pediatrics, in 2021, the most recent year for which there are figures, 4,752 children died from being shot. According to Pew Research Center, gun deaths among children were up 50 percent between 2019 and 2021. In other words, the number of children killed with firearms in the U.S. in 2021 was more than three times higher than the number of Israelis killed by Hamas last Saturday.

Those are the numbers. But we are talking about children here. We are ignoring the deaths of innocents among us, just as we have ignored the deaths of innocents in Israel over the years.

If we define terrorism as the killing of civilians outside the rules of war, which is how the Hamas attack on Israel is being defined, and we add the killings in this country by white supremacists and other extremists to the number of mass shootings we have every year, including school shootings, then we cannot avoid the conclusion that terrorism is happening practically every day right here in the United States of America. We are a nation of 330 million with more guns than people, and we are paying a steep price for that fact. We don’t need Hamas to attack us for thousands to die. We are doing it to ourselves.