Jonathan Glover

The London bombings pose a dilemma. It is hard to believe that the right response to terrorism is to make concessions. But the terrorism also seems part of a cycle of violence in which we too are involved, a cycle of potential war between Islam and the west that threatens to spin out of control. Should we do nothing, leaving the violence to accelerate? Or should we make concessions that may encourage terrorism? Political violence is often a resentful backlash to a group’s sense of being insulted or humiliated. The rhetoric of 1990s nationalism in the former Yugoslavia was filled with remembered defeats and humiliations by rival groups. Al-Qaida rhetoric before 9/11 has the same tone. 9/11 was fuelled by this resentment, as the horrifying pictures of cheering Palestinians showed.

The terrorist attacks appal us because of the loss of life, but even more because the killing is deliberate. In London, traffic kills far more people than bombs. But we are outraged by what the bombings express. In the climate after 9/11, with 3,000 murdered in the symbolic heart of US, any president might have found retaliation imperative. But the 20,000 killed in Afghanistan fed Islamic resentment in turn. So too did the attack on Iraq. The al-Qaida response to Iraq, in Madrid and now in London, propels the war on terror. And so it all goes on. The Israeli and Palestinian responses to each other’s violence are a pilot study in entrapment. Each killing is defended as retaliation for the last. Now the west and the Islamic world may repeat the same cycle on a huge scale. There is a dangerous gulf here.

As the assassination at Sarajevo and the response to it triggered the 20th-century world wars, so 9/11 and the response to it could ruin our century. Much depends on whether we can break out of the violence cycle. This requires a serious dialogue between the west and Islam before irreversible mutual hatred sets in. We need such dialogue internationally, between western and Islamic leaders. We also need it in this country, between those who are not Islamic and those who are. It could be one of the great projects of mutual education of our time. Two topics would be central. One would be the different systems of belief on each side. The other would be our different narratives of recent history.

What would dialogue be like? Different systems of belief, especially over religion, are often thought impossible to discuss. But the history of philosophy has been a sustained investigation into the difference between good and bad reasons for holding beliefs. Students end up with different beliefs. But if things go well they hold their final beliefs more tentatively, aware of how precarious the foundations of any beliefs are. In religious and ideological conflicts, this precariousness is the antidote to fanaticism. The other topic of the dialogue should be narratives of recent history. This is because of their role in conflict. Years ago there were two episodes between Israelis and Palestinians. Pictures went round the world showing a 12-year-old Palestinian boy crouching behind his father, trying to avoid the Israeli bullets that killed him. A week or two later two young Israeli men crossed a boundary into Palestinian territory. They were killed, torn apart by an angry crowd.

We feel the horror and the tragedy of these events. But the tragedy has an extra dimension. The Palestinian narrative will remember the first episode and the Israeli one the second. The stories reinforce the stereotypes that maintain the conflict. Tackling the deep psychology of conflict involves persuading groups to listen to each other’s stories and to look for the possibility of a narrative that does justice to the truths in both. Sometimes this happens after conflicts, with truth and reconciliation commissions. The urgent need is for it to happen before further conflict between the Islamic and “western” views in Britain. What is needed is not a one-sided dialogue in which “we” undermine “their” fanaticism. There are indeed questions to ask about settling political issues by murder or about settling moral issues by appeals to the supposed authority of texts claimed to be the word of God. But there are also questions about “our” morality. We allowed Falluja to be destroyed like Guernica. And there are questions about the supposed moral difference between bombs in the underground and cluster-bombing civilians in an illegal war. In genuine dialogue both sides have positions at risk. Paradoxically, this can start a virtuous circle. One side admitting intellectual vulnerability may make the other side less defensive too.

We should not reward terrorists by capitulating to their demands. We do not know exactly what they want. And some alleged demands are unacceptable, such as forcing Israelis or Spaniards to live in some totally Islamic caliphate. But the alternative is not passivity. It is talk. “Never talk to terrorists” is a bad slogan. Talk will not stop the killing tomorrow. But we need long-term thinking too. The right kind of talk opens chinks that let in doubts. And in religion and politics doubts about beliefs save lives. —The Guardian