One year ago, Hamas launched a coordinated attack on Israel that led to the greatest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The shock of the attack fundamentally reshaped Israeli counterterrorism.
Until 1967, Israel sought to preempt terror. It had little choice. Surrounded by enemies, Israel had little strategic depth. At its narrowest point, Israel was just eight miles wide, shorter than the distance between Salt Lake City’s airport and the heart of downtown. If Israel awaited attack, it would cease to exist.
After Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, Israeli defense changed. The country was still vulnerable, but it could weather the first hours of an invasion and launch a counterattack. Containment trumped preemption.
Demography also changed Israeli counterterrorism. Whereas a generation of Jewish emigrants from Arab states and Iran knew their birth countries with a granularity down to the neighborhood or even block, the new generation lost that native knowledge but refused to admit it. Within the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, arrogance trumped effectiveness.
Israeli leaders believed they could contain terror. Israel treated the Sinai as a buffer until Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat’s land-for-peace deal brought peace between Egypt and Israel and won the respective Israeli and Egyptian leaders a Nobel Peace Prize. Between 1982 and 2000, Israeli forces occupied southern Lebanon for the same reason. Both the West Bank and Gaza likewise served as buffers for Israel within its 1949 borders.
In both the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli officials embraced a concept of “mowing the grass.” The idea was simple: Because they feared the casualties inherent in dense urban warfare and the risks of collateral damage to civilians whom terrorists used as human shields, Israel would pursue limited counter-terror operations every two or three years to degrade the bomb-making and other capabilities of groups like Hamas. It was a strategy to kick the can down the road.
In this, they were little different from the United States. After al-Qaeda’s 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, President Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan. He hoped to degrade terror training camps and sponsors but did not want U.S. boots on the ground. Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden took advantage of this reticence. Afghanistan remained a safe haven from which he planned the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Like their Israeli counterparts, American officials believed that superior technology could protect them from terror.
Both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 demonstrated this to be an expensive error, but U.S. counterterrorism remains hobbled by an even greater blind spot.
Both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 demonstrated this to be an expensive error, but U.S. counterterrorism remains hobbled by an even greater blind spot.
President Joe Biden entered office promising “Diplomacy is back.” He sought to restart rapprochement with Iran and reprioritize a process that, unlike the Abraham Accords, would not bypass Palestinians. For the White House, this meant not only empowering Iran by ending “Maximum Pressure,” but also pressuring Israel for further concessions.
Underlying his diplomatic strategy an assumption that grievance rather than ideology caused terror. This can be comforting for diplomats because it means all they need do is find the right magic formula or package of concessions and guarantees to resolve root causes. This might be the prevailing belief in the State Department and universities, but it is wrong. What motivates Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is not grievance, occupation, poverty or other diplomatic disputes; it is genocidal ideology.
Consider: In 1946, the Intelligence Division of the Department of War, the predecessor to the Defense Intelligence Agency, sought to predict the greatest threats to the United States now that the Allies had defeated Nazism, fascism, and the Japanese Empire. Analysts identified two threats: Communism and radical Islamism. This was a year before the partition of Palestine and two years before the creation of Israel. Their evidence was growing Muslim Brotherhood attacks on anything the Egyptian group perceived as polluted by Western liberalism. If Islamist terrorism predates Israel, it is naïve to believe that unresolved Palestinian aspirations motive it.
Ideology is further apparent in the Covenant of Hamas that calls for the genocide of Jews, and in the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s 2002 statement, “If they [Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” There can be no negotiation with either Al Qaeda or the Islamic State; their goal is the elimination of the liberal world order and its replacement by a tyrannical caliphate. Nor is the Islamic Republic of Iran any more moderate.
Two years ago, Iranians poured into the streets by the millions for the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement to protest regime leaders and ideology. The Supreme Leader’s top representative in northwest Iran said the quiet part aloud when he declared possession of nuclear weapons to be one of Iran’s top goals. “An atom bomb ... must be produced as well,” he said. “That is because the Qur’an has told Muslims to ‘get strong and amass all the forces at your disposal to be strong.’”
Today, Israel seeks not to “mow the grass” but uproot the lawn because it recognizes it must eliminate purveyors of Islamist ideology, not allow them to fester and grow. While Biden urges Israel to act with proportionality, he misunderstands the concept in international law: Israel need not calibrate violence to that it faces from its enemies; it may use violence necessary to achieve its military goals. If those goals are the end of Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran’s nuclear program, it can act with overwhelming force.
Too many in Washington are defeatist. They believe Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic are facts of life, but forget it is possible to defeat ideology. Just ask the Khmer Rouge or Baader–Meinhof Gang. Rather than restrain Israel, the best lesson for Washington is to recognize the procrastination and passivity will never win the war against those seeking Western civilization’s end.
