The Real Reason Israel and Hamas Do Not Want Peace

It is only rational to keep killing each other

When discussing international conflicts, journalists, commentators, and academics tend to hyper-fixate on substantive issues.

Nowhere is this best seen than in the coverage of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and its recent devolution into a full-scale war in the Gaza Strip.

Most of the “explainer” type coverage that the American and British press publish elucidates that the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that the two nations refuse to share the land. Depending on the writer’s preference, the explainer will then conclude that the Israelis and Palestinians should fulfill its commitment to the Oslo Accords, create a bi-national state, or ethnically cleanse each other.

While this type of writing highlights what the Israelis and Palestinians are fighting over, it doesn’t tell general audiences why this frozen conflict heated up. Land disputes are not necessary for war to break out and the existence of international and regional institutions make it so that states have alternative, and more efficient mechanisms to prosecute contentions over land.

The current war between Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls the Gaza strip, and Israel broke out because both sides have maximalist aims for the territory and there are no structural incentives for them to negotiate. In other words, Israel and Hamas have rational reasons to wage war.

From the River to the Sea

The importance of substantive issues in contextualizing a conflict is that they reveal the preferences of belligerents in an international conflict.

In the case of the war between Israel and Hamas, both sides want to control all of the territory from the river Jordan to the Red Sea.

Israel has held control of most of this territory since the Six Day War and has stayed in a perpetual state of conflict with the Palestinians it displaced into what is now known as the West Bank and Gaza.

However, just because both Israel and Hamas want to control all of the territory, war is not guaranteed.

Plenty of territorial disputes have been settled through negotiations without turning into a war such as the Troubles, the Chamizal dispute between the U.S. and Mexico, and claims of sovereignty over Xinjang between China and Pakistan.¹ The reason that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to heat up is because Israel does not have intimate knowledge of militant groups’ capabilities and militant groups need to continually attack Israel in order to survive.

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

The Rationale of Terrorism

There is debate amongst scholars about the efficacy of terrorist attacks like the one Hamas was able to successfully carry out on October 7^th.

When I was a young political science undergraduate, I learned that terrorism was an ineffective strategy in accomplishing long lasting political change. This is because the targeted civilian population rallies around its government rather than pushing it accept the political equilibrium that terrorist groups want. Therefore making it an irrational strategy.

This idea was pushed into the mainstream by Max Abrahams, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston. Examining the actions of 125 terrorist groups, Abrahams was able to find that in all but a few cases, terrorist groups were not able to change the targeted government’s behavior. The problem with this line of argument is that it fails to realize that terrorist groups have other incentives than shifting the political calculus in their favor.

In the context of this current war, Hamas definitely did consider shifting the bargaining range in their favor and failed as Abrahams predicted. Many commentators and politicians believed that Hamas was incentivized to conduct the October 7^th attack to prevent Israel from normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia and exchange prisoners for hostages.

It seems that so far, Hamas will not achieve those goals. But they also had other goals. Terrorists, like states, have more than one reason for engaging in an offensive than the bargaining range.

Scholars of terrorism and political violence have long recognized that militant groups are reliant on the hydra effect.

This means that in order to survive, recruit new members, and ascertain financial support, they must either be able to conduct successful attacks on a target government or force that target government to launch attacks on the territory the terrorist group operates in. Simply put, terrorists gain credibility from their ability to successfully target and provoke a government.

Terrorisms delicate balance

This insight that terrorists need to continually attack a target government in order to survive can best be seen by the history of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. A secular, socialist Palestinian nationalist coalition that operated as a militant group from the mid 1960s until 1994. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the PLO was operating amongst Palestinian refugees in southern Lebanon when the country hosted a large number of Palestinian refugees.²

Lebanon was used by the PLO as a staging ground for terrorist attacks into Israel. These attacks were so wildly successful, that Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and violently jettisoned the PLO to Tunisia where it withered away and lost much of it support from the Palestinian populace because it is much more difficult launching attacks on Israel when you are a thousand miles from it instead of ninety.

The PLOs activities and Israel’s response reveals how the actions of terrorist groups and states are strategic and interdependent. This allows political scientists to use game theory to model how Israel and Hamas will interact with one another and show why both parties are incentivized to commit mass campaigns of violence against one another.

Perpetual Conflict and a Sobering Reality

In an article for Foreign Affairs a couple of years ago, Peter Fevers and Hal Brands proposed that the best strategy for counterterrorism is applying a “goldilocks strategy” that involves the usage of special forces raids in conjunction with drone strikes to target and disrupt terrorist networks in the Middle East.

Furthermore, targeted governments would also send a limited number of troops to train local governments and militias in basic counter terrorism actions (basically policing).

These strategies are congruent with research from Daniel Arce and Todd Sandler that finds that when targeted governments adopt preemptive strategies such as policing and killing terrorists before they can launch attacks, targeted governments are less susceptible to terrorist attacks.

However, this goldilocks strategy is much easier said than done. Israel, in fact had been using a modified version of this strategy since 2006 against Hamas. The Israel’s  Goldilocks strategy involved the IDF targeting and killing Palestinian militants in assassination plots and special forces raids if they crossed into the West Bank.

Meanwhile, if Hamas began to threaten Israeli security from Gaza, they would engage in an air campaign and limited ground incursions to reduce Hamas capabilities as seen in 2006, 2008, 2014, and 2021. This strategy clearly did not prevent Hamas from launching the October 7^th attacks and has failed to reduce its capabilities.

Alternatively, states have the option to overreact and launch a full-scale war against terrorists and the territory they control. This often leads to mass death, destruction, and unspeakable cost to the invading nation, but will be guaranteed in reducing the militant group’s capabilities.

This is best highlighted by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Both of these incursions resulted in the destruction of millions of lives and led to the Taliban and Hezbollah achieving political control over the invaded territories, but the targeted governments were able to successfully destroy Al-Qaeda and the PLOs capabilities.

The idea that state overreaction is more beneficial than the policing/goldilocks strategy can be understood by looking at how terrorist groups act strategically and sometimes attack governments when their support is weak in order to gain more supporters.

An overreaction by the state, while multiplying the hydra effect also has a higher probability of destroying terrorist capabilities and killing their leaders and recruitment pool. In short, dead people cannot adopt radical views.

States still benefit from overreaction even if the terrorist organization is strong and able to inflict high costs on the state. This is because they would still be successful in destroying terrorist capabilities. We can represent this reality with the payoff matrix down below.³

The matrix here highlights the problem with counterterrorism. States do not know if terrorists are attacking from a position of strength, broad support from the potential recruiting base, or weakness, limited support from the potential recruiting base. If states did have the intelligence to determine the position terrorist groups were in, that information would increase the payoffs for policing and make overreacting a non-dominant strategy.

Of course, since states do not have the necessary intelligence to determine what strategy they should pick, in the real world they will choose to overreact more often than not.

Can we prevent states from overreacting ?

For now, it seems that Israel’s choice to overreact and launch a full-scale invasion of Gaza was the correct strategy. The IDF has made spectacular progress in their operation as Hamas fighters have buckled in the face off modern military firepower.

Furthermore, even though Gazans despise Israel, thy aren’t exactly keen on Hamas.

Hamas differs from other terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda in that they actually have to govern and therefore, have to maintain a basic level of public support.

Survey data from the 2023 Arab Barometer shows that on October 6^th, 2023, only 30 percent of Gazans aged 18-29 and about 26 percent of Gazans older than 30 said they had trust that the Hamas government would properly carry out its job. In addition, 70 percent of all Gazans believed that Hamas failed to respond to its local populace’s needs. A majority of Gazans also blamed Hamas for the economic woes that strip has faced since the militant group has come to power.

This polling data, while not perfect, contextualizes Hamas’s weak position and that it will lose much of its strength by the end of the war.

Unfortunately, the choice Israel made has directly caused the deaths of more than 10,000 Palestinians at the time of this writing, most of whom are children between the ages of 10-18.

Gazans are fleeing in droves and may never return cementing a cycle of cleansing these people have endured since 1948. To be clear, for its own security, Israel responded in the most rational way possible. Just because a strategy is rational, does not mean it is morally or factually correct.

True security will only come through changing the incentive structure for Israel and making it so that indiscriminate murder is not seen as a form of justice for the victims of October 7^th.  

Part of this answer relies on using human intelligence in conjunction with electronic surveillance instead of being reliant on electronic surveillance alone. In addition, a truly international peacekeeping force led by the United Nations should be allowed into Gaza and prevent Israel and Hamas from shooting each other.

I am not sure what Israel’s partners like the United States could do. I do know citizens in Western countries must fight for the rights and freedom of people in Palestine and empathetically share the perspective of Gazans living under a brutal regime that was historically propped up by Israel. By putting pressure on elected officials in our country to criticize the actions of our ally, we can maybe help change its behavior and recognize that Palestinians and Israelis are equals and ought to both have the right to self-determination.

1. A war not breaking out as a result of territorial dispute does not mean that there was an absence of violence. Rather, the belligerents were able to recognize that wide scale military operations would be more costly than what the territory was worth.

2. Many of these refugees were later ethnically cleansed by Lebanese Christian militias with support from Israel, but that is a topic for another day.

3. Important to note that the payoffs in the matrix are arbitrary and meant to illustrate a point