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some suggestions as to how they might be addressed beyond military reprisal.
Nevertheless, the novelist remains pessimistic as to whether the cycle of violence
may be broken. He observes that a Palestinian firebrand, referring to the murder of
Israeli athletes at the 1976 Munich Olympics, told him in a 1982 Beirut interview
that “terror is theater.” Certainly, the attacks upon the Pentagon and World Trade
Center fit this definition of what the anarchist Bakunin termed “the propaganda of
the act.” While this scenario has played out on the streets of New York City, Wash
ington, D. C., Kabul, and Baghdad, scenes of violence between Israelis and Pales
tinians accelerated in 2001-2003.
The breakdown of negotiations between Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000 led to the Second Infatada,
Israeli military reprisals, suicide bombers, Israeli reoccupation of West Bank cit
ies, and increasing violence on both sides. In the ensuing carnage, the economic
and political origins of this conflict are all too often ignored by pundits and the
media. In his 1983 novel The Little Drummer Girl, le Carre, however, sought to
examine the causes for the Israeli-Palestinian clash, representing a rare Western
popular culture effort to portray the Palestinian cause and people in addition to the
Israeli perspective. While The Little Drummer Girl and its 1984 film adaptation
provoked controversy, the root causes of the conflict, which le Carre attempted to
incorporate into his popular fiction, have remained off the radar screen for most
Americans. The events of September 11th, the war on terrorism, the U.S. military
invasion of Iraq, and escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence remind us that these
root causes may be ignored at our own peril. Accordingly, a reexamination of what
le Carre had to say about terrorism in 1983 may shed some light on where we have
been and where we are going in our efforts to understand the phenomenon of ter
rorism.
In the 1960s and 1970s, le Carre published such popular espionage fiction as
The Looking Glass War (1965); A Small Town in Germany (1968); Tinker, Tailor
Soldier, Spy (1974); The Honourable Schoolboy (1977); and Smiley's People (1980).
Le Carre’s spy fiction is characterized by an ambiguity regarding what the author
considers the moral bankruptcy of the Cold War. In a world where treachery, de
ceit, and betrayal are the norm, the author fears that the means used to defend
Western society may produce a society not worth defending. Espionage becomes a
metaphor for both personal and political betrayal. In summarizing the espionage
novelist’s career, literary scholar Peter Lewis writes, “For le Carre, human life is
irreducibly paradoxical: victory at one level requires defeat at another; success is
inevitably characterized by failure; to achieve a desirable objective, something
else of value must be sacrificed; good ends may well demand unpleasant means,
and good means are likely to produce the wrong ends. Above power struggles,
whether between nations, groups, or even individuals.”2