The bandits' week
Sir: Your comments on the deplorable hi- jacking episode (19 September) miss the essential point, which is that effective power is no longer centralised in the hands of responsible '(or irresponsible) governments. However much we may regret the fact, neither Russia nor America can control their client states in the Middle East, and these states no longer control their extremist ele- ments. The Palestine guerrillas cannot be wished out of existence so long as their fel- low-Palestinians labour under a sense of extreme injustice; the government of Israel cannot ignore popular pressures for retribut- ive action.
Wherever men are made desperate by fear or unjustice they now have the means, because of the increasing complexity of 20th-century life, to blackmail civilised governments by throwing spanners into the ever more sophisticated (and so vulnerable) machinery of international and national life. 'Standing up to blackmail' will only raise the stakes of the game without removing the fears and injustices that cause desperate men to play it. We must remember that the firing- pin was removed from the grenade in the El Al airliner in which the process of bluff-call- ing was set in motion.
The natural response of comfortably- situated men and women has always been to 'crack down' on national or international trouble-makers, regardless of the real source of the trouble. It is now becoming clear that this policy will only lead to greater trouble unless national and international law is more firmly based than now on national and inter- national justice. This applies as much to the situation in Latin America and the negro ghettoes as to that in the Middle East. Nor is it irrelevant to the treatment of unofficial strikers at home. Effective power is becoming decentralised.
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