Inside the heads of terrorists: Does Israel know its enemies? - interview
To explore this root cause of October 7, the Report interviewed Prof. Arie Kruglanski, a world expert on the psychology of terrorism and extremism.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
On October 7, we learned that Israel neither knew the enemy nor knew itself. Despite having imprisoned Yahya Sinwar for over two decades, we failed to learn, understand, and pay attention to his intentions – even though he declared them openly.
And despite some 15 major operations and wars against Gaza since 1948, Israel and the IDF did not come to know themselves – applying strategies that repeatedly failed, while building blindly on assumptions (the enemy is deterred) that were visibly and obviously false.
To explore this root cause of October 7, I interviewed Prof. Arie Kruglanski, a world expert on the psychology of terrorism and extremism.
Interviewing Arie Kruglanski, a world expert on terrorism and extremism
Born in Lodz, Poland, he came to Israel with his parents as a child and served in the IDF. He was a psychology professor at Tel Aviv University for 15 years, then moved to the US, where he co-founded the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism. He is a pioneer in the psychological study of closed-mindedness and the motivational underpinnings of terrorist activity.‘Extremism is not a phenomenon limited to a group of crazy people who have lost their minds. Under certain circumstances, anyone, even you and I, is capable of becoming extremists or of doing extreme things.’ This is a quote from your talk last year to the Israel Psychological Association annual meeting.
For many years, Israel has faced terror and extremism on its borders, from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Houthis, Islamic Jihad, ISIS, and others. What in your view is the root cause? And does Israel bear partial responsibility for it?
The issue is Palestinian versus Jewish statehood, which can only be achieved through sovereignty over land. However, on a deeper level, it all goes back to human nature and individual psychology, and in particular to everyone’s need for significance and mattering, the ‘mother of all social motivations.’
The quest for significance can be accomplished in two basic ways: (a) through individual accomplishments for which one is rewarded with respect and prestige; and (b) through one’s social identity. For different reasons, the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs were unable to achieve much respect through their individual accomplishments. The history of the Jews, the pogroms, and ultimately the Holocaust convinced many that their individual attainments would not matter and that they would always be treated on the basis of their disrespected social identity as Jews.
The Palestinian Arabs, too, were treated with disrespect as natives throughout the centuries of their domination by the Ottoman Empire. The wave of nationalism in the late 19th century gave hope to both the Jews and the Palestinians of elevating their sense of significance and mattering by enhancing their social identity through statehood. Tragically, the statehood of both peoples could be accomplished through sovereignty over the same area of land.
The Palestinian cause was adopted by other Arabs and ultimately Muslims worldwide who (partially) shared their social identity (i.e., as Arabs or Muslims), fueling the Arab-Israeli wars and the general moral, diplomatic, and material support of Arabs and Muslims for Palestinian desire for statehood.
Given the unswerving commitment of both Arabs and Jews to their statehood, the only practical solution that seemed feasible was a division of the land between the two peoples, and ultimately a two-state solution. This was suggested time and time again, accepted by the Jewish side but rejected by the Arabs, who felt that by the force of sheer numbers and over time they are bound to prevail. In the same way that the Crusaders kingdom of Jerusalem was founded in 1099 and finally conquered by the Muslims in 1291, succumbing finally, so would Israel finally fall and the Jews would be killed or forced to flee.
That kind of narrative fueled the violent approach to the conflict, initiated first by the Arabs and responded to in kind by the Jews. Violence is the primordial route to dominance and hence significance, and over time it overshadowed completely alternative, more peaceful approaches, like that attempted in Oslo in 1993. However, the extremists on both sides, and in particular Hamas, torpedoed the agreements and kept pushing militancy and violent ‘resistance’ as the only way to go.
Israel’s response to Palestinian violence was the demeaning occupation imposed on the Palestinians and the settlement movement, which further humiliated the Arabs and fueled their desire for vengeance.
The continued intransigence and violence encouraged reciprocal violence on the Israeli side and the adoption of the narrative that ‘there is no partner to talk with.’ These encouraged increased brutality by the Israelis as well, contributing to the spiral of violence whose manifestations we have seen from October 7, 2023, onward.
The appeal to the Israelis of the nationalist narrative, whereby the Jews have the biblical right to all of Eretz Israel, increased in proportion to the decline of the appeal of the conciliatory narrative owing to continued violence and the humiliation it bestowed on both sides. This was yet abetted by divisions in the Israeli society and its growing religionization.
Could things have been done differently? And who is more blameworthy? These are unanswerable questions at this point. Unless both sides are tired of the violence and are willing to give an alternative a chance, little can happen.
Defeating the Hamas organization and driving it out of Gaza, along with setting up an alternative, more conciliatory regime, along with Israeli readiness to make serious concessions such as dismantling settlements, etc., might have a chance.
Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader, spent 22 years in Israeli jails until his release in 2011 in a prisoner exchange. Some 10,000 other Palestinians were held in our jails. They were interrogated, but apparently no effort was made to moderate their extreme views. On the contrary: Prison deepened their hatred and extremism. As an expert on extremism, do you believe we could have used those 22 years to rehabilitate Sinwar and others?
In our work and the work of others on deradicalization, we have learned one lesson. Deradicalization has a chance to succeed when the violent route to significance is taken off the table and shown as likely to bring shame rather than pride or respect. Otherwise, the appeal of violence and the demonstration of power as the path to glory is extremely powerful and hard to compete with.
In our work on the successful deradicalization of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka in their detention camps, we have seen a readiness to deradicalize by most of the detainees – but this was after their organization was demolished on the ground, and their charismatic leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed.
The Egyptian terror organizations Gamma Islamiyah and Al Jihad deradicalized once they were defeated on the ground, their leaders were jailed, their weapons caches were confiscated, and the Egyptian population turned against them. At that point, the leaders ‘saw the light’ and realized that the Koran actually prohibits the killing of innocent civilians; they published pamphlets to that effect and went on lecture tours of prisons to dissuade their followers from violence.
Given these considerations, it would have been difficult to deradicalize the thousands of Palestinians in Israeli jails, given that the resistance movement is strong and prestigious, significance affording, among the Palestinians and the alternative, conciliatory approach, is not very popular or significance affording at this time. More generally, deradicalization must not be understood as a de-contextualized process carried out by psychologists in isolation of the larger societal trends that are taking place.
Even if you separated in prisons the leaders of the movement like Sinwar from their followers and tried to deradicalize the latter, upon their release they would find out immediately and painfully that their deradicalized attitudes brand them as traitors and cowards and bring them quickly to re-adopt the general prevailing norms of their society.
In your talk to the Israel Psychological Association last year, you asked a core question that troubles many people: ‘Why is there so much extremism in the world these days?’ (I would personally include the current president of the United States in this category.)
You state: ‘Our research shows that the imbalance stems from the basic human need for dignity and personal meaning. For various reasons, this basic need is not being met by many millions of people around the world.”
The right-wing Israeli government under Netanyahu has been in office since March 2009, except for a brief period under Bennett and Lapid. Netanyahu and many of his more extreme ministers attach no importance to finding ways to restore dignity to the Palestinians – hence, many Palestinians find personal meaning in extreme violence against Israel. A doom loop emerges, in which Palestinian violence has elicited (with justification) Israeli violence, and so on.
How can Israel break this doom loop and at least begin to mitigate the endless violence?
Again, the challenge is twofold: (1) convincing the Palestinians that violence will not ultimately bring significance and statehood but, on the contrary, will bestow on them additional humiliation and ignominy.The moderate Arab states – Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon to some extent, the Saudis, and the United Arab Emirates – are more willing to listen to such moderate narratives than at present are the Palestiians, enthralled as they are by the October 7 humiliation of the Israelis. Enlisting the Arab moderates’ support for ending the violence is essential to convincing their Palestinian brethren that ultimately there is a better way than violence. (2) Accordingly, an alternative must be outlined and found sufficiently acceptable, and significance affording. Though many people have pronounced the two-state solution as dead, there is, in my opinion, no viable alternative to ending the violence. Mere economic development is unlikely to convince the Palestinians to lay down their arms and desist from violent struggle. The economy isn’t everything, contrary to the popular conception. Being rich and affluent is significance bestowing but not if you are stateless and lacking national pride. Palestinians’ pride and significance quest would continue demanding realization of their national aspirations for an independent state.
Wise Israeli leaders should realize that and promote policies that are based on that assumption. But so should the Palestinians realize that Israelis aren’t going anywhere and that the approach of eliminationism (of one side by the other) is an unrealistic pipe dream likely to promote and prolong the suffering of both parties and their continued humiliation by each other. ■
The writer heads the Zvi Griliches Research Data Center at S. Neaman Institute, Technion. He blogs at www.timnovate.wordpress.com.
