The Weekly Sift

Back in 2004, before The Weekly Sift existed, I wrote a piece on DailyKos called “Terrorist Strategy 101: a quiz“. Laid out in a Q&A format, the purpose of that piece was to get people thinking differently about terrorism and anti-terrorist strategy. Its main point was that if you are a pro-X violent extremist, your primary obstacle is not the popularity of the radical anti-X position.

Quite the opposite, in fact. If you’re a violent extremist, the main obstacle to your success is the apathetic middle. Most people just want to get on with their lives, and if you give them half a chance, they’ll work out some compromise that makes you irrelevant. Your first priority, then, is to radicalize the center. “Invert the bell curve” was the way I put it. Rather than most people being the middle, you need most people to be at the extremes.

Strangely enough, your supposed enemies, the anti-X violent extremists, are in exactly the same position. So the best way things could work out for both of you is a series of tit-for-tat atrocities that produce too much collateral damage for the public to ignore. If the attacks and counter-attacks go on long enough, the center becomes untenable and the bell curve inverts. “The anti-X extremists are monsters who only understand force,” you say. “We won’t be safe until we kill them all, regardless of the innocent people who get in the way.”

And of course, after you end up killing a bunch of those innocent people, the anti-X extremists get to say the same thing about you.

History is full of examples. In Weimar Germany, you had to be a Communist because only they were tough enough to stop the Nazis. Or you had to be a Nazi, because only they were tough enough to stop the Communists. (Social Democrats? Give me a break. What are those wimps going to do?) Around the time TS101 was written, President Bush was justifying torture because he had to prevent another 9-11, and Al Qaeda was recruiting based on what Bush’s people were doing in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Israel/Palestine wasn’t the main focus of that article, but it did come up.

That’s why extremists come in pairs: Caesar and Pompey, the Nazis and the Communists, Sharon and Arafat, Bush and Bin Laden. Each side needs a demonic opposite in order to galvanize its supporters.

Naive observers frequently decry the apparent counter-productivity of extremist attacks. Don’t the leaders of Hamas understand that every suicide bombing makes the Israelis that much more determined not to give the Palestinians a state? Don’t they realize that the Israeli government will strike back even harder, and inflict even more suffering on the Palestinian people? Of course they do; they’re not idiots. The Israeli response is exactly what they’re counting on. More airstrikes, more repression, more poverty — fewer opportunities for normal life to get in the way of the Great Struggle.

And that brings us to the October 7 attacks. Even a casual observer had to realize that the attacks didn’t make a lot of military sense. The Israeli army was barely touched, but Hamas went after a music festival, a few kibbutzes, and some other convenient villages. They didn’t capture key generals or government officials, but instead they killed a bunch of random Israelis and took a number of ordinary folks as hostages. The Israeli military had overwhelming superiority before the attacks, and it had overwhelming superiority after.

The attack was on another level entirely, and corresponds to terrorism in its most literal sense. The point was to evoke many Israelis’ worst nightmare: the fear that they can never be safe, and that they can’t protect their loved ones. Taking Prime Minister Netanyahu’s daughter wouldn’t have served that purpose nearly so well as grabbing the children of people no one had ever heard of. You may not be special, but they aren’t either. What makes your children different?

Everyone knew that Israel could and probably would retaliate with overwhelming force. And that was the point. Over the last few years, the Arab world had been starting to forget about the Palestinians. Leaders like Saudi Arabia’s MBS were beginning to see Israel less as the Great Boogeyman and more as a potential trade partner and/or ally against Iran. More and more Arab leaders were starting to see the Palestinian problem as a nuisance, something to be contained rather than solved. So Palestinians needed the Great Jewish Boogeyman to reappear on the world stage.

Now, I’m not the only person who understands this strategy. The Israeli government has some pretty smart people in it, so they must have grasped what was happening. NYT columnist Thomas Friedman (whom I seldom agree with) raised the perfect question on October 10:

What do my worst enemies want me to do — and how can I do just the opposite?

Pretty clearly, Hamas wanted Israel to do more or less what it has done: charge into Gaza and kill a bunch of innocent people (in addition to a bunch of really horrible Hamas terrorists). AP reports:

Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 22,400 people, more than two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory. The ministry’s count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. … Much of northern Gaza, which troops invaded two months ago, has been flattened beyond recognition. … Some 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes and squeezed into smaller slivers of the territory. Israel’s siege of the territory has caused a humanitarian crisis, with a quarter of the population starving because not enough supplies are entering, according to the U.N. At the same time, airstrikes and shelling across Gaza continue to destroy houses, burying families taking shelter inside.

Take that, MBS! How are your negotiations with Israel going now? And you Palestinian or Israeli moderates, who still hope for peace and a two-state solution — have you persuaded anybody lately?

Now, it’s easy to be judgmental about this, and to a certain extent we should be. But we also need to appreciate just how hard Friedman’s advice is to follow. If gunmen had invaded your home, killed your spouse and carried off your children, and if you had the power to destroy everything in your path as you tried to get the children back, how restrained would you be? How open would you be to “reasonable” advice?

What needed to happen after 10-7 was some delicate combination of sticks and carrots whose restraint probably would have infuriated a big chunk of the Israeli public. Yes, Hamas can no longer be allowed to govern Gaza, and those holding Israeli hostages need to be tracked down. But Palestinians also have to be offered some kind of hope for a revitalized peace process. Otherwise, their choice is between being slowly strangled by ever-expanding Israeli settlements, and going out in a blaze of glory. The choice to become a terrorist is usually made in late adolescence, when a blaze of glory can be very appealing.

The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Palestinian political analyst Ibrahim Dalalsha, who analyzed things this way:

Hamas in Gaza is three things: You have Hamas, the government, that was basically governing Gaza until October 7th. You have Hamas, the military wing, which is roughly thirty or forty thousand gunmen. And then you have Hamas as a political organization, which some politicians refer to as ideology. I think getting rid of the first—and saying, “Hamas will never govern Gaza again”—would have been a measurable and achievable goal. But the Israeli government instead went about it holistically, saying, “We will eliminate anything that has to do with Hamas or stands for Hamas.” It forgot that a political organization like Hamas has public support because Hamas stands up when Israelis apply collective punishment and discriminate against an entire population. By going against the entire Palestinian population, both in the West Bank and Gaza, they pushed all Palestinians to one side.

Now, why would Israel’s government do that? For a mixture of reasons, I imagine: Some leaders are probably as possessed by rage as anybody else; they’ve been hurt and they want to hurt somebody back. Some cynically recognize public anger as a force they can channel to raise their political power (and in Netanyahu’s case, stay out of jail). And some constitute the Israeli mirror-image of Hamas. (Remember, violent extremists come in pairs.) Just as Hamas wants to banish Jews “from the river to the sea”, they want to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the same region.

They’re not going to do that by making peace. They need to keep the pot stirring until the bell curve completely collapses and a majority of Israelis see ethnic cleansing as the only answer. Two of them, Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national defense minister Itamar Ben Gvir, more-or-less said that recently.

each suggested the war in Gaza could result in the resettlement of the Palestinian people.

Smotrich told reporters Monday that the solution to the war was “to encourage the voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees,” The Times of Israel reported.

Ben Gvir echoed similar sentiments, telling reporters Monday that the war offers an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza,” according to the outlet.

“We cannot withdraw from any territory we are in in the Gaza Strip. Not only do I not rule out Jewish settlement there, I believe it is also an important thing,” Ben Gvir said.

A US State Department spokesman commented:

We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the Government of Israel, including by the Prime Minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government.

Maybe so. But nonetheless members of the cabinet are making such statements in public. So we know those ideas are being discussed within the government. Palestinians know it too. And that makes the job of Hamas recruiters so, so much easier.