President Donald Trump announced earlier this month that the United States will cease sanctions against Syria “to give them a chance at greatness.” As part of that statement, Trump chortled to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman: “Oh, what I do for the crown prince.” But does any of this ad-hoc commentary make tangible policy sense for Israel?
It’s not a hard question. In Jerusalem, nothing could be less welcome than encouraging a Syrian “chance at greatness.” Even if Trump is correct that sanctions relief would strengthen the new Damascus regime and accelerate Saudi support for potential military measures against Iran, such benefits would also be a double-edged sword. In Syria, a long-time ally of Iran, assorted jihadi groups will configure and reconfigure under the still-indecipherable gaze of interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani) and several jihadi terror groups, not just al-Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militia, will seek to expand their relative power.
Whatever the particular nuances of jihadi reconfiguration in Syria, triumphant terror groups will focus more determinedly on transcendent goals than short-term advantages. Like all jihadi groups past and present, the ultimate goal of these groups will be “power over death.” It follows that Israel’s acceptance of security benefits based on Syrian sanctions relief would elevate contrived hopes over dispassionate analyses. If Sigmund Freud were here to assess these current issues, he would likely describe the American president’s expectations for Syria as “wish fulfillment.”
Unlike Israel’s systematic orientation to counterterrorism, a posture that centers on logic, science and engineering, the jihadis’ orientation toward violence will continue to revolve around manipulation, mystification and gratuitous cruelty. Accordingly, the following core question should be assigned prominent pride of place in Jerusalem: How should unchanging jihadist beliefs in personal immortality—beliefs based on the necessary “sacrifice” of “unbelievers”—be combated by Israel’s national security decision-makers?
In every domain of religion-based mystifications, there will eventually arise powerful yearnings of anti-reason. Facing seductive jihadi ideologies that promise eternity to “the faithful,” Israel will need to remain wary of projecting ordinary political preferences on its jihadi foes. This is not meant to suggest uniform enemy irrationality, but only to underscore that the usual secular preferences, e.g., “Palestinian self-determination,” would be secondary or “reflective.”
Normally, projections of decision-making rationality make sense in world politics. Nonetheless, there are still enough significant exceptions to temper any hope-dependent generalities.
If Israel’s decision-makers were to appraise the current reconfigurations of global jihadist terrorist organizations, both Sunni and Shi’ite, from an augmented analytic standpoint, one that acknowledges the faith-based impact of “power over death,” the nexus between “martyrdom operations” and “life everlasting” could become more understandable. At that point, Jerusalem’s national security planners could begin to place themselves in a significantly improved position to deter Islamist murderers, hostage takers and suicide bombers. Such egregious outlaws, known under international law as hostes humani generis or “common enemies of mankind,” include both individual terror criminals and enemy state terror patrons.
There are corresponding elements of justice. Jihadi insurgents seeking to justify unrestrained attacks on Israeli noncombatants act in contravention of authoritative international law. Ex injuria jus non oritur. In law, all law, rights can never stem from wrongs.
In world politics, indiscriminate violence is never acceptable. Whatever the cause, violence becomes terrorism when insurgents intentionally kill or maim noncombatants. In law, it is irrelevant whether the terrorists’ expressed cause of political violence is just or unjust. Thus, the favored jihadi mantra of “by any means necessary” is nothing more than an empty witticism. Recalling Hague Convention No. IV: “The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.”
Martyrdom-seeking jihadi foes sometimes advance a supposedly legal argument known as Tu quoque. This fully discredited argument stipulates that because the “other side” is allegedly guilty of similar, equivalent or greater criminality, “our” side is innocent ipso facto. Jurisprudentially, such an argument is always wrong and always invalid, especially after post-war legal judgments of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals.
In Israel’s no-choice war against Hamas and its allied jihadists, the death and injury of Palestinian noncombatants remain the legal responsibility of “perfidious” Islamist enemies. Because these adversaries place terrorists in protected places like schools, hospitals and mosques, these places are no longer off-limits to defensive military actions by Israel. For the Jewish state, the enemy’s use of “human shields” is always exculpatory for any needed exertions of military force. In law, the applicable principle is called “military necessity.”
Though Israel’s bombardments of Gaza has led to Palestinian casualties, the legal responsibility for these harms lies with the Jewish state’s “perfidious” jihadi foes. While Israel-inflicted Palestinian casualties are unwanted, inadvertent and unintentional, the civilian deaths and injuries in Israel are the result of intentionally indiscriminate Palestinian terror. In legal terms, only the Palestinian side has “criminal intent” or mens rea; There is a consequential difference between raping and murdering celebrants at a public music festival and the lethal consequences of a beleaguered state’s self-defense operations. In this context, it is worth remembering that the entire State of Israel is less than half the size of Lake Michigan.
Insurgent movements that fail to meet the test of “just means” can never be protected as lawful. Even if relevant law could somehow accept the argument that the terror groups had fulfilled all valid criteria of “national liberation,” these groups would not satisfy the equally important legal expectations of distinction, proportionality and military necessity. Historically, these critical standards of humanitarian international law were applied to insurgent or armed substate organizations by the common Article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and by the two 1977 protocols to these conventions.
Standards of “humanity” remain binding on all combatants by customary and conventional international law, including Article 1 of the Preamble to the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907. This rule, commonly called the “Martens Clause,” makes “all persons” responsible for the “laws of humanity” and associated “dictates of public conscience.” There can be no permissible exceptions to this universal responsibility except in cases where enemy perfidy endangers a state’s unchallengeable right to self-preservation.
Terrorist crimes mandate universal cooperation in both apprehension and punishment. As punishers of “grave breaches” under international law, all states are required to “extradite or prosecute” individual terrorists. Under no circumstances are states or substate actors permitted to treat terrorist “martyrs” as law-backed “freedom fighters.”
Though this imperative is currently most relevant to Israeli operations in Gaza, and in Judea and Samaria, it could soon become relevant in post-Assad Syria, too. As for Washington’s promised sanctions relief for Syria, it will more likely hasten the next generation of jihadi terrorists seeking “power over death” than encourage any plans for Syrian “greatness.”