Category: Terrorism

Posted on

Say it again: Hate crimes are not terrorism.

Since I have written extensively about this subject over the years I will not bore readers with more tedious expositions. But in light of recent events I thought it would be permissible to height some basic facts about hate crimes and terrorism. Here goes:

Government officials, politicians and media have misidentified the recent murders of two Israel embassy staffers in DC as terrorism. It is not. It is a hate crime. In this instance there is no differentiation between target, subject and object of the attack, which is what separates terrorism from hate crimes. Hate crimes are acts of violence against specified “others” and confined to the acts themselves. They can be done for political (i.e., ideological, partisan), and/or non-political reasons (e.g., basic racism, religious animosity, greed, jealously). They can be motivated by revenge, which in turn is most often fuelled by hate. But in all instances the target, subject and object are the same. For the perpetrators, focused violence IS the intent and does not extend beyond itself (even if repercussions do).

Terrorism involves separate targets (victims), subjects (audiences) and object(ives) that go beyond a given violent event. For example, innocents are killed in order to influence the perceptions and will of both sympathetic and antipathetic audiences with the intent of altering their behaviour to or away from certain courses of action (say, regarding an occupation). The motives of terrorism may dovetail with those of hate crimes but the subject and object are broader than just the targets.

While they matter in terms of specific causality chains and the impact derived from them, terrorism is not defined by the identities of the victims, perpetrators or the motives of the latter. It is defined by the act of violence set against a broader context involving actors, audiences and behaviours. It is grotesque theatre of the macabre.

Although politically-motivated, the DC murders are not terrorism. Attaching that label in order to influence popular perceptions and add legal weight to prosecutions for partisan purposes is an egregious instance of conceptual stretching that renders the term terrorism meaningless. In fact, “terrorism” is now used to describe pretty much any act of politically-motivated violence precisely because it is such an emotionally-charged term, one that gets trotted out by authorities, politicians and media depending on who the perpetrators and victims are.

Worse yet, deliberate misuse of the term “terrorism” often serves as a type of what is legitimately known as “stochastic terrorism.” Stochastic terrorism involves the framing of social narratives in order to invite, incite or provoke violence against a designated group or entity (one example is Great Replacement theory, which argues that there is a plot by Jews and other nefarious actors to replace the white races with non-Christian people of color. That was a major rallying point of the racist violence in Charlottesville, VA in 2017. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally).

Misuse of the term “terrorism”also allows governments to clamp down on dissent, opposition and civil society in general by invoking national security threats related to those designated as such. For example, the Trump administration has designated the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua criminal gang as a “terrorist entity” in order to detain and deport thousands of Venezuelans resident in the US (regardless of their immigration status or the fact that most have no affiliation with T de A).

Because of the very real dangers associated with the misuse of the term, we really need to demand conceptual clarity when and where political or ethnographic-religious/racial/sectarian violence is concerned. Otherwise we are on just another race to the bottom when it comes to understanding the darkness that surrounds us.

Posted on

The video sums things up.

Let me make this short and sweet (taken from my other social media):

Seeing some of the world’s richest men shaking the blood-stained hand of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin-Salman while being warmly introduced by US president Donald Trump pretty much sums up the era we live in. It was a Petrotechthugocracy meeting in real time. Shameful.

Posted on

Drawing Parallels.

The April 22 attacks by Kashmir Resistance (KR), a (at least tacitly) Pakistani-backed irredentist group in Indian-controlled Kashmir, in which 26 people were murdered, has some unfortunate parallels with the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. Although many more Israelis died in the latter (nearly 2000) and the costs to Palestinians living in Gaza (and to a lesser extent the West Bank) from the subsequent Israel war campaign against them have been astronomical (53,000 dead in Gaza alone while the India-Pakistan conflict is just now beginning and its outcome is as of yet undetermined), there are enough similarities between them to offer some observations about them, as well as their differences.

Hamas and Kashmir Resistance are both ethno-religious-nationalist irregular warfare movements that violently resist occupation and apartheid-like segregation. Both are animated by pre-modern if not primordial hatreds. Both are Muslim, opposed to Indian Hindu nationalism in the latter case and Israeli Zionism in the former instance. Both are proxies for other States, those being Iran in the case of Hamas and Pakistan in the case of KR. For their part, in their present political guises both Israel and India (who quietly support each other in their respective conflicts) prefer that their rule lead to consolidation of ethno-States dominated by their respective Jewish and Hindu majorities, including in the disputed territories over which their respective conflicts have periodically erupted.

The October 7 and April 22 attacks were provocations designed to prompt an over-reaction from the stronger State adversary which in turn was supposed to spark a broader conflict that would draw in other actors and create international pressure on, if not popular protests against the respective State adversaries. For a short moment, Hamas appeared to have succeeded, as the Israeli ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza is by any definition disproportionate and indiscriminate in effect, involving the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity in doing so. Hamas’s tactical objective was to spread the IDF thin as it encountered armed resistance in Gaza, the West Bank and coming out of Lebanon, and have Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis eventually join in a multi-front struggle against the “Zionist entity.” This would in turn draw in more actors from the region and elsewhere as public pressure mounted for an end to the Israeli campaign (including in Israel), thereby forcing a diplomatic compromise that recognised Hamas’s status as the main Palestinian interlocutor (rather than the Palestinian Authority). The mounting toll of victims (including hostages taken on both sides) was a pawn in this larger game.

Protests erupted world-wide against the Israelis, causing civil unrest in many Western democracies as well as throughout the Muslim diaspora. Iran and its regional proxies, Yemeni Houthis and Hezbollah in Lebanon, attempted to widen the conflict into a regional war while fomenting pro-Hamas unrest in Arab States. For the first year of the conflict it looked like the Hamas strategy was working, especially after a coalition of US-led nations broadened the fight by sending a naval flotilla the Red Sea to thwart Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the maritime choke point in support of Hamas. This was seen by Hamas and its supporters as confirmation that the West was on Israel’s side regardless of its behaviour and therefore not just anti-Palestinian but anti-Islamic as a whole (because the Houthis, Hezbollah and Iran are Shiites while Hamas is mostly Sunni Muslim).

For its part, KR hoped and may still be hoping that an Indian overreaction in the form of attacks on Pakistan and/or ethnographic-religious purges in Kashmir that will lead to Muslim uprisings throughout India and anti-Indian violence in surrounding countries with significant Muslim populations such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. That may be wishful thinking.

Whatever initial propaganda gains may have been made in the first six months after October 7, Israel’s response against Hamas and the Palestinian people has been multi-faceted, overwhelming, relentless, devastating and successful. It has ramped up its repression in the West Back while now moving to permanently occupy Gaza. It has intimidated Iran by killing some of its leaders on Iranian soil while launching missile attacks on military facilities, all while threatening Iran’s nuclear sites. It has conducted strikes against the Houthis and Hezbollah in their territories (including in foreign capitals like Beirut, Damascus and Sanaa) and killed scores of their leaders using conventional and unconventional means (such as the pager bombs used against Hezbollah, missile attacks on Iranian diplomatic facilities in Syria and the murder of a Hamas leader in an Iranian Revolutionary Guard guest house). It has occupied swathes of northern Lebanon and western Syria for good measure and shows no signs of withdrawal from anywhere anytime soon.

In other words, the Hamas “sucker ploy” (getting a stronger adversary to over-react to a provocation so world attention is focused on the response, not the initial atrocity) may have worked over the short-term but has now backfired spectacularly because, among other things, no other country or the community of nations appears able or willing to persuade or force the Israelis to stop their scorched earth campaign. In fact, Israel appears to see October 7 as an excuse and window of opportunity for its territorial expansion and direct control of Gaza and territorial strips from neighbouring countries like Lebanon and Syria. Much of that is also due to the US blanket backing of Israel with weapons and aid, something that as of yet is not a factor in the India-Pakistan conflict. But for Hamas, it means that its provocation may well result in its annihilation.

An obvious difference is that unlike the David versus Goliath nature of the Palestinian-Israeli war, the KR provocation has resulted in a peer conflict between two nuclear-armed States, again, with neither receiving the unequivocal backing on any Great Power (in fact, US president Trump initially said that the US should just “let them go to it and sort it out” or words to that effect). More subtly, the India-Pakistan conflict has become a bigger proxy clash between arms weapons suppliers, with Pakistan mostly fielding PRC-made weapons while India has diversified amongst Russian, French and Israeli platforms. That arms supplier competition is an ominous incentive to broaden the conflict into a conventional war.

Israel can engage in a scorched earth campaign against Hamas and other irregular warfare actors because it is a nuclear power with the strongest and most experienced conventional military in the region, one that has no significant challenger to its supremacy. It has cowed Iran and its proxies into acquiescence to its logic of force, if not submission to the new status quo. All with the backing of the US and other Western nations.

The situation is different in South Asia. India and Pakistan are nuclear armed peer competitors (although the Indian military is much larger). Notwithstanding some of the alarmist rhetoric of armchair pundits (including in NZ), neither is interested in using nuclear weapons for non-existential reasons, so this puts a cap on the escalatory potential of the conflict. Whereas Israel is free to mete out collective punishment on Palestinian civilians as it pleases, arguing that they harbour terrorists and disguise the terrorist’s infrastructure (and it is likely that due to their life histories and upbringing many Palestinians do indeed hate Israel and Jews, which still does not justify committing atrocities and war crimes against them), India and Pakistan have to tread more lightly. So far India has targeted “terrorist infrastructure” and air defence systems in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and Pakistan itself, with Pakistan retaliating with limited air strikes across the border aimed at as of yet indeterminate (presumably military) targets. So long as the Indian targeting remains focused on military sites and irregular warfare proxies’ staging and hiding places, and the Pakistanis limit their response to military targets, then the escalatory potential for the conflict is low. It will be a limited conventional military tit-for-tat rather than a rush towards a conventional or nuclear Big Bang.

This demonstrates the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, at least when in the hands of rational actors like the Indian and Pakistani military leaderships. Civilian groups, politicians and ethno-religious partisan media may agitate for all out war but unless there is a hot-head or two in the high commands of both countries, the chances of either ordering a nuclear strike–a first use one at that–is remote. Not impossible if things do not go as foreseen above, but pretty unlikely in any event.

Truth be told, the Indo-Pakistani conflict is about saving military face and national honour rather than conquest or retribution no matter how much historical baggage is layered onto it by war-mongering actors on both sides.

Perversely, the fact that Israel is (yet) the only nuclear power in the Middle East deters all would-be adversaries from openly posing real existential threats against it. For all of the talk by Iran and its proxies about erasing the “Zionist entity” from the face of the Earth, in practice they steer clear of actually attempting to do so. They know what that will bring, and this was the case before they were militarily and diplomatically neutered by the current Israeli war effort. In a strange way, all of this suggests that in both instances nuclear deterrence works and can be used to a nuclear-capable country’s advantage as a conflict limitation device under given circumstances. That is of no solace to Palestinians of course, but it may spare Indian and Pakistani civilians similar levels of devastation given the different nuclear context in which the conflict has begun.

This is where KR may have erred in emulating the Hamas provocation strategy. Rather than induce a sucker ploy scenario that garners global sympathy for the plight of Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir (and elsewhere in India), it has led to a peer clash between adjacent nuclear armed States that have previously fought conventional wars against each other. This very different context suggests that the conflict will not only be a two-sided rather than a one-sided affair, but that interests of State will prevail over ethnographic-religious hatred and ambitions for territorial expansion by either of them. For KR, much like for Hamas but in a different way, April 22 may well have sown the seeds of their own demise, at least as an armed irregular warfare group. Their ideology will remain and give hope to future resistance fighters, but for the moment current exigencies mitigate against widening their war and in fact suggest that they may be sacrificed in the pursuit of larger interests.

Other parallels may well be drawn as the Indo-Pakistani conflict evolves, but for the moment let us leave on this note: Sometimes the lessons learned from the experience of others are not the ones that were hoped for or intended to be.

That is the ultimate parallel of all.

Posted on

About Syria.

I have been thinking about Syria and coverage of the fall of the Assad regime, and to be honest I believe that there is something missing from the picture being painted, at least in NZ. Although I am no expert on Syria or the Middle East, I do have some experience working with irregular and unconventional fighting groups as well as writing about authoritarian regime demise and the modalities by which that occurs. I will therefore take a moment to reflect on what I think is missing.

Media reporting has it that the attack on Aleppo and rapid, two-week drive through Hama and Homs to Damascus was a surprise. That may be true for the media, many non-Syrian laypeople and perhaps the Russians and pro-Assad Syrians themselves, but otherwise I beg to differ. The reason is because the training and massing of rebel fighters in Northern and Central Syria would have taken time (some believe the uprising has been 5-10 years in the making), and would have therefore been detected by Western and regional intelligence services some time ago. If we think about satellite and aerial imagery, signals intercepts, ground based thermal and other technical acquisition capabilities as well as human intelligence on the ground, then consider that Syria and its armed factions are in the middle of a larger geopolitical conflict in the Levant and wider Middle East, and then think about who has a direct vested interest in Syria’s fate (as well as their partners and patrons), it is probably safe to assume that intelligence agencies grouped in the 5 Eyes, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, France and/or Germany were monitoring at one level or another developments in rebel-held areas long before the assault on Aleppo was launched.

And then there is the pro-Assad intelligence community.

Perhaps distracted by events elsewhere, the Russians appear to have been genuinely caught off-guard, although it has been reported that they started pulling out personnel from Syria weeks before the attacks began (which would suggest they knew something was about to happen). Likewise, perhaps distracted by their own concerns regarding Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iranians eventually airlifted key personnel out of Damascus shortly after Aleppo fell, so even if they were blind to the preparations for the uprising, they clearly believed, correctly, that momentum was with the rebels once the assault was launched. More tellingly, weeks ago there were credible claims that the Syrian State had been “hollowed out” by senior officials (i.e. state coffers were raided, corruption and drug-dealing was endemic and public service provision halted), who then fled the country. Make of that what you will.

All of this would have given some clear indications that the Syrian status quo was about to change and Assad and the rest of his henchmen were soon to exit one way or another. What is telling is that the intelligence agencies that would have known about the rebel’s preparations (including NZ via its connections to 5 Eyes and other Western intelligence agencies including Mossad), maintained excellent operational security and did not let it be known, either by leaks or mistakes, that a major coordinated assault by the rebels was in the making. This was done not so much to spite the mainstream corporate media, which clearly had zero boots on the ground in rebel-held areas prior to the assault, but to prevent the Syrians, Iranians, Hezbollah, Hamas and Russians from learning about the uprising before it was underway. By the time the “axis of resistance” realised what was happening, it was too late to do anything but wait, watch and if need be, flee.

Whether the Russian, Syrian and Iranian intelligence failures were caused by them being stretched too thin on the ground, distracted with external events and/or incompetence, there are lessons to be learned learned from their lack of forewarning.

Israel’s successful (at least for now), multi-front campaign against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis, with some sidebar strikes on Syria thrown in for good measure, degraded the axis of resistance’s capabilities to detect and prevent the uprising. Now it appears that Israel is opening another front in Syria with an eye to significantly changing the geopolitical landscape in the region. Hamas and Hezbollah have been decimated as military forces. Iran has been intimidated into passivity. The Houthis have gone largely silent. This, thanks to Israel’s scorched earth, targeted assassination and long-range missile strike operations against all of them. Now Israel has launched a two-pronged offensive in Syria, conducting a bombing campaign against weapons storage facilities (some containing chemical weapons stockpiles) while simultaneous targeting command and control facilities as well as the entirety of the Syrian Navy (which shares major port facilities with the Russian Mediterranean fleet at the city of Tartus, which in turn raises the question of what will become of the Russian presence there and at a nearby airfield once the rebels seize control of them).

The IDF has also sent ground forces into and beyond the UN-monitored buffer zone separating Syrian control from Israel within and beyond the Golan Heights. Much like in Southern Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has seized the opportunity provided by neighborly discord in order to expand its presence in its neighbours’ territory, perhaps with an eye to redrawing their common borders. Since there is no foreign power capable of stopping Israel or willing to do so, it looks like the Israeli gambit will pay off. But that may depend on what the rebel-led government in Syria does next.

If foreign powers were aware in advance of the rebel’s plans, it is also very likely that they conducted more than passive observation and information-sharing amongst themselves. The US has 900 troops in Syria, most of them US Army Special Forces (Green Berets), Green Berets’ main mission is to train, advise and assist local forces in any given conflict, so it is possible that they had working ties to the rebel groups in advance of the assault on Aleppo. The US also has combat troops stationed in Jordan, Israel and Iraq and a variety of military assets in Turkey, effectively surrounding Syria’s land borders. Likewise, in part because of the lingering presence of ISIS in central and eastern Syria, a number of other countries–NATO members most likely–have special operators and/or military intelligence assets “in theatre.” Turkey acknowledges its military working relationship with one of the rebel groups, the Syrian National Army (SNA) in Northern Syria. The US has close ties to Kurdish insurgents in Northwest Syria and Northwest Iraq. The Jordanians are said to have operatives in Southern Syria and one can assume that, if not an surreptitious military presence, Israel has its covert hand in the pie as well.

What this means is that it is quite possible that foreign forces provided training, advising and intelligence and logistical support in the years, months, weeks and days leading up to and through the assault on Aleppo. If so, it should not be surprising that he rebels maintained an unusual amount of discipline previously unseen in their ranks, and that the various armed factions worked well together, sometimes in coordinated fashion. Even some of their combat fatigues and weapons look new and Western in origin!

So who are these rebels? Basically they are Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), who are the remnants of a group formerly known as Jabbat al-Nusra (Nusra Front), an al-Qaeda and ISIS-connected Islamicist group; the Free Syrian Army (an anti-Assad “secular” group backed by the West); and the afore-mentioned, Turkish-backed SNA. There are also Kurdish PKK/YPG/SDF militias in the mix who control approximately one quarter of Syrian territory east of the Euphrates River (and major oil fields), although these divide their time between mopping up Syrian Army troops in Northeastern Syria and fighting ISIS militants, the SNA, the Turkish military and pro-Turkish militias.

The rebel coalition has formed a tactical alliance against its common enemy. None of the constituent parts are particularly democratic in orientation, and in spite of HST’s claims that it has served all ties with ISIS and does not espouse (Sunni) Islamicist beliefs such as Salafism or Wahhabism, such statements must be taken with a grain of salt. There are numerous reports of lethal attacks on Christians and Alawites (which is a Shiite sect) by rebel forces in Aleppo and Hama, so the proof of the rebel’s good intentions remains to be seen, especially if military discipline has broken down amid the quest for collective revenge.

The sectarian nature of the rebel coalition is worth noting because the Assad regime was Alawite, which is a mostly coastal minority community in an otherwise Sunni-dominated country. Assad reserved many of his governments’ top positions to co-religionists in the Syrian Baath Party (originally related to the Iraqi Baathists led by Saddam Hussein), so retribution and revenge against those who formed the support base and bureaucratic staff of the Assad regime can be expected, HST assurances to the contrary notwithstanding. What is promising is that HST has agreed to form an interim (not yet transitional) government with various sects represented and some carry-overs from the Assad regime appointed in order to restore and/or maintain continuity in public services.

The HST-led government is now focused on rooting out Assad loyalists, imposing social order, securing military and police facilities (including notorious prisons), and bringing public services back to life where possible. But reconstruction of battle-damaged areas will be lengthy and difficult process given that Syria’s treasury has been emptied, many public offices looted and/or damaged, and corruption is rampant within and between various sectarian groups. The international community will be asked to foot the bill and provide the human, material and financial capital required to return the country to some semblance of normalcy. This is complicated but the fact that the HST and PKK/YPGSDF have been designated as terrorist entities by the UN and a number of countries (although for different reasons, with HST designated because of its ties to ISIS and the PKK/YPG/SDF designated at Turkey’s insistence because of their irredentist activities in pursuit of an independent Kurdistan in territory now controlled by Syria, Iraq and Turkey). Before international relief can be offered, the terrorist designations will have to be lifted, something that will not please many interested parties for a variety of reasons.

More broadly, the fall of the Assad regime is one variant of what is known as “bottom-up transitions,” where before the regime is prepared to exit it is forced to do so by public pressure and mass collective action. Bottom-up transitions can stem from revolts, rebellions, general strikes, mass protests and the ultimate sub-type, revolutions (which, unlike the others, involve parametric change in the economy, social order and political society). These are not to be confused with top-down transitions, in which the outgoing regime frames the conditions by which it relinquishes power. This can be done peacefully or by a coup d’état, which is essentially an armed quarrel amongst elites in which the military acts as the arbiter of who wins and loses in the power struggle by siding with those that favour an exit strategy and transition to a different regime type. Examples of peaceful top-down transitions were seen in Brazil in the 1980s and Chile in the 1990s, where power was devolved from military control and handed over to elected civilian rule rather than be overthrown by force.

In Syria as has happened elsewhere, there will be major tensions between so-called “moderates” and “militants” (soft-liners and hard-liners) in the HST-led coalition. Hardliners and militants tend to come from fighting backgrounds. They tend not to seek compromise and conciliation because they have succeeded in imposing their will by force of arms. They are reluctant to forgive their defeated adversaries and many are sworn to avenge the affronts committed against their families, friends and communities (and in Syria, the affronts included atrocities and other forms of barbarism committed by Assad’s forces against the civilian population). Moderates, on the other hand, tend to come from the non-fighting political opposition, religious, business and community leaders and foreign interlocutors. These seek to draw a line behind them when it comes to dealing with the past in order to facilitate the reconstruction of society and promote national reconciliation.

The key to keeping the post-Assad transition relatively peaceful is for the moderates and softliners to gain the upper hand in negotiations to form the new government. For that to happen, inducements and constraints (think carrots and sticks) must be offered to and placed on the militant hardliners. Inducements can include open trials for those accused of heinous crimes committed on Assad’s behalf, placement of senior rebel commanders in leadership roles the Syrian security apparatus, establishment of Truth and Reconciliation Tribunals that address past sins committed on all sides, and even material rewards for those who refrain from continuing to use violence as a means to an end. Constraints could include weapons impoundments, criminal prosecutions, and other legal and material disincentives that discourage continuation of hardline or militant behaviour.

None of this will be easy but it is necessary is stability is to return to Syria. It is possible that the armed factions and their political and social supporters can use the common ground forged fighting the common enemy to expand the basis for commonality into other aspects of Syrian life. It could start with something as simple as national sports or cultural traditions and then move to the more thorny issues of governance, economic accumulation and distribution, religious and secular civil rights, and so forth.

What is clear is that, for the short term at least, the big losers in Syria are Alawites, Iranian and Russians. Assad is gone and his minions routed. Iran has lost its major overland transit route connecting it to Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Palestine (Hamas) as well as the intelligence, forward basing and logistical support of the Assad regime. Russia has lost it foremost ally in the Middle East as well as the intelligence and military assets that it had stationed in Syria prior to Assad’s fall (assuming that the new regime will confiscate the Russian facilities at Tartus and Khmeimim Air Base near Latakia city). Reputationally, both Iran and Russia have taken a major hit with their weaknesses as a security partner now exposed.

Israel appears to be the primary short-term beneficiary of Assad’s overthrow. To a lesser but significant extent, so are Western and Middle Eastern powers with a stake in the Levant. But a longer-term prognosis is more difficult to ascertain because the direction of the HST-led government has yet to be determined, and the post-Assad settling of scores has yet to be decided. Whether or not this involves a return of Islamicists with or without the ISIS brand is foremost among the concerns of many security agencies.

In any event the best we can do is embrace the uncertainties inherent in the moment, attempt where possible to bolster the moderate/softliner positions within the new government and offer concrete steps based on the experience of others as part of the path towards national recovery. History will be the ultimate judge of the process but for the moment all we can say is that we live in interesting times.

Posted on

Media Link: AVFA on Israel going rogue.

In this episode of the “A view from Afar” podcast Selwyn Manning and I discuss Israel’s expansion of its war in Lebanon as part of a “six front” strategy that it thinks it can win, focusing on the decision-making process and strategic logic at play that led to the most recent turn of events. Plus some game theory references just to place things in proper context.

Posted on

Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt One.

This project analyzes security politics in three peripheral democracies (Chile, New Zealand, Portugal) during the 30 years after the end of the Cold War. It argues that changes in the geopolitical landscape and geo-strategic context are interpreted differently by small democracies with peripheral involvement in the major international security decisions of modern times, different geopolitical perspectives, foreign relations networks and dissimilar histories of civil-military relations (post-authoritarian versus post-colonial in this sample). These democracies react to but do not initiate changes in the strategic environment in which they operate. The specific combination of internal and external factors involved in security policy-making  translates into different strategic perspectives, institutional features and policy outcomes that combine the traditional interest in preservation of the nation-state with an understanding of the diplomatic as well as military and intelligence necessities of variegated partnerships in a fluid international environment in which the threat of traditional inter-state conflict shares space with asymmetric warfare involving state and non-state actors. 

The issue of how small states, and small democracies in particular, react to changes in the international security environment is especially salient during periods of global change such as the period following the end of the Cold War. During that time international security affairs suffered two appreciable modifications that required major adjustments on the part of a wide variety of actors, especially militarily and economically vulnerable countries such as those studied here. 

These milestones were the end of the Cold War and its attendant bi-polar security alliance structure at the beginning of the 1990s, the subsequent emergence of a unipolar international system in which the United States served as the world “hegemon” and systems regulator by acting as a global police force that intervened in a number of low intensity conflicts that were not existential in nature (to the US and its major allies), but which promoted regional instability that undermined the international system as a whole. 

This was manifest in the spread of Islamicist-inspired insurgencies in response to Western secular expansion after the decline of the Stalinist bloc. The latter saw its definitive pronouncement on September 11, 2001, which forced another turn of the international security “screw.” That was marked by the advent of global unconventional warfare in concert with ongoing conventional operations and increased preoccupation about the use of weapons of mass destruction by non-state as well as state actors. Notions of cooperative security, which had replaced collective security doctrines as the dominant Western security paradigm in the 1990s, gave way to global asymmetric warfare involving collective security partners. Multinational counter-insurgency operations in parallel with peace-keeping and nation-building (as operations other than war) became the dominant form of conflict until the mid 2010s, 

At the same time, while the US and various coalition partners expended blood and treasure fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Northern Africa, Syria, the Sahel and East Africa (and beyond), other powers directed resources into economic and military development unimpeded by the costs of those “small wars.” India, Russia and the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) poured resources into building the foundations for their rise to Great Power status (India and the PRC as emergent powers and Russia as a re-emergent former Superpower). From 2001 to the present the international system began a process of transition, as of yet incomplete, to a multipolar order in which the US is now just one of several Great Powers competing for influence using “hard” as well as “soft” (and “smart” and “sharp”) power in order to achieve strategic objectives. 

The move to multipolarity was accelerated in the 2010s by the end of many of the low intensity conflicts that preoccupied Western military leaders in the early 2000s. The US and its coalition partners withdrew from Afghanistan and Iraq and downsized their presence in other areas in which jihadism was present. The territorial defeat of the Islamic State (aka ISIS or Daesh) in Northern Iraq and Syria reduced armed disputes involving jihadists to localized encounters. Syria remains stalemated between the Russian-backed Assad regime, US-backed anti-Assad forces and ISIS remnants while post-Gaddafi Libya is rendered by sectarian violence unimpeded but armed by outside forces. The Taliban have regained control of Afghanistan. Shiite and Sunni militias vie with the post-occupation Iraqi defense forces for dominance. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, with the war ongoing, while Israel responded to the October 2023 Hamas attacks that killed 1300 people and in which 150 were taken hostage by engaging in asymmetrical collective punishment against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank that has resulted in over 40,000 deaths, mostly civilian non-combatants. The PRC has expanded its reach deep into the South China Sea, provoking clashes with its littoral neighbors, while at the same time pushing its land claims against countries on its western borders. The Sahel region has seen a rise of indigenous militant groups opposing local authorities and their Western partners (such as the Tuareg in Mali). Via proxies and directly, Iran has conducted attacks on Israeli and Western interests, and the Kim regime in North Korea continues to rattle its nuclear sword. In effect, by the end of the 2010s, the global “War on Terror” was effectively over but conflicts and wars, both conventional and unconventional, remained as a systemic constant.

In both East and West but more importantly, in the global North and South, the strategic gaze has returned to a “Big War” focus involving peer militaries in the emerging multipolar system. The PRC’s aggressive military diplomacy in the South China Sea, marked by island-building projects in disputed waters that defy international norms regarding territorial sovereignty and maritime laws, coupled with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, represent the two most obvious signposts that a return to “Big Wars” is now on the minds of strategic planners world-wide. The way in which peripheral democracies responded to these events and others therefore offers insight into the broader issues at play in the realm of comparative security politics in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. 

So why choose Chile, New Zealand and Portugal as case studies? The justification for their selection is made by the internal differences that underlie their geo-strategic commonality. All are small in population size and geographically distant from the major centers of international conflict and security decision-making. All are countries of the “West,” albeit of different ethnic and cultural traditions and democratic capitalist maturity. All have recent histories of UN-mandated peace keeping, and all have minor involvement in the larger conflicts of the early twenty-first century. Military forces from all of these countries are currently deployed overseas as part of UN-mandated multinational security commitments. All have seen their military politics transformed, to one degree or another, by the strategic-doctrinal and geopolitical shifts that followed the end of the Cold War. Yet, varying in length of democratic experience, institutional stability and levels of economic development, each has a very distinct set of civil-military relations, military institutional culture and strategic perspective that impact on their specific response to the changing global security context after 1990. It is the effects of these changes on national security politics across three geographic regions that are of concern here.

Why go “small, democratic and peripheral” when studying comparative security politics? The world strategic environment is dominated by large countries with substantial military resources and the nature of contemporary conflicts has taken on increasingly complex characteristics, so it appears counter-intuitive, if not inconsequential, to study countries that have no major impact on the strategic matters of the day. However, there is good justification to do so, because small democratic nations serve as weather vanes of larger global trends and the repercussive effects that they generate. It is equally clear is that there are few studies that systematically compare, on a cross-regional basis, the military politics of small, peripheral democracies. There are virtually none that do so with a specific focus on the way the post-Cold War move to unipolarity, subsequent rise of the War on Terror, followed by the shift to multipolarity and return of Big War strategising between peer competitors has influenced the evolution of military-security dynamics in them.

NEXT: A question of size.

Posted on

Setting things straight.

Seeing that, in order to discredit the figures and achieve moral superiority while attempting to deflect attention away from the military assault on Rafa, Israel supporters in NZ have seized on reports that casualty numbers in Gaza may be inflated by Hamas (even if corroborated by international agencies), I thought I would recap the truth behind this spin game.

On October 7 Hamas fighters attacked Southern Israel from the Gaza Strip. They were initially said to have killed more than 1500 people (mostly civilians), but after scrutiny that figure was reduced to below 1200 (including military personnel). At least some of the deaths attributed to Hamas were later found to be the result of friendly fire from responding Israeli (IDF) forces. Israeli sources claimed that babies were cooked in microwaves, women were sexually tortured and mutilated and that mass rapes were carried out, but that has not been independently substantiated. Scores of hostages (closest reliable count is 250) were supposedly taken back into Gaza, presumably to serve as human leverage in subsequent negotiations with Israel. A few have been released but many of those have died, not just at Hamas’s hands but as a result of IDF assaults on the places that they were being held captive.

Here are some facts. The killing of IDF soldiers by Hamas is not a crime, as it can be classified as the product of clashes between an armed resistance to an illegal occupying force on Palestinian land (one look at the 1947, 1967, 1973 and recent maps of Palestine/Israel demonstrates the steady annexation of Palestinian land regardless of the formal agreements in place). In other. words, as ugly as that sounds, in a fight with an armed opponent IDF soldiers were fair game.

What is a war crime is if Hamas tortured, raped or murdered soldiers after they surrendered. But in order to prosecute the Hamas individuals or units involved would require international recognition of Hamas as a legitimate fighting force acting on behalf of a recognised State or political community. Although Hamas has a political wing that is related to but separate from the armed wing and has been the de facto government of Gaza since its victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections, leading to the 2007 Hamas-Fatah war that resulted in Hamas gaining control of Gaza while Fatah and other Palestinian Authority factions retreated to the West Bank, the International community (read: the West) does not recognise it as a State or government and instead has designated it a terrorist entity because of the irregular warfare operations, including terrorist attacks, conducted by its armed wing. That may be convenient for Israel and its Western supporters, but it makes it more difficult to hold Hamas accountable for the actions of its members, armed and unarmed (because not all Palestinians, or Hamas supporters for that matter, are fighters). So, in spite of the obvious fact that Hamas was a governing entity in Gaza at the time the war started, charging Hamas fighters with war crimes is difficult because they are not seen as representative of any duly constituted political organisation. They are just terrorists, and if one is to believe the Israel apologists, so are the people they are ostensibly fighting for.

Here I must pause for a brief aside about non-recognition. There is irony in non-recognition of Hamas as a legitimate representative of at least some Palestine people. Hamas exists as a political movement with an ideology (nationalist-religious in this case), as well as a physical presence that extends beyond its armed wing. It will not go away just because it is not recognised abroad, is not liked by many, or if its armed cadres are decimated. And it holds equal if not more legitimacy than the Palestinian Authority of which Fatah is part, which is a corrupt gerontocracy that serves as a laptop of the Israelis in the West Bank. Moreover, Israel itself is not like in many quarters and is not recognised by a number of Muslim-majority States, but it certainly exists and is not going anywhere no matter what other’s may wish or think. In addition, the State of Israel was created in part due to the “terrorist” operations of the likes of the Irgun (which was designated as a terrorist organization by the British), so not recognising Hamas because of its irregular warfare activities in the contemporary era is a hypocritical specious reasoning.

The bottom line is this. Non-recognition may be an attempt at de-legitimation and ostracism, but it is more akin to closing ones eyes and putting fingers in one’s ears while shouting “you are not there” to someone you dislike. The reality says otherwise, and in the international arena non-recognition only serves to absolve political actors from assuming full legal responsibility for their actions. Not recognising Hamas as having a legitimate claim when it comes to representing Palestinians is therefore an own-goal (remember, Hamas won the largest plurality in the parliamentary elections of 2006 and would have been required to form a coalition government before Israel, the US and other Western states backed Fatah’s rejection of the results and subsequent armed assault on Hamas in Gaza. This only played into the hands of the hardline Hamas cadres and strengthened their resolve to prevail in the fight against Fatah, which they did. That set up the subsequent chain of events that has led to the current disaster).

In any event, killing, raping and abducting civilians are crimes against humanity even if the actions of the Hamas fighters are not technically classified as war crimes when it comes to their treatment of IDF soldiers. Remember that it is not the method or instrument of violence that defines a war crime or a crime against humanity. Nor is it the number of victims. Instead, it is who commits atrocities (war crimes are committed by military forces) and who is targeted. Regardless of who the material authors may be, for there to be war crimes or crimes against humanity, the victims must be defenceless. In the case of Israelis attacked by Hamas on October 7, most but not all of them were, so the scale of the atrocities was significant and cannot be downplayed.

In response, Israel unleashed a scorched earth collective punishment approach to the residents of Gaza, and has meted out come collateral punishment to Palestinians in the West Bank as well. Some see the IDF military campaign in Gaza as genocidal in intent–and it may well be–but at a minimum it is ethnic cleansing in effect: entire swathes of Gaza have been cleansed of their inhabitants. The NZ apologists for the IDF approach want to make it seem that 15,000 or 20,000 Palestinian dead is significantly different than 30,000 or 40,000 dead claimed by Hamas (never mind the wounded and maimed or those now enduring mass starvation due to Israeli (including Jewish settlers!)) interference with aid convoys. But at the same time they use the malleable 1200+/- Israeli body count to argue that the IDF response is proportionate to the October 7 attacks. They also clamour for the release of the Israeli hostages but are silent about the thousands of Palestinians detained by Israel since October 7. It seems that Israel also understands the hostage-taking-as-leverage game. Perversely, for the Israel supporters scale and scope of dehumanisation only matters when the numbers favour a particular victimisation narrative. In other words, 1200 Israeli dead is comparable with 20,00 rather than 40,000 Palestinian dead, so moral equivalence applies. That is not a winning argument.

That is in large part due to the fact that collective punishment is illegal under international law and classified as a war crime, most specifically Convention 4, Article 33 of the Geneva Convention. The same convention, article 34, notes that the taking of hostages is prohibited, even if it does not specify the means by which hostages are taken by belligerents (presumably the 3,000 or so Palestinians held in “administrative detention” without charge by the Israelis since October 7 would fit into this category regardless of the institutional/legal facade used to cloak their real status). So although only Israel is guilty of violating the convention when it comes to collective punishment, both sides are in violation of the Geneva Conventions when it comes to hostage taking.

That brings up the truth of the matter. Both Hamas and the IDF have committed war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. Both have committed serious breaches of international law. Fiddling with and sniping about numbers do not alter this fact. Moral relativism does not alter this fact. Trying to comparatively scale and scope the atrocities does not alter this fact. No amount of spin alters this fact.

Most of all, both Israel and Hamas apologists cannot escape this fact.

Posted on

Again, hate crimes are not necessarily terrorism.

Having written, taught and worked for government agencies on issues involving unconventional warfare and terrorism for 30-odd years, two things irritate me the most when the subject is discussed in public. The first is the Johnny-come-lately commentators who have zero practical or academic experiences with the subject but who, in an effort get their “brand” out in the public eye will pontificate ad nauseum about things that they do not know about. In NZ this an especially acute problem because people with real knowledge of what terrorism is and is not are few and far between, so the “look at me” opinionators are way too prominent in discussions of acts of mass violence.

The second source of irritation is the abuse of the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” in order to generate headlines, clickbait or to pursue other agendas. Rightwing corporate and social media are full of this egregious mis-application of a very specific concept to any number violent incidents carried about by by a variety of perpetrators. The latest example of this is the coverage of the stabbings in Sydney this past week.

I wrote a series of social media posts clarifying my objection to the coverage and have aggregated and edited them here. I have also linked to a couple of previous essays on the subject in order to give recent readers of KP some idea of the basis for my concerns about this particular type of conceptual stretching.

Let’s begin with the bad news. Since 9/11 the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” have been rendered meaningless. Terrorism has a target (victims), subject (wider audiences) and object (to bend the audiences to the terrorist will, say, by altering government policy). The three aspects are not one and the same. If these three aspects or conditions do not apply to a specific violent incident, then it might be a hate crime inspired by bigotry or other form of animus (say, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism), (mass) murder due to mental impairment, or criminal murder (e.g. mob hit, domestic violence or in a bar brawl). None of these fatal incidents are terrorism even if victims are terrified in the moment. For it to be terrorism there has to be an audience beyond the victims, and the object is not just the act of violence itself.

Terrorism is about more than the terror inflicted on targets. It is about ulterior motive/intent, the wider audience and specific messaging, which is collective in focus, not personal. Labelling every act of public violence as terroristic confuses the issue and allows for bad-minded or deliberately hateful manipulations of coverage to suit ideological agendas. Witness the initial coverage and reaction to the Bondi mall attack. It was a case of a white male with violent schizophrenia acting out of incel hate, but was immediately deemed a terrorist attack. That allowed racists to jump on the Islamophobic bandwagon and claim the attacks was done by a jihadist (because he had a beard!), which in turn brought out calls for revenge, deportations of Muslims, cultural stereotyping and other types of violent trolling. The real cause was lost in the xenophobic, bigoted din.

The attack on the bishop at a Sydney church was motivated by religious animosity, but the attacker’s target, subject and object were the same, a preacher who disparages other religions and their leaders. Motive did not extend beyond that. That is a hate crime, not terrorism. But it does not stop malignant narcissistic charlatans like Brain Tamaki from using it to urge for the mass deportation of Muslims from NZ, something that has reverberated around the NZ rightwing echo chamber.

Unfortunately, NZ has bad form when it comes to misidentifying violent crimes and perpetrators as “terrorists”. Here is a post that I wrote after the supermarket stabbing in New Lynn in 2021.

And yet, this time around NZ media outlets again initially jumped on the terrorism bandwagon, only to back off once the Australian authorities identified the Bondi attacker as someone with a history of mental illness but who was allowed to circulate in public. That is a public security failure, not anything related to terrorism.. Even so, both the Australian police and NZ media continue to refer to the church attack as terrorism, which shows that even security experts as well as media talking heads do not have their conceptual ducks in a row when it comes to this type of violence. Perhaps they know but choose not to do so because, well…

I also wrote an academic article a while back about how a specific type of terrorism–state terrorism–can be used to reinforce a particular social and economic project. It is long but you can find it here. I link to it here because terrorism not only has many varieties, but it also has ulterior motives. Neither incident in Sydney this past week meet that criteria.

This may seem tedious and repetitive, but so long as the concept of terrorism is stretched out of all context and meaning, I will have to be pedantic about its real significance and permutations.

Posted on

NZ on Hamas and Zionist Settlers.

Here is one for the road before I shut down for a while due to the previously mentioned family medical issues. It is about NZ designating Hamas as a terrorist entity, adding its political wing to the 2010 decision to call its armed wing a terrorist entity under the 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act. I believe that the decision is mistaken. Here is why.

The move is more about tightening NZ’s alignment with its Western security partners with regard to the Israel-Hamas war and broader Middle East conflicts than about hindering Hamas’s ability to sustain itself. Hamas is supported by Iran and other states, so the move to sanction it under the TSA is more symbolic than substantive. It will have little discernible impact on Hamas’s operations other than to prevent it from hiding assets in NZ or receiving funding from it, be it by individuals or groups, under penalty of law. What it does allow is NZ to more fully commit to the anti-Houthi coalition now ring-fencing the Red Sea maritime channels because it can argue that the Houthis are supporters of a terrorist entity and therefore punishable as such (since the Houthis say that they support Hamas in its struggle with Israel and argue that their attacks on shipping are justified by Article 2 of the Convention on Preventing Genocide and are limited to Israel-bound or departing vessels and their naval support convoys).

However, most of the international community recognizes the difference between Hamas’s political and military wings, so NZ, its 5 Eyes partners and the EU (all of whom have designated both Hamas wings as terrorist entities) are at odds with the majority view. That view understands that resistance, revolutionary, nationalist and independence movements have armed and political wings that share broad objectives but behave according to principles of operational autonomy. Under those principles, armed wings provide coercive leverage that creates space for political wings to negotiate favorable settlements on disputed matters with adversaries. This is also a type of “moderate-militant” strategy that is a mainstay of collective action, but with armed force as the sharp end of the stick. Examples include the IRA and Sinn Fein (with whom the UK signed the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreements and the IRA laid down its weapons), the Taliban during the ISAF occupation (where its political wing based in Qatar negotiated the withdrawal of US and ISAF forces with the Trump administration, paving the way for the calamitous allied retreat and Taliban return in 2022), Kurdish separatists in Iraq (who fought to secure political autonomy from the central government in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein and US troop departure) and more. The point is that armed and political wings are, within the limits of operational autonomy, the yin and yang of many mass movements and enjoy a symbiotic relationship as a result. The relationship between political and armed wings may be akin to that of glove and fist, but the glove is a deliberate loose fit.

Under the principle of operational autonomy armed wings do not share information about real-time military details and planning with their political wings because that risks leaks and intentional or inadvertent disclosures that can be exploited by enemies. In turn, political wings do not share information about negotiating strategies that may involve compromises because that can risk backlash, division and fracture with militants in the armed wings, which are also exploitable by adversaries and often are lethal.

It is important to note that in the exercise of operational autonomy the armed and political wings of a mass movement aim to influence each other. The armed side wishes to present a fait accompli on the ground that backs the political wing into a bottom line negotiating corner when it comes to common enemies. That was the case with October 7. The political wing attempts to restrain the use of force and use the threat posed by the armed wing as a bargaining chip in order to extract concessions from its adversaries. That makes for a two-level game, one internal and one external. It is the internal dialectic between the two sides that ultimately determines the external strategy employed by the movement as a whole.

In other words, the two wings share broad strategic goals but not tactical approaches. Operational autonomy promotes operational security. That is why lumping the Hamas political wing (based in Qatar, as were the Taliban) with its military wing (based in Iran and Gaza) is a case of specious logic on the part of the NZ government. For security reasons the political wing was uninvolved in planning the October 7 attacks for which it is now blamed as a co-conspirator by NZ. It is still needed as a Palestinian agent if any negotiated settlement is to be achieved because like it or not, it will not be fully eliminated as a political entity even if the armed wing is destroyed (and even then, only temporarily). Denying that reality is misguided, especially since the Palestinian Authority is corrupt and discredited at home and abroad even if recognized by Western nations as a puppet Palestinian “government” in the occupied West Bank. With its foreign backers behind it, Hamas is here to stay regardless of how it is “designated” by NZ and others. (As an aside, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are currently in talks in Moscow about a post-war Palestinian government, which shows that at least the PA understands the reality of the situation).

Put another way: For those who think that cutting off recognition of Hamas is a good idea, remember that there must be someone to talk to if a resolution to the war is to be had. They will not be destroyed because they are more than an army–they are an ideological movement that will outlive its militant fighters. You may not like them, and in fact hate them, but like Israel itself, they will not go away. Best then to talk to their political wing even as part of a divide and conquer strategy because the ultimate resolution is political, not military.

The NZ decision on Hamas also demonstrates the lie that is the claim that NZ enjoys foreign policy independence, since NZ has simply bowed to the wishes of its 5 Eyes and other Western security partners against a rising tide of global public opinion about the Hamas-Israel war. That, in the words of a former NZ PM, is the price for being in the Anglo-centric big boys “club.” But there is more costs involved–that of the impact on NZ’s international reputation as a good global citizen and honest interlocutor.

The NZ government also declared that it was imposing travel bans on about a dozen Israeli settlers know to have committed violent acts against Arabs in the West Bank. But let’s be clear: that is just trying to have a diplomatic bob each way when it comes to Israel and Hamas, since the chances of Zionist extremists seeking to travel to NZ is about the same as finding a nun in a brothel. That makes it an empty symbolic gesture rather than an effective diplomatic tool.

It is said that the currency of diplomacy is forged by hypocrisy. NZ’s behaviour with regard to Israel and Hamas is a case in point.

Posted on

Further thoughts about a couple of things near and far.

My son is back home recovering well. There are some more serious sequels to come, but for the moment we will enjoy the end of year respite and welcome in what we hope is a better 2024 even with the knowledge that he is not out of the woods yet.

I remain unhappy with much of the coverage of the Hamas-Israel conflict in NZ, so threw some thoughts together on the consultancy social media account. They are just sketches designed as food for thought rather than deep analysis. I have fleshed them out a bit here.

First. What does it take for Israel to be labelled a “pariah State” and subjected to international sanctions? North Korea, Iran and Myanmar have all been branded as such and sanctioned because of their behavior (seeking nukes, human rights abuses). So what is the threshold for Israel? Or is it because it is “of” or backed by the West (specifically, the US) that it gets a longer definitional rope? I realise that there is not specific criteria for why and when a State is designated as a pariah and sanctions invoked (which themselves are not uniform or standard in nature), but surely Israel has moved into that territory. Or not?

On the other side, when it comes to those who attacked Israel on October 7, note their differences. Islamic Jihad is a religious extremist movement that pursues holy war against non-believers, Jews in particular. Hamas are an ethno-nationalist movement with some religious extremist elements that seeks to reclaim traditional lands lost to Israel. Their alliance is tactical more than strategic because their objectives overlap over the short-term but differ over the long term. They have common patrons (Iran/Russia), allies (Hezbollah/Houthis/Iraqi militias/Syria) and enemies (Israel/US/ West/Sunni oligarchies) but should not be seen as being a single entity.

The difference is important because Western corporate media tend to treat islamic Jihad and Hamas as a single organization, which implies a unified command, control, communications and intelligence-gathering (C3I) hierarchy. Although there is certainly a degree of coordination of weapons and intelligence transfers between them and their allies and integration of operational units such as what occurred on October 7, the leadership structures of the organisations differ as well as their long term objectives. More specifically, it is my read that Islamic Jihad desires a holy war and the establishment of a Caliphate in the Levant and larger Middle East, whereas Hamas wishes to reclaim what has historically been known as Palestine (hence the phrase “from the river to the sea,” demarcating the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean from the Lebanese/Israel/Syria border to the Red Sea). This well-known map shows the area of claim and what has happened to it since 1946.

The fact that Islamic Jihad and Hamas have different long-term objectives means that they are potentially divisible when it comes to both military approaches as well as diplomatic negotiating strategies.They and their patrons will resist the latter as a divide and conquer approach, and they will be correct in interpreting the situation as such. But for the larger set of interlocutors trying to achieve a solution to the current status quo impasse and endless cycle of violence, separating the approach to Islamic Jihad from that towards Hamas makes sense. Remember that Hamas wants to replace the Palestinian Authority as the main agent of the Palestinian people and has strong support in the West Bank in that regard (the Palestinian Authority is headquartered in the West Bank but is totally subject to Israeli edicts and controls). Islamic Jihad would prefer to see the current conflict broaden into a regional war out of which a new Caliphate will emerge from the ashes. The Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and Shiite militia attacks on US bases in Iraq are part of that effort.

Remember that Islamic Jihad and its allies do not need to win any major war in order to prevail (they militarily cannot). But their efforts have already caught the attention of the Arab “street,” where restive populations see the indifference or complicity of their oligarchical leaders when it comes to Israel as further proof that they are Western puppets. The idea is to expose who the real Masters are, undermine their Arab servants and promote jihad on a regional, grassroots level. it may seem like a pipe dream to those of us far from the streets of places like Cairo, Amman, Tangiers or Riyadh, but if and when anger takes to the streets of such places, then the outcomes are by no means certain when it comes to regime status quo stability.

It does not appear that Islamic Jihad will accept territorial concessions in order to achieve peace, as its project is larger than removing Israel and Jews from the Levant. Hamas, on the other hand, is arguably more nationalist than religious in nature, which means that the ideological focus is on specific ancestral territory rather than on religious orientation (even if Jews make for convenient historical scapegoats). It is also something that is obliquely seen in the fact that although Palestinians are largely Sunni Muslim in religious identification, Hamas’s main support come from Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite Iran and the Shiite Alawite (Assad) regime in Syria. These patrons and allies well understand that the Palestinians are much like the Kurds further to the East, claiming ancestral homelands that have long since been carved up by foreign occupiers (not just European colonialists) and who for many historical reasons are reviled by their co-religious neighbours (hence the refusal to grant or cede territory for either a Kurdish or Palestinian homeland by Sunni-majority regional neighbours or the acceptance of Palestinian refugee flows from the current conflict by these same States).

We must also factor in that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have factions within them, including political and military wings, (comparatively) moderates and militants, pragmatists versus “idealists” in their ranks. Islamic Jihad has a more unified political-military command (which makes it vulnerable) even when using a decentralised guerrilla military strategy), while Hamas has separated its political and military wings while trying to professionalize its fighters. In any case, harder or easier, these divides can be exploited if the will is there. Conversely, if the divisions are self-recognised and there is a unity of spirit against an immediate foe n face of the odds, they can be mitigated even under the stresses of overwhelming kinetic assault.

In the end, Islamic Jihad is an existential threat to the Middle Eastern status quo because it, like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, want to overthrow the established order even if its current capability to do so is minimal and dependent on the help of others. Hamas is a stronger irregular warfare actor as well as an ideological movement in the local and international imagination because of its territorial focus, so does not pose as much a threat to the broader regional order other than the fact that it’s success could encourage similar insurrectionary movements in the near elsewhere.

Many difficulties exist on the other side of the road to elusive peace in Palestine. Israel will have to cede occupied territory for Hamas to even be approachable regarding negotiations, but what with the combination of recent orthodox Jewish immigrants from the US, Russia and elsewhere fuelling the settler movement, and with the Netanyahu government leaning hard right as a result of the conservative religious extremists in his cabinet, leading to the Israeli government arming of settlers and protecting them with military units, that is clearly not an option any time soon if ever. Israelis are hinting at the Sinai Peninsula as a place to re-settle Palestinians, but Egypt wants no part of that, nor for that matter do the Palestinians themselves. So the first thing that will need to happen is for the Israeli government to change and for it to abandon its settler policies. Again, this seems like a very high mountain to climb.

Another obstacle is that Netanyahu and his supporters may see the situation as a window of opportunity. They may liken the move to eradicate Hamas from Gaza and drive its population out of the Strip as being akin to the Six Day 1967 War in which Israel stripped Jordan of the West Bank, Syria of the Golan Heights and Egypt of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. Moreover, given the surprise of the October 7 Hamas attack this year, it is clear that Netanyahu does not want to be seen as Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur (or Ramandan) War of 1973, when Israel was caught unprepared for an attack on October 6 by Egypt and Syria, leading to large early losses for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Even though Israel ultimately won that war in 20 days, Prime Minister Meir was castigated for the lack of preparedness or forewarning and her coalition lost a majority in the legislative election the next year, resulting in her resignation. Netanyahu is acutely aware of her fate as well of the actions he took that helped facilitate Hamas launching its attack (like ignoring intelligence warnings and re-deploying active duty troops from the Gaza border to protect illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank). He knows that politically he is a dead man walking unless he comes up with something spectacular.

In his mind and that of his supporters and colleagues, seizing Gaza may be just that. Since there is no credible international deterrent levelled against Israel and a lack of enforcement capacity to stop its prosecution of the war even if there was a consensus that it has gone too far with its collective punishment/ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza, Netanyahu makes the plight of the Gazans a UN refugee problem while the IDF consolidates its physical control of the territory. That allows him to “eliminate” Hamas (and many innocents) as a physical entity in the Strip, opening the door for Israeli occupation and settlement. If that is the case, he may well overcome domestic anger at his pre-war actions and seeming disregard for Israeli hostages and instead ride a wave of nationalist sentiment to another term in office.

Should that happen, the shrinking map of Palestine shown above will have to updated yet again.