A response to Richard Hanania on Arab militants
In honour cultures, a desire for “blood revenge” is one of the main motives for joining militant groups.
Written by Noah Carl.
In a widely shared piece published at the end of last year, Richard Hanania sought to refute the common argument that, by reacting to October 7 in the way it has, Israel is simply creating more militants. Thousands of people have died in Israel’s bombing campaign, and each of those people has friends and relatives who now hate Israel even more than they did before. So through its actions, Israel is increasing the total number of militants it will have to face in the future, thereby jeopardising its long-term security.
Yet as Hanania noted, there’s another possibility, namely that Palestinians already hated Israel to the maximum possible extent before October 7, so there really isn’t any trade-off between keeping Israel secure in the short term and keeping Israel secure in the long term. Or in other words, since Palestinian hatred of Israel is already “maxed out”, Israel might as well prioritise destroying Hamas, even if that means killing a lot of civilians too.
Hanania then went further and argued that, through its actions, Israel might actually be reducing the total number of militants it will have to face in the future. How so? If the scale of devastation Israel wreaks on Gaza and on Hamas in particular is sufficiently great, Palestinians might just lose hope and give up. As a consequence, they might start to hate Israel less and become disinclined to join militant groups.
In his article, Hanania includes a chart that plots “hatred of Israel” on the y-axis against “oppression level” on the x-axis. His claim is that it’s far from obvious the two have a positive, linear relationship. It could be that there is some point after which Palestinian “hatred of Israel” remains constant or even declines as Israel’s “oppression level” increases.1 While conceding that a linear model might have been true in the past, he suggests it is no longer an accurate description of reality, and that either a logarithmic model or the “lose hope” model provides a better fit to the data.
