Israel and the 'Global War on Terror'

The Arab world reacted fiercely to the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) methods of suppressing the Palestinian disturbances and demonstrations. In the global era, with the ubiquitous presence of high-powered communications media such as digital cameras, the Internet, and television, every event immediately reaches every corner of the world and draws an immediate reaction. Thus, millions took to the streets in Arab capitals to demonstrate against Israel and its sponsor, the United States. In Rabat, for example, in one of the biggest demonstrations in the history of the Moroccan capital, a million people chanted slogans against Israel’s “barbarism and despotism” in suppressing the “children of the stones.” In Turkey, Islamic political activists started to talk about a “global Intifada.” The wave of furious demonstrations across the Arab and Islamic world was unprecedented: in Cairo, Amman, and Damascus, in the refugee camps of Lebanon, in Pakistan, and in Tehran. 1