Israel, Palestine, and reflections on the post-9/11 War on Terror
How can the United States best help Israel defend itself against terrorist atrocity? Obviously, sustaining the alliance and friendship with the United States is vital for Israel and its security. Equally clearly, the scale and nature of Israeli violence in Gaza since October 2023 has placed new and great strain on the US relationship. This has famously been reflected in university campus protests across the States, including those at major universities. But this strained relationship has also been repeatedly evident in the tensions between US political preferences and the current Israeli government’s stubborn adherence to its Gaza policy.
One of the repeated problems with state counter-terrorism is a tendency towards short-termism. The understandable pressure to do something after a terrorist atrocity, and to do it now, can get in the way of wise policies based on past experience. Short-termism also ignores the long-term future dangers that are generated by impulsive contemporary actions.
The United States’s long and sometimes painful experience of its post-9/11 War on Terror offers potential insights to help shape its ally’s response to Hamas terrorism. Hamas’s horrific 7 October attack, like al-Qaida’s appalling assault on the United States in September 2001, prompted the demand for something unprecedented and decisive to be done. So much can now be known about what went well and what went badly in the post-9/11 War on Terror as it evolved. Given this retrospect, we can start to analyse the limitations and errors in Israel’s approach towards Palestine, in light of previous US actions.
Allow me to briefly suggest four undermining factors of the US’s counter-terrorist approach:
Much that went badly in the US-led War on Terror involved an exaggeration of what could be done through military means. This has been a common error in the long history of counter-terrorism elsewhere too: from the French in Algeria, to the UK in Ireland in the 1920s and in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and beyond. While the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was justifiable in relation to al-Qaida and their Taliban hosts, the Iraq War was—in relation to counter-terrorism—a disastrous military venture. Terrorism increased as a result of the invasion and its aftermath, rather than diminishing.
In Israel/Palestine too, both Hamas and the current Israeli government exaggerate what their own violence will achieve. For Israel’s part, military methods simply will not eradicate Palestinian resistance and Hamas terrorism in the ways that are being proclaimed by some politicians.
A second insight from the War on Terror is the need to set realistic goals and then to pursue them consistently. Much of what proved problematic in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the wider War on Terror had its roots in a mixture of unrealistic ambitions and an unhelpful vacillation between priorities. The envisioned transformations of Afghan and Iraqi society were implausible, not least since their only chance of success would have required a US commitment to massive engagement over a period far longer than was ever likely to be possible. More limited goals (damaging al-Qaida, displacing the Taliban, but not embarking on nation-building transformation) would probably have been more sensible.
Regrettably, part of the adoption of a realistic approach to counter-terrorism involves learning to live with and contain terrorist violence rather than pledging to eradicate it (certainly within any short timeframe). Israeli government mistakes here are clear, and are likely to prove counter-productive. There seems no likelihood of completely removing Hamas terrorism against Israel. But there does exist the possibility of limiting it so that life can proceed in far safer and more normal ways than has become the case for Israeli citizens in recent years. A combination of efficient counter-terrorist tactics with the avoidance of strategic over-reaction is likely the best approach.
Counter-terrorism is made more difficult if one mistakes the terrorist symptom for the more profound issues at stake. In the War on Terror, it was less accurate to suggest that al-Qaida hated the United States for its freedoms, than to suggest that it hated the US for its foreign policy. Misdiagnosis of cause does little to help those trying to remedy the problem so produced. In Israel, understandable rage at entirely unjustified Hamas atrocities such as 7 October should not blind anyone to the reality that terrorism in Israel/Palestine emerges from a clash of religiously fuelled rival nationalisms; and from an agonizing conflict over state legitimacy and the autonomy of national peoples.
This does not mean there are any easy answers or simple political solutions. But the ignoring or misdiagnosis of the root causes behind terrorism have tended in the past to prove counter-productive.
Counter-terrorism has tended to undermine itself where public and international opinion judges too many civilians to have been avoidably killed and injured in the process. In the War on Terror, civilian deaths at the hands of the United States and its allies (whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere) helped terrorist enemies gain sympathy and damaged the War on Terror in terms of credibility and support. The implications here for Israel and Gaza could hardly be clearer. Extensive violence against civilians—however unintended—is likely to undermine the counter-terrorist effort.
Israel’s most important global ally needs to ensure that the mistakes of the War on Terror encourage the adoption of a more proportionate and politically strategic counter-terrorism. Without this, Israel and the wider Middle East will likely experience exacerbated conflict and bloodshed.
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