Fighting Terrorism

Benjamin Netanyahu, who later served as Prime Minister of Israel, examines why terrorism has been spreading across both domestic and international arenas. He draws on case studies from many countries to show how a technologically advanced society can usually defeat homegrown terrorist movements, and can do so without giving up much of its civil liberties.

Netanyahu argues that a more serious danger comes from international terrorism, which he links increasingly to Islamic militants. In his account, these groups take their direction and inspiration from Iran and a growing network of satellite states. He pairs the rise of fundamentalist Islamic terror with the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon, and he presents this combination as a threat more alarming than Soviet Communism, since he sees the adversary as less rational and so harder to control.

The book closes by asking how democracies can protect themselves against this new kind of threat.