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Hero Moshe Plesser, immediately after shooting the terrorist

Today’s terrorist attack in Jerusalem in which an “Israeli Arab” driving a huge articulated loader (not a bulldozer) killed three people and injured tens more is nothing special, except for the murder weapon. But there was lots of human drama, like the mother throwing her baby out of a car window to safety before the massive bucket came down and crushed the life out of her, or the heroes that jumped up on the machine and struggled with the driver, the off-duty soldier Moshe Plesser finally shooting the terrorist to death as he yelled “Allahu Akhbar!”

For a good real-time account of the story, including video links, see IsraellyCool here.

Press reactions were the usual, with speculation about the ‘motives’ of the Arab construction worker, Husam Taysir Dwayat. Excuse me, what motivates an Arab to kill as many arbitrary Jews as he can and shout “Allahu Akhbar”, a concern for  peace, justice, and human rights?

His family and friends acted surprised. Husam was known as a drug dealer, but not a ‘political’ person, they said. Maybe he had been taunted by Jewish teenagers and just ‘lost it’, they suggested.

But Palestinians understood and cheered. Elder of Ziyon presents some Palestinian reactions to news reports. It was a big hit with them.

The Hebrew University bomber, the Merkaz haRav murderer, and now this one, all lived and worked in the Jerusalem area and had Israeli identity cards. Does this mean that there’s no future to the idea of Israeli Jews and Arabs living together peacefully, if not in friendship?

Unfortunately, that is probably exactly what it means. And the consequences of this will be terrible for Jewish and Arab Israelis. The fault lies with the Arab leadership and elites who have insisted for 60 years — no, for almost 100 years — that there must be no peace.

It lies with the Arab newspapers, TV networks, websites, religious establishment, political systems, educational systems, writers and intellectuals, Yasser Arafat, Fatah, Hamas, Azmi Bishara, the Balad party, Hosni Mubarak, Hafez and Bashar Assad, Hassan Nasrallah, Mohammed Bakri, Raed Salah, Mahmoud Abbas, the House of Saud, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, and I could go on, and on, and on if my fingers weren’t tired.

Every day there is one overwhelming message broadcast to every Palestinian and Israeli Arab from every direction: the Jews took your land, they are responsible for all of your problems, they are your deadly enemy, the highest praise is due to martyrs in the fight against them, they are destroying the al-Aqsa mosque, they are the sons of apes and pigs, they have damaged your honor, etc.

Is it any wonder that Arabs who are not engaged in organized professional terrorism often involve themselves in amateur terrorism, or that “non-political” types like Husam Taysir Dwayat often explode into ‘impulse terrorism’, the so-called “sudden jihad syndrome”?

But in fact these are distinctions without a difference. The idea of a Jewish state with a peaceful Arab minority isn’t going to fly any more.

This is one of those facts whose consequences are so bad that everyone insists that it’s not true. But it is true, and it’s probably too late to reverse the trend, which in any event is accelerating, not slowing down. This horse is already out of the barn, thanks to the abovementioned list of disseminators of hatred, and all the efforts of the “pro-peace” people are not going to put it back in.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs, Husam Taysir Dwayat, terrorism, Jerusalem

Many of the wars of the 21st century will be asymmetric conflicts. There are multiple definitions of this term, so I won’t try to define it in great detail. Suffice to say that asymmetric warfare is often practiced in order to nullify the advantage of a belligerent that is much stronger than another.

Let’s look at the Arab-Persian aggression against Israel in particular and analyze the form taken by one asymmetric conflict.

One feature of it –  at least in its present stage – is that it is a proxy conflict. Israel is not fighting Iran, Saudi Arabia, or even Syria. Her direct antagonists are Hezbollah and Hamas. This permits the real enemy, in this case primarily Iran, to deny any connection to atrocities committed by its proxies, and to avoid international sanction while still pursuing an aggressive course. Proxy warfare is a common asymmetric technique; the Vietnamese war comes to mind in which the US fought soviet-backed Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces, or the Soviet-Afghan conflict in which US-backed Mujahideen returned the favor.

Another feature is that it is primarily a low-intensity conflict. Much of the time fighting is confined to skirmishes between small units or terrorist attacks against the civilian population. The aggressor attempts to calibrate the damage done by his attacks so that the conflict will remain at a low enough level that its victim will not be able to justify using its superior forces. From time to time, for short periods, it may erupt into more conventional conflict. But the aggressor will try to keep these periods short to reduce the amount of damage that he will sustain from his more powerful adversary.

Finally, it is important to realize the degree to which this stage of the war is primarily a propaganda battle. The goals for the aggressors are not the traditional ones of destroying armies and conquering territory. The main goal is to change attitudes and opinions among various groups of people in order to manage the outcomes of the more intense flare-ups and to lay the groundwork for a successful conventional assault, when the time comes. There are several main groups that are targeted:

1)    The aggressor’s own population. Successful low-intensity warfare, combined with propaganda that vilifies the enemy, is an excellent tool to recruit personnel and funds for the cause.

2)    The world in general. Although the aggressors may not have the power to force the victim to give up territory directly, it may be possible to manipulate the major powers who do have the ability to change fundamental geopolitical realities. The government of South Africa, for example, which was much more powerful militarily than the ANC, was forced to cede control by international pressure. The Second Lebanon War, a conventional flare-up in the midst of low-intensity struggle between Israel and Hezbollah, ultimately resulted in a better strategic position for Hezbollah –  despite the fact that Israel had the military advantage –  because of Hezbollah’s management of world opinion.

3)    The victim’s population. The frustration of trying to fight a low-intensity conflict is highly damaging to the morale of a conventional army. The combination of terrorism with propaganda is also effective in causing a civilian population to doubt the rightness of its own nation’s cause, or in extreme cases to support the aggressor.

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