Had to play with fire, and get burned
Only way the boy, ever gonna learn

- Jay-Z

Some five-thousand years before either Ramzi Yousef or Zionism was born, an Israelite named Gideon carried out recorded history’s first commando raid. At least what was meant to be recorded as history, as our best guess is that Odysseus’ Trojan Horse predates this Israeli raid by about a century. So it is within Gideon’s tale that we can find some of the earliest precursors of both commando and terrorist attacks, as the former and the latter are operationally bound together by shared means and strategies.

And it is Gideon who stands as history’s first commando leader of a special operation, and in some ways its first terrorist – he cast the mold that Yousef would fit roughly into several thousand years later. In a trope that continues to haunt today’s modern Jewish state, in Gideon’s time the Israelites were surrounded by adversarial tribal groups intent on their destruction.

Chief among them were the Midinanites, who attacked the Twelve Tribes of Jacob in a seemingly endless series of raids. These raids soon threatened to be much more than a nuisance as they coalesced into a full-blown war, as the Midinanites joined forces with another tribe at odds with the Israelites. They crossed the Jordan River and encamped within striking-distance of the Jewish heartland.

Hearing of the threat, Gideon organized a force of 32,000 men to confront the massing army and save his people. But despite drawing from four allied tribes, this force was nowhere near as large as the one he faced. If the Israelites and their allies met their enemy in even combat on an open battlefield they would be sorely outnumbered, and almost certainly destroyed. So Gideon formulated an operation special enough to both save his people and change the face of organized violence forever.

Terrorism is generally regarded as a tool of the weak, resorted to when a fair fight is not an option. But this is an incomplete characterization, so it is far more telling to examine terrorism as a tool of the resourceful, the sly, and the inventive.

And, perhaps most importantly, as the little brother of warfare.

It is no coincidence that Churchill classified the Allied commandos deployed inside occupied Europe as “specially trained troops of the hunter class who can develop a reign of terror down these coasts.”¹ These commandos were able to harness various forms of asymmetric warfare to stir up an insurgency that helped tip occupied Western Europe in the Allies’ favor. When these commando operations began, the Allied forces in Europe were demoralized and nearly defeated. They had been pushed back to the coasts and were at risk of being overrun.

When the Allied commando actions ended, it was the Axis powers who were in full retreat, and the war was all but over.

The asymmetric is synonymous with the unconventional: any means of violence that somehow steps outside the box of traditional conflict, or incinerates the box entirely. Commandos, then, are military men who use asymmetric means to drastically magnify the perceived potential of the forces they’re allied with. Sometimes they use subterfuge, sometimes sabotage, sometimes assassination – but always using dissimulation and always coming at the enemy from an angle left unprotected and unguarded. And they always seek to stoke fear and unease within the groups they target.

So where does the commando begin and the terrorist end?

It is always a matter of context and perception – not one of morality. The line between the terrorist and the commando will never be stark, but always blurred and shifting depending on your angle of perception. The Allied fire-bombing of Dresden is often cited as an example of a state acting as a terrorist – attacks which intentionally targeted civilian areas and killed untold thousands of German citizens.   Modern warfare is replete with examples of “systematic large bombings of civilian populations,” attacks which are always “explicitly intended to spread fear among the targeted populations.”^2.5

However little objective insight into the machinations and innerworkings of terrorism can be revealed by comparing that attack with 9/11, so always-subjective ideas of morality – although important to debate and consider on their own – only work to confuse this discussion.

Innocents and innocence alike are lost in the stench of terror’s breath.

At its core, terrorism seeks to create the perception that a target population has suddenly been thrust into the middle of a war. Sometimes for only a few moments, sometimes for months on end. The stronger this perception and the longer it goes on, the more masterfully the illusion of warfare is woven – the more effective the terrorism. The target population can be as small as an isolated military barracks on the edge of the Mediterranean, and as large as the collective Western world. And the illusion that a war is occurring can be created via a nearly infinite avenue of means.