The problem is straightforward. U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for peace is drawn from verifiably false premises.
Even now, in the middle of steadily escalating Hamas violations, those who support the agreement refuse to understand the core motivators of Palestinian terrorism. Naively, they project their own views of Western history on the present-day Middle East. The plan’s supporters have imprisoned themselves within simplistic frameworks of political explanation. Clinging stubbornly to clichés, they steadfastly ignore what is happening before their eyes.
Yet jihadi terrorism is an expression of religious sacrifice. For these criminals, terrorism is always a codified crime; violence against Israel represents fulfillment of obligations that are “sacred.”
For Hamas terrorists, violence and the sacred are one and the same. They are logically inseparable. To overlook or misunderstand this point would doom any so-called “Board of Peace.”
History deserves pride of place. Earlier Israeli policy supported Hamas against Fatah. At that time, Fatah’s policy direction was most directly articulated by Othman Abu Gharbiya, the group’s deputy chief of the national and political guidance bureau, who told Al-Hayat Al-Jadida newspaper: “We must always be prepared to sacrifice our blood, as in the beginning ... and as we will continue to sacrifice. Fatah is a movement of blood sacrifice ... . Our people gave the world a chance, and unless the world takes this opportunity, violence and havoc will come.”
These same primal sentiments quickly came to dominate Hamas, aka the Islamic Resistance Movement.
For Hamas and its jihadi allies, diplomatic settlements are always narrowly tactical or transactional. For these self-described “lovers of death,” there is only one correct path. Regarding Israel, this is a path of “holy war” and “religious sacrifice.”
Speaking to Palestinian security forces in Gaza back in 2001, PLO leader Yasser Arafat pledged, “We will fight for Allah, and we will kill and be killed, and this is a solemn oath ... . Our blood is cheap compared with the cause which has brought us together ... but shortly, we will meet again in heaven ... .”
Central to understanding this rallying call is the duality of sacrifice. The fighters were all told, “We will kill and be killed.”
The message was and remains unambiguous. True victory for the Palestinian people will come when Israelis and Arab “martyrs” suffer force-multiplying death. But while death for “the Jews” will allegedly be final and unheroic, death for the Palestinians will be just a temporary inconvenience on the way to immortality. For all jihadists, not just Hamas, it is both by killing Jews and being killed by Jews that freedom from death can be granted. This is the core meaning of Islamist terrorism against Israel, its “bottom line” rationale, its raison d’être.
In essence, terror is a form of sacred violence oriented toward the “sacrifice” of enemies and martyrs. Quite pleasingly, we may learn from pertinent history, it is through the intentional killing of Jews that a Palestinian embarks upon jihad and can buy himself/ herself free from the ultimate “penalty.”
Even if it is unscientific, Israeli policymakers will need to acknowledge that “eternal life” is no small reward.
There is more. Once Israel has finally understood that terrorism as an activity expresses sacrifice, it will be much better positioned to counter terror crimes. Lacking such understanding, caricatural 20-point peace plans will never accomplish anything of tangible significance. Prima facie, the Trump plan lends itself to failures of insubstantial thought. More purposefully, Palestinian terrorism should be approached, at least in part, as a sacred act of mediation between Arab sacrificers and religious obligation. With such a newly informed approach, Jerusalem could finally begin to fashion its counterterrorist strategy on serious intellectual foundations.
Years ago, Arafat pledged: “The Palestinian people are prepared to sacrifice the last boy and the last girl so that the Palestinian flag will be flown over the walls, the churches and the mosques of Jerusalem.” The then-PLO leader was not speaking of political sacrifice. Rather, by situating personal death in the context of jihad, it was a literal flesh-and-blood sacrifice wherein “the last [Palestinian] boy and girl” could discover immortality.
For Palestinians who regard terrorism as a sacrifice, it is a sacred violence that rewards doubly. Killing the despised Jew while simultaneously killing death for the Islamic faithful, sacrificial terror always reveals the optimal fusion of religion and politics. Such violence fulfills a timeless but generally overlooked function of sacrifice; that is, to quell violence within the community and prevent intra-communal conflicts from erupting or overflowing. Predictably, post-agreement violence against Palestinian “collaborators” by Hamas, including multiple executions, has been seen on major television news programs and is linked to temporary halts of sacrificial terror against Israelis.
What counterterrorism lessons can be learned from all this? To summarize, Hamas jihadi terrorism is a form of religious sacrifice.
This egregious criminality will never cease in response to Israeli “redeployments” commanded by an American president.
It will assuredly not end if a Palestinian state is declared in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. It will end only when the religiously despised Jew has left every inch of “Palestine,” an area which includes the entire State of Israel, or when Israel learns that no neatly delineated 20-point program for peace could outweigh the palpable attractions of “martyrdom” and “power over death.”
