After a year and a half, many are glad for the progress in negotiations and a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. But recent threats by President Donald Trump (“It’s OVER for you”), rhetoric by hawkish pundits and right-wing think tanks persist with threats of violence and propagate the dangerous myth that strength and force are the only effective tools to deal with terrorism. This is a common refrain even among those that uphold the Christian tradition claiming the man who said to “love your enemies” and “overcome evil with good” as their model and savior.
Popular thinking—supported by visceral emotion and political rhetoric—is that groups like Hamas only capitulate when confronted with overwhelming force. However, peace in response to threat is not just a “Christian” ideal. Decades of research and historical evidence challenge the notion that violence is what works. Let me outline here a sample of dozens of studies indicating violence, threats, and retribution are counter-productive, and to draw attention to the alternatives that do, in fact, work.
Political scientist Audrey Cronin, in her two-century survey of how terrorist groups end, found that negotiation, normalization, and political engagement are far more effective than military force alone. She notes that once groups enter negotiations there is less than a 10 percent chance of failure. A 1994 study by Bryan Brophy-Baermann and John A.C. Conybeare found that Israeli military retaliation had no significant long-term deterrent effect on terrorism. Martha Crenshaw and Gary LaFree found that retaliatory attacks, harsher punishments for captured terrorists, and even UN resolutions have little impact on reducing terrorism and may even lead to a net increase in attacks. And Louise Richardson similarly critiques military methods, arguing that the use of overwhelming force often exacerbates extremism rather than curtailing it. Lastly, Seth Jones and Martin Libicki, in their RAND study, analyzed hundreds of terrorist organizations and found that only 7 percent of terrorist groups were defeated through military force.
On the other side of the battlefield, terrorist groups looking to instigate political or societal change ignore pragmatics as well. Erica Chenowith and Maria Stephan demonstrate, for example, in their study of hundreds of movements that non-violent civil resistance succeed twice more often than violent ones at achieving their aims. Research by Max Abrahms also notes that terrorism is an “inherently unprofitable coercive tactic” and points out the body of evidence that terrorist campaigns shift electorates to the right, creating more and stauncher enemies apt to label them as subhuman zealots.
There are many other studies. Suffice it to say, politicians and rhetors, while generating popular support for their strongman images, are not only being counterproductive, but they’re also dangerously escalating and perpetuating conflict. Audrey Cronin says:
“The basic instinct to fight fire with fire, to meet treacherous force with a devastating counter punch, is as longstanding as the Old Testament and Machiavelli’s The Prince. What a shame that the modern historical record fails to support such a noble impulse… The good news is that terrorism virtually always fails, As long as policymakers are wise enough to avoid ceding power to the treacherous use of force.”
None of this is to suggest that governments should simply ignore terrorism, they have a mandate to protect citizens. But states need to heed the mountain of evidence, act in citizens’ best interests and recognize they’re dealing with fellow humans. Terrorists and those who live under their influence are people who have desires, material needs, families and dreams. The temptation to dehumanize our enemies and label them as animals or insects aids to justify further violence. And, the temptation to label terrorists and their supporters as “crazy” is another disproven and dangerously false stereotype. When we fall into these patterns of retribution, dehumanization, and false-labeling we illustrate more about our own fear and insecurity than anything substantive about the objects of our critique. We are not that different.
There are eerie similarities between extremisms of all types that perpetuate a mad cycle of mutual radicalization. Consider the shared traits of violent extremist elements among Jewish settlers, Islamists, and Christian nationalists. They all support strict/literal textual hermeneutics; male-dominant militancy; apocalypticism and a yearning for the end of days; a clear out-group enemy blamed for the ills of society; intellectual vices such as closed-mindedness, dogmatism and cognitive bias; strong in-group entitativity; a high degree of certainty in holding beliefs (fanaticism); anti-modernist tendencies; skepticism towards science; beards, guns… we could go on. When we compare the right wings of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism we’d find vast similarities. Turns out these groups have much in common and in some strange way need their enemies to define and perpetuate their causes.
Jesus’ words about logs and specks might echo in what extremism researcher J.M. Berger famously said, “If you believe that only ‘the other guys’ can produce extremists and that your own identity group cannot, you may be an extremist yourself.” Recognizing and confronting extremism and terrorism as such, even in our own identity groups is a collective responsibility. Christians need to be reminded and should be encouraged for example that Jesus’ teachings of non-violence, non-retaliation, love of neighbor, and love of enemy have more applicability than just the interpersonal level. The research indicates a saliency to the Christian truths that revenge begets more revenge and those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
The belief that terrorists only respond to strength is not just misleading—it is dangerous. It promotes dehumanization, creates a false decision between violence and capitulation and plays into human fight or flight responses. If we are serious about ending the Gaza conflict, and more broadly, creating a peaceful solution in Israel/Palestine, we must be willing to see the humanity and shared experience of the other, acknowledge and denounce the contributions of “our” own groups and embrace strategies that actually work.
The insistence that only brute force can end terrorism ignores a wealth of evidence indicating otherwise. We are left to conclude that either politicians and their sycophants are completely unaware of the overwhelming evidence or more concerningly, that they may in fact want to perpetuate terrorism and conflict because it bolsters their political appeal and power plays. If the goal is really peace, history suggests ratcheting down the rhetoric, caring for people’s holistic needs, making room for belonging, addressing grievances, political normalization, economic development, and strategic negotiation are far more effective.
