When Hamas gets it right, Israel must take note*

* Ron J. Hutter and Anjuli Pandavar

After the IDF killed the Hamas propagandist/spokesman, Abu Obaida (alt. Ubeida), the jihad terror group, yet again, accused Israel of psychological warfare. Hamas warned Gazans not to believe these rumours, as they served Israel’s need to boost morale. Hamas has unwittingly revealed its greatest fear, its soft underbelly, psychological operations.

Up till now, it has been Hamas sitting on the pound seat relentlessly demoralising Israel, resulting in helpless grief, despair, divisiveness and anger towards a government that is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. Hamas has exercised psychological warfare in a ruthless and brutal manner that has not only disregarded basic humanitarian law, but has successfully inflamed public opinion, the media and traditionally allied governments against the victims, Israel.

Now the tide seems to be turning. Of course, Israel as a liberal democracy cannot respond to terrorism with barbaric methods. Therefore, Israel needs to do exactly what Hamas fears most: psychological warfare. The point of departure has to be: fighting Hamas from an Arab/Muslim cultural perspective.

Up to now, Israel’s initiative has been mostly from within a Western paradigm, not paying enough attention to the basis of Arab culture, which is largely “honour and shame” and Islamic. Israel values life and Jews are a life-affirming people, by definition a positive force for both humanity and civilisation. By contrast, Arab Muslims often chant, “They love life and we love death” and “We love death more than we love life.” Hamas understands how to play the psychological card very effectively, bolstered because Israel eschews psychological warfare, leaving the field wide open to Hamas, Arab Muslims and Muslims in general, to wreak havoc on the Israeli and Jewish psyche.

Muslims in general and Arabs Muslims in particular, are especially susceptible to rumours and conspiracy theories, a psychological outcome of their Bedouin heritage reinforced with a madrassa upbringing. Hamas fears losing control through rumours and conspiracy theories, because they understand that their communities can become unstable and turn against them. That same upbringing desensitises Muslims to objective truth and marginalises reality. In the Muslim mind, allegiance is truth and truth is allegiance. Hamas understands that undermining their rule could be their end and that Israel would emerge far more powerful militarily, economically and diplomatically, an objective truth devastating enough to overwhelm allegiance and become the new truth to Arab Muslims.

The starting point for Israel is to internalise that a purely military victory does not necessarily bring the desired results. A purely military victory can actually embolden Hamas, as has been shown in previous campaigns and during the current war. Therefore, Israel has no choice but to devise strategies that shame Hamas and its supporters. Shame at the intensity of military defeat means humiliation. Unless Hamas, or any Muslims for that matter, ends up humiliated, they have not been defeated, even if half of them are dead and their lands have been reduced to rubble and ash. Time and time again, Israel has eliminated Hamas leaders in Gaza, only to end up eliminating their replacements, and the replacements of the replacements. This is due to their style of a network leadership, as opposed to strictly hierarchical leadership as in the West.

Israel needs to find an Islamic way of breaking the network.

The starting point in exploiting the shame-honour dichotomy, therefore, is humiliation. In Islamic culture this entails loss of land, and in Arab culture, loss of face, the two great Muslim vulnerabilities that Israel does not fully understand and is reluctant to even acknowledge.

A clear example of how Israel squanders these vulnerabilities was the IAF overflying Hezbollah chief Nasrallah’s funeral in Beirut. The huge crowds shook their fists at the planes shouting, “Death to Israel!” All that the tepid Israeli Defence Minister wanted to accomplish with this expensive mission was “sending a message” that we are watching you, as if every five-year-old Muslim in Lebanon does not know this already.

Arab funerals offer outstanding opportunities for striking severe psychological blows, something Israel inadvertently achieved at the first funerals for victims of the exploding pages the previous day. Everyone had discarded their pagers and had fallen back on using portable two-way radios. When in turn, these walkie-talkies exploded at the funerals, chaos ensued, leaving the mourners paralysed with paranoia. The lesson obviously had not been learnt when, at Nasrallah’s funeral, Israel did nothing about replicating the walkie-talkie effect at the previous pager funerals. Had the IAF, instead, created sonic booms over a stadium jam-packed with terrorists and their sympathisers, there would have been mayhem, injuries and deaths, and most importantly, humiliation, with Nasrallah’s body trampled underfoot by the fleeing crowd.

Two previous examples from which Israel should already have learnt are, firstly, the funeral of the founding Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. The crazed, shoving, jostling, Muslim crowd, each wanting a piece of the corpse’s burial shroud, upset the aloft coffin, turfing out the body as frantic, outstretched hands grabbed for whatever came within their grasp of the rapidly-vanishing shroud. The second example was the funeral of mass-murder mastermind Qassim Soleimani, where mourners trying to reach the coffin stampeded, leaving fifty-six mourners trampled to death. Management of this-worldly affairs has never been an Islamic strong point, another Muslim vulnerability begging to be exploited. At the scene of the catastrophic 2015 Hajj crushing, William Langewiesche reports of the Saudi emergency services that:

It took ten hours for the evacuation to be accomplished. Much effort was wasted on the removal of the dead, even as the injured lay mostly unattended and continued to die.

As already noted, Muslims value death more than they value life. With Obaida’s death, ditto that of the Houthi Prime Minister, Israel had another chance both to prevent the mourners’ morale boost and to humiliate them. With the Houthi Prime Minister, thousands attended his and another eleven senior officials’ funerals. As with other high profile terrorist funerals, this funeral did not dampen the excited crowds, but emboldened them, reinforcing their exhilaration and sense of defiance and invincibility.

Humiliation is often multi-layered. Muslim funerals caused to collapse into chaos open opportunities for deepening the humiliation of the funeral itself. Imagine the clean-up scene the next day: staring out from amongst the scattered detritus after, say, Nasrallah’s funeral, thousands of printed images of Yahya Sinwar’s head with that famous hole in it, saying something callous or spiteful to Nasrallah. In a world of smartphones, the authorities would not be able to collect up all these flyers before they hit the Internet. Two immediate issues arise: one, when were these flyers dropped? Thus reminding everyone of the horrible sonic booms and leading them to think of what else could have been done to them while they fled in panic. Two, everyone is reminded of the poisonous Sunni-Shi’a relationship. Both of these allow the previous day’s humiliation to also exploit the Muslim propensity for conspiracies.

By allowing these high profile funerals to take place without fear and humiliation, Israel is unwittingly reinforcing the mourners’ sense of exhilaration, triumph and empowerment.

Muslim funerals that do not end in stampedes give a moral and psychological boost to the mourners, illustrating basic, classical conditioning, which Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov demonstrated with a dog in 1897. To turn such funerals into events of fear, suspicion and stress, and devoid of defiant anti-Israel chants, therefore, other tactics must be employed in order to achieve counterconditioning. Sonic booms with resultant panic could be effective in this regard, reinforced by what is found when people return to clear the mess.

Once humiliated, the terrorists and their supporters need to be traumatised. The trauma disrupts their functioning of psychological wellbeing by inducing insomnia, psychosomatic disorders, hyper-vigilance, social anxiety disorder, panic attacks and a low threshold of stress. Ongoing humiliation and trauma lead to helpless despair, that immobilises.

Israel has reached the point where Hamas is on the cusp of a military defeat. The Hamas accusation that Israel is using psychological warfare exposes a cry of desperation. Israel must use that acknowledgement to hammer the point home, pulling out all the stops to humiliate and traumatise Hamas and its supporters in an Arab cultural manner.

The IDF has a target bank that it used to devastate Gaza. The time to seal the victory is now. With Europe increasingly hostile, and Trump under pressure both domestically and internationally, Israel must move fast with a psych ops plan that is relentless and devastating to the Gazan morale.

Are some of these measures “unethical?” No! War has to achieve defeat of the enemy in a manner that the enemy recognises as defeat: in this case, humiliation. We do not have to achieve humiliation by the enemy’s means, but achieve it we must. Critics can say what they will, but until they address the enemy’s gang-rapes, beheadings and baking babies in ovens, they have nothing to say.

Ron J. Hutter is the author of the satirical novel on antisemitism, The Trombone Man: Tales of a Misogynist; Kristallnacht Cantata: a Voice of Courage; and the satirical stage play BEST.

Picture credit:

IDF