The Biden admin’s security officials rarely pass up an opportunity to persuade the media that you can wage a successful military campaign against an idea.
The Biden administration’s security officials rarely pass up an opportunity to disabuse the press of the notion that you can wage a successful military campaign against an idea.
“What we have learned through our own experiences, that military and other means you can absolutely have a significant impact on terrorist groups ability to resource itself, to train fighters, to recruit fighters, to plan to execute attacks,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters last November. “It doesn’t mean that the ideology withers away and die [sic].” Those sentiments were recently echoed by State Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “You can defeat a terrorist group on the battlefield, but ultimately you have to beat that idea with a better idea,” he said. It is for that reason that the U.S. supports Israel in its objective of “defeating Hamas” on the battlefield, but a lasting peace in the region will only be achieved through a “broader political resolution that will address the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.”
At the level of abstraction, Kirby and Miller are correct. There will always be competing forms of human social organization, and ideas of consequence never truly disappear — they merely fall in and out of fashion. At the same time, however, it is foolish to assume that bad ideas are only ever supplanted by better ones (from the West’s perspective) by virtue of their obvious, compelling superiority. Better models of social organization — like, for example, terroristic, kleptocratic, quasi-theocracy — must be revealed as dead-ends first.
And what would the administration like to see replace the “idea” to which Hamas is beholden? After all, you cannot replace a bad idea with the same idea. And the administration doesn’t seem capable of the imagination capable of conceiving a new modus vivendi for the Palestinian people than the one that has kept them in shackles for decades.
“Hamas’s particular idea is ‘the Palestinian cause,’” wrote Amherst College professor Ronald Tiersky. “Rescuing the Palestinian cause was the justification for attacking Israel on October 7. It was the justification for taking hostages, which is against the international law of war, as well as justification for accepting the total devastation of Gaza as a place to live, with 30,000 civilians dead and the remaining population (its own people) now on the point of famine.” True enough. But there is no alternative to Hamas’s conception of “the Palestinian cause” in political economies of Gaza and the West Bank — an inconvenience the Biden administration has chosen to simply ignore.
Whatever the future holds for the Strip, it “must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last year. That project requires “a revitalized Palestinian Authority,” read an op-ed bylined by President Joe Biden, “as we all work toward a two-state solution.” That’s a fine aspiration, but it’s easier said than realized. Neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Fatah Party that controls it have provided any indication that they’re willing to submit to revitalization, however the administration defines that project.
As public-opinion polling has shown, Fatah is held in lower regard in the West Bank than Hamas. That’s why, for example, the secretary of Fatah’s Central Committee, Jabril Rajoub, called the October 7 massacre an outgrowth of the “defensive war full of epics and heroics that the Palestinian people have been fighting for 75 years.” The party in control of the Palestinian Authority knows full well that the people under their thumb would replace their brand of extremism with something even more brutal if given the opportunity. That, as well as Israel’s wealth of experience dealing with the PA, explains why Jerusalem’s wartime unity government has already ruled out the restoration of PA authority in Gaza.
There are precious few indications that there is an appetite in the Palestinian territories for an idea that can compete with the notion of total victory over Israel. The idea with the most appeal is the notion retailed by both Hamas and Fatah — that through protracted, terroristic conflict, the state of Israel will one day cease to exist. That idea can only be replaced after it has been unambiguously defeated. If the Biden administration genuinely believes that it can supplant that idea and replace it with a better one, its first objective must be to see Hamas neutralized and Gazans confronted with the bitter costs of their regime’s miscalculations. The life of the mind comes later.