Palestinian terrorism is not about self-determination - opinion

• Published date: 02 April 2024
• Author: LOUIS RENÉ BERES
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Israel must first examine Palestinian violence against the innocent in terms of the wider human need to belong. This compelling need can be expressed harmlessly, as in sports hysteria and rock concerts, or perniciously, as in jihadist terror. Further, the Hamas murders of Israeli noncombatants on October 7, 2023, went far beyond the pernicious. Prima facie, they were conspicuously barbarous and patently inexcusable

What does this candid assessment suggest about the seemingly authentic Palestinian demand for a "two-state solution?" Above all, it reveals a demand that is based upon deliberate misinformation and orchestrated subterfuge. Not only would a Palestinian state fail to inhibit or halt Palestinian terrorism, it would render such grievous wrongdoings increasingly likely and still more injurious.

In explaining these many-sided security matters, analytic thinking and philosophy will deserve pride of place. Long ago, Aristotle understood that "man is a social animal." Typically, the seminal Greek thinker recognized that even "normal" individuals can feel empty and insignificant apart from tangible membership in the "mass."

Aristotle's reasoning endures. Sometimes that "mass" is the state. Sometimes it is the tribe. Sometimes the faith (always the "one true faith"). In the case of Palestinian terror violence, it is the aspiring state.

Details aside, whatever the "mass" claims at a particular historical moment, it is an unquenchable craving for belonging that threatens to produce the catastrophic downfall of individual responsibility and correlative triumphs of collective criminality.

In jihadist-centered parts of the Middle East – and this includes places that harbor the Shiite Hezbollah as well as the Sunni Hamas/Fatah/Islamic Jihad – belonging is generally determinative. Unless millions can finally temper the all-consuming psychological desire to belong, all military, legal, and political schemes to control virulent terrorism will fail.

Why do people become jihadists?

TO MORE genuinely understand what lies behind Palestinian terrorism against Israel, science-based analysts must first learn to look more deeply behind the news to explain jihadist fusions of susceptible individuals into murder-centered terror gangs. In the jihadist Middle East, neither terrorism nor war could plausibly take place in the absence of such steeply corrosive identifications.

In science, relevant concepts were already elucidated by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Whenever...