Who Counts as a Terrorist? How Netanyahu Propagandized the Term “Terrorism” in 1984
By Michael Lofton
I was sent a video that referenced a conference Netanyahu held in Washington, DC, in 1984 where he popularized the term “terrorism.” He used the term to mean the targeting of innocent civilians and applied it to all of Israel’s enemies — especially Palestinians. He identified Palestinians, and even Islam itself, with terrorism, and he called on Western powers to join him in a war on “terrorism.”
As I looked further into it, I came across a 2014 article by Rémi Brulin titled “Israel’s decades-long effort to turn the word ‘terrorism’ into an ideological weapon.” In the article, Brulin points out that Netanyahu never applied this term to Israel, the US, or the Lebanese Catholic Christian militia allied with Israel at the time of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The irony is that all of these groups had engaged in acts that met the very definition of terrorism Netanyahu provided.
I had already known that Israel and the US have engaged in acts of terrorism. We simply have to look at Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US’s funding of it to see that. But what really shocked me was learning that a Lebanese Catholic Christian (Maronite) militia teamed up with Israel during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. What shocked me even more was that this Maronite militia killed over 3,500 civilians — Palestinian men, women, and children — in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Some of those killed were refugees from the 1948 Nakba.
I was even more horrified when I read that one of the Christian soldiers explained why they killed babies in their mothers’ wombs. He said: “The pregnant women will give birth to terrorists and the children will grow up to be terrorists.” This really shocked me because it is the exact argument Israeli Zionists use today to justify massacring babies in Gaza. We even recently saw a member of the Knesset say essentially the same thing about Palestinians in the West Bank, using it to justify calling for the complete eradication of Palestinians there.
What made this even stranger to me is that I often hear in apologetics that the killing of babies in Old Testament passages — where the Israelites were commanded by God to cleanse the inhabitants from the land — was justified because those babies would grow up to fight the Israelites. Effectively, they would become “terrorists,” and therefore had to be killed as babies. I think this is a horrible argument, and it sounds like something an IDF soldier would say today, so I do not recommend it.
But what really hurt was seeing people who identified as Catholics — as Christians — teaming up with Israel and massacring babies using the same rationale that Israel uses to justify the genocide in Gaza today. I was not expecting this, and I also wonder why I had never been told about these things despite my strong interest in history.
The article argues that Netanyahu was wrong to identify all Muslims as terrorists, but also hypocritical for refusing to identify Jewish or Christian acts of terrorism as terrorism. I have to agree that there is an inconsistency here, and I think it is even more apparent now in 2026 than it was in 2014 when the article was written.