By Bruce Hoffman
March 2, 2015
Does terrorism work? Its targets and victims steadfastly maintain that it does not, while its practitioners and apologists claim that it does. Scholars and analysts are divided. Given the untold death and destruction wrought by terrorists throughout history, the question has an undeniable relevance that has only intensified since the September 11 attacks. Yet a definitive answer unaccountably remains as elusive as a universally accepted definition of terrorism itself.
"Terrorists can never win outright," Prime Minister Ian Smith of Rhodesia declared in 1977. Following the 1983 suicide truck bombing that killed 241 U.S. military service personnel in Lebanon, President Ronald Reagan defiantly proclaimed that "the main thing" is to show that terrorism "doesn’t work," and "to prove that terrorist acts are not going to drive us away." Margaret Thatcher described the attempt by the Provisional Irish Republican Army to kill her at the 1984 Conservative Party Conference as illustrative not only of a failed attack but of a fundamentally futile strategy. And in July 2006, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel promised that his government "will not give in to blackmail and will not negotiate with terrorists when it comes to the lives of Israel Defense Force soldiers."
Scholars have made similarly sweeping claims. Thomas Schelling, a Nobel laureate in economics, observed in 1991 that despite considerable exertion, terrorists have little to show for their efforts except for fleeting attention and evanescent publicity. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the historical novelist cum military historian Caleb Carr consolingly averred, "The strategy of terror is a spectacularly failed one." And in a 2006 article unambiguously titled "Why Terrorism Does Not Work," the political scientist Max Abrahms argued that terrorism is a failed tactic. "The notion that terrorism is an effective coercive instrument," he concluded, "is sustained by either single case studies or a few well-known terrorist victories."
Yet if terrorism is so ineffective, why has it persisted for at least the past two millennia and indeed become an increasingly popular means of violent political expression in the 21st century? The sense of personal empowerment and catharsis articulated by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, based on his experiences in Algeria during that country’s struggle for independence against France, only partially explains terrorism’s enduring attraction to the alienated and disenfranchised. It is necessarily incomplete because individual motivations are only one side of a coin that also must address organizational dimensions and imperatives and the collective mind-set that they reflect.
The political violence that plagued Palestine when it was ruled by Britain presents a model case to assess terrorism’s power.
Hence, much as politicians and scholars may trumpet terrorism’s ineffectuality, it is nonetheless widely accepted that terrorist violence is neither irrational nor desperate but instead entirely rational and often carefully calculated and choreographed. Terrorism is thus consciously embraced by its practitioners as a deliberate instrument of warfare, a pragmatic decision derived from a discernibly logical process. As the doyenne of terrorist studies, Martha Crenshaw, explained in her seminal 1981 article on the causes of terrorism, "Campaigns of terrorism depend on rational political choice. As purposeful activity, terrorism is the result of an organization’s decision that it is a politically useful means to oppose a government. … Terrorism is seen collectively as a logical means to advance desired ends."
Terrorism’s posited ineffectiveness as a coercive strategy—confined to a handful of case studies—thus hardly squares with the terrorists’ own fervent and abiding faith in the efficacy of their violence, its intractable persistence over the course of history, or indeed the disproportionate influence that even a small number of well-known victories has had in inspiring imitation and emulation by successive generations of terrorists.
In other words, the handful of supposed exceptions may be far more important and far more compelling than the perceived rule. And even if terrorism’s power to dramatically change the course of history along the lines of the September 11 attacks has been mercifully infrequent, terrorism’s ability to act as a catalyst for wider conflagration or systemic political change appears historically undeniable. The assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand by a young Bosnian terrorist in June 1914 and the cross-border Palestinian terrorist attacks that led to the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War are arguably examples of the former, while the struggles for independence won by Ireland in 1922, Cyprus in 1960, and Algeria in 1962 are among the examples depicting the latter.
The list goes on: Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe; the U.S. Marines departed Lebanon soon after the 1983 truck bombing; Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, a former PIRA terrorist, has been the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland since 2007; and Israel later freed five imprisoned terrorists in exchange for the bodies of two kidnapped Israeli sergeants. Hezbollah’s significant role in Lebanon further challenges arguments about terrorism’s strategic futility. Indeed, neither Sinn Féin nor Hezbollah could ever have acquired the power, influence, and status it enjoys today if not for its terrorist antecedents.
The political violence that plagued Palestine when it was ruled by Britain presents an ideal case with which to examine and assess terrorism’s power to influence government policy and decision making. Before 1948, the land that eventually became the Jewish state of Israel was administered by Britain under the terms of the mandate awarded it in 1922 by the League of Nations. Charged with preparing this territory for eventual independence, Britain was regularly subjected to violent pressure by Arab and Jew alike. Arab rioting and attendant anti-Jewish violence and terrorism during the 1920s led to more widespread insurrection in the late 1930s. Then, during the 1940s, two Jewish terrorist organizations—the Irgun Zvai Le’umi (National Military Organization), led by Menachem Begin, later prime minister of Israel, and the Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), known to Jews by its Hebrew acronym, Lehi, and to the British as the Stern Gang—arose to challenge Britain’s rule over Palestine.
The terrorist campaigns waged by both these organizations, it should be emphasized, were only one facet of a broader confrontation that dominated Anglo-Zionist relations throughout the mandate’s final decade. Palestine’s Jewish community and Britain came into conflict over a number of issues involving the rights of Jews—immigration to Palestine; the purchase of land and construction of settlements; the acquisition, importation, and storage of weapons; the organization and training of civilian self-defense forces—and, most fundamentally, over Palestine’s political future. The struggle for Jewish statehood employed almost every means possible: diplomacy, negotiation, lobbying, civil disobedience, propaganda, information operations, armed resistance, and terrorist violence.
But the Palestine case is especially valuable in understanding the impact that terrorism can have on government policy and decision making. The Jewish terrorist campaign was arguably the first post-World War II "war of national liberation" to clearly recognize the publicity value of terrorism; the violence was often choreographed for an audience far beyond the immediate geographic locus of the terrorists’ struggle. The lessons with respect to government policy responses and tactical countermeasures are equally profound. Modern Western nations’ fear of foreign terrorist infiltration and radicalization of an indigenous minority population, for instance, echoes concerns 60 years ago about the spread of Jewish terrorist activities from Palestine to Britain and Europe.
Many of the security challenges that Britain subsequently encountered in Malaya, Cyprus, and Kenya during the 1950s and in Northern Ireland throughout the closing decades of the 20th century, and that the United States and Britain together have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, were also present in Palestine throughout the period of British rule. Highly professional military forces, in some cases flushed with recent hard-fought victories on conventional battlefields, were perplexed by their failure to swiftly suppress and ultimately defeat numerically inferior, poorly armed, enigmatic adversaries. They chafed at restrictive rules of engagement in densely populated urban areas and often had grave difficulties in obtaining the cooperation of the local population. Intelligence collection and analysis were similarly frustrating and often inadequate; policing was largely accorded a low priority, and consequently training was poor and personnel numbers deficient; proficiency with local languages was frequently a problem; and civil-military relations were strained and coordination fractured.
Menachem Begin’s strategy was not to defeat Britain militarily but to use terrorist violence to undermine the government’s control of Palestine by striking at symbols of British rule. "The very existence of an underground … must in the end undermine the prestige of a colonial regime that lives by the legend of its omnipotence," he later explained. "Every attack which it fails to prevent is a blow at its standing. Even if the attack does not succeed, it makes a dent in that prestige, and that dent widens into a crack which is extended with every succeeding attack." Hence, in contrast to previous colonial rebellions that either had sought decisive military victories in actual battle or had relied on a prolonged strategy of attrition, the Irgun adopted a strategy that involved the relentless targeting of those institutions of government that unmistakably represented Britain’s oppressive rule of Palestine.
This was not a war of numbers. Winning was measured not in terms of enemy losses or assets destroyed but by psychological impact.
Through terrorist violence, the Irgun sought to foment a climate of fear and alarm in Palestine by demonstrating the British security force’s weakness and inability to maintain order. The inherent clandestine nature of terrorist warfare was therefore used by the Irgun to confuse the government and force it to treat the entire Jewish community as the enemy, harboring or protecting or otherwise refusing to divulge information on the terrorists within its midst. In these circumstances the British could respond only by imposing a harsh regimen of security measures encompassing a daily routine of curfews, roadblocks, cordon-and-search operations, and, for brief periods, the imposition of martial law on select locations. Although some major counterterrorist operations were heralded by the authorities as decisive successes, they in fact proved to be counterproductive: ephemeral victories bought at the cost of further alienating the community.
Begin banked on the fact that the upheaval and inconvenience caused by these operations would alienate the community from the government, thwart efforts to obtain the Jewish community’s cooperation against the terrorists, and create an impression in the minds of the Jews of the British army and police as oppressive occupation forces. Further, the more aggressive and conspicuous the security forces were and the more pervasive the physical barriers and other visible defenses against terrorist attack became, the stronger and more powerful and threatening the terrorists appeared.
At the foundation of the Irgun’s strategy was Begin’s belief that the British, unlike the Germans, who during World War II had carried out wholesale reprisals against civilians, were incapable of such barbarity. By pushing a liberal democracy like Britain to mount increasingly repressive measures against the Jewish community in Palestine, the terrorists sought to push Britain to the limits of endurance.
Finally, an integral and innovative part of the Irgun’s strategy was Begin’s use of daring and dramatic acts of violence to attract international attention to Palestine and thereby publicize simultaneously the Zionists’ grievances against Britain and their claims for statehood. In an era long before the advent of 24/7 global news coverage and instantaneous satellite-transmitted broadcasts, the Irgun deliberately attempted to appeal to a worldwide audience far beyond the immediate confines of its local struggle—and beyond even the ruling regime’s own homeland.
By September of 1947, the Irgun had achieved its objective. Each successive terrorist outrage illuminated the government’s inability to curb, much less defeat, the terrorists. Already sapped by World War II, Britain’s economic resources were further strained by the cost of deploying so large a military force to Palestine to cope with the tide of violence submerging the country. Parliamentary sentiment and public opinion in Britain was ill-disposed to the continued loss of life and expenditure of treasure and effort in an unwinnable situation.
This was not a war of numbers. Winning was measured not in terms of enemy losses or assets destroyed but by psychological impact. The Irgun undertook innovative and spectacular attacks such as the bombings of the King David Hotel and the British embassy in Rome, the assault on the officers’ club in Jerusalem’s special security zone, the raid on Acre prison, and the hangings of two British sergeants specifically to demoralize Britain and undermine its resolve to remain in Palestine.
The butcher’s bill was remarkably modest compared with the horrific standards of terrorism today. Between August 1945 and August 1947, a total of 141 British soldiers and police officers and 40 terrorists died, including those executed or who committed suicide while awaiting execution. Civilian fatalities during the same period were also remarkably low. Fewer than 100 Arab and Jewish noncombatants perished as a result of terrorism between August 1945 and August 1947, and just over 400 were injured. The overwhelming majority of these casualties were inflicted in one incident alone—the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel, which perhaps explains why that attack has never been forgotten and remains a source of perpetual controversy.
In the final analysis, Britain’s commitment in Palestine exceeded not only its financial resources but, most important, its will to remain there whether for reasons of prestige or strategic considerations. Without a firm policy, it was impossible for Britain to define precisely what its interests in Palestine were. The absence of this policy also violated one of the basic principles of the use of military force: have a clear political objective.
The rise of Israel was the product of many powerful forces in addition to terrorism. At the same time, however, it is indisputable that at the very least the Irgun’s success in both hastening and profoundly affecting British government decision making demonstrates that—notwithstanding the repeated denials of governments—terrorism can, in the right conditions and with the appropriate strategy and tactics, succeed in attaining at least some of its practitioners’ fundamental aims.
Even if the Irgun’s accomplishments were not immediately reflected in the actual acquisition of power—Begin and his Herut party, for instance, remained in opposition in Israel for some 30 years—it is a measure of the recognition that the group achieved that Begin was granted audiences with members of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, including its chairman, to explain the group’s aims, motivations, and vision of a Jewish state.
The Irgun’s terrorism campaign is critical to understanding the evolution and development of contemporary terrorism. The group effectively directed its message to a global audience—in New York and Washington and Paris and Moscow as much as in London and Jerusalem. This taught a powerful lesson to similarly aggrieved peoples elsewhere, who now saw in terrorism an effective means of transforming hitherto local conflicts into international issues. Less than a decade later, the leader of the anti-British guerrilla campaign in Cyprus, Gen. George Grivas, adopted an identical strategy. Although there is no evidence that he ever read Begin’s seminal book, The Revolt (an English-language translation had been published in London and New York in 1951), or studied the Irgun’s campaign, the parallels between the two are unmistakable.
The internationalization of Palestinian Arab terrorism that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s would also appear to owe something to the quest for international attention and recognition that the Irgun’s own terrorist campaign pioneered a quarter of a century earlier. And the Brazilian revolutionary theorist Carlos Marighella’s famous Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, which was essential reading for the various left-wing terrorist organizations that arose both in Latin America and in Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, embodies Begin’s strategy of provoking the security forces in hopes of alienating the population from the authorities.
Thus the foundations were laid for the transformation of terrorism in the late 1960s from a primarily localized phenomenon into the security problem of global proportions that it remains today. Indeed, when U.S. military forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they found a copy of Begin’s The Revolt along with other books about the Jewish terrorist struggle in the well-stocked library that Al Qaeda maintained at one of its training facilities.
Bruce Hoffman is director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. This essay is adapted from his book Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947, just out from Knopf.
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