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When trying to wipe out terrorists, be careful not to create more. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-21  

In the time since I wrote my diary last week where I expressed anti-war sentiments, I’ve returned to my normal stance of observer. Perhaps, as it was suggested in the comments attached to nancyjones’ diary Tuesday, people have “fatigue” when it comes to the conflict between the state of Israel and Palestinians.

Yet the diaries that have made it into the trending column seem to be pro-war or, at the least, pro-invasion. I don’t know how else to describe this. And it’s very surreal, being on a progressive site where historically people have been anti-colonialism and anti-war.

I happened to be on Daily Kos when the news of the Al-Alhy hospital attack broke here.

The thing about that story was that it had the potential to swing sympathy toward the Palestinians to where people would see them as unprotected victims. Five hundred people killed in an attack where the people there, if not waiting for actual medical treatment, were huddled because they had been forced out of their homes and had been assured that they could gather at the hospital for emergency shelter. Everyone needs shelter.

The timeline has had to be reconstructed, and it’s still being repaired. But it was impressive how quickly the state of Israel swung into motion to tamp down the idea that it was their actions that caused all of those deaths at one blow. How is it that they moved so swiftly?

As I understand it, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s social media adviser, Hananya Naftali, initially claimed that the state of Israel was responsible for the attack. However, this tweet was removed within the first hour of being posted. Then the state of Israel began to lay blame elsewhere, that is, with the Islamic Jihad.

This is what you call a shifting story.

The state of Israel also put out several segments of footage so as to disperse blame to other actors. Yet, as the timeline has been reconstructed by third parties, it appears that the state of Israel used images that did not correspond to the moment of impact, so they were forced to remove those images.

They said they had voice recordings of two people who had privately discussed the bombing and had taken responsibility for the carnage. Yet an examination of these recordings has determined that the aspects of speech of the two people do not match what normally would be found in the region. Independent Arab journalists told Channel 4 the recordings were fabricated, due to “language, accent, dialect, syntax, and tone.”

Meanwhile, doctors at the hospital stated that they had received warning from Israel that the hospital might be bombed—first a phone call (which Israel said went unanswered—they weren’t able to reach anyone), and then warning bombs. The doctors ruefully noted that nowhere else in the world but Gaza would a warning about bombs be given via bomb.

It so happened that, between the posting of my previous diary (last Saturday) and the catastrophe at the hospital, I had begun investing time getting a better idea of the backstory of how we got here in the first place. There’s a lot of history, and I can claim to have only started my journey of understanding. Yet, thinking about this rapid deflection by the state of Israel and their production of what might be called in a different context an orgy of evidence, I recalled something that the scholar Norman Finkelstein said about the Israeli / Palestinian conflict. He said the one thing that Israel couldn’t afford to be seen as doing was targeting civilians.

The rapid distribution of alternate images and persons to blame was, as I see it, an extraordinary effort to stanch the deep damage that the initial news reports were doing to the perception of Israel as a state actor. This was done because, if true, if Israel had performed an attack on a hospital in such a situation where so many were using the place as a refuge from Israel’s own militaristic campaigns, it would destroy the idea of any righteousness in their cause.

I cannot, from here, say one way or the other whether the state of Israel committed that strike against the hospital. I can say that statements by the state of Israel have been entirely inconsistent; and the speed by which this apparent wealth of evidence has been produced is in itself rather astonishing.

I can say that the dispute as to who the culprits are and whether the footage and other evidence produced is reliable has taken us to a place where we argue over these details and forget the five hundred people who lost their lives.

People talk about the fog of war, but here it seems we have a fog machine.

Finkelstein sat for an hour-long interview with Chris Hedges. In it, he said that the terrorist attacks had shaken him and given him great pause. He went, from all accounts, through a period of soul-searching. But, he said, that while he does not condone what Hamas did on October 7th, he can only see what it might mean to grow up in a concentration camp. (As both of his parents were in Nazi concentration camps, I’m sure Finkelstein chose his words carefully.)

For those who’d grown up in that environment, he said, he could understand if that had led to a form of madness.

While I think the sentiment was a bit strong, it brought to mind something I had just come across in a completely unrelated avenue of research. I’d read about a study from 1938, an animal study, where the scientists had found that by giving the subjects an insoluble problem, the subjects would devolve into convulsions and neurosis.

The animals in the study (rats in this case) were trained to associate a food reward with one symbol (a card with a white marking) and punishment with another (a card with a black marking). I’ll save my commentary about inherent color bias for another time, but what is important to know about this set-up is that the cards were each on a platform; the reward platform had the food behind the white-symbol card, whereas the punishment card led to the animal receiving a “bump on the nose” as well as being dumped several feet below into a net. “Under these conditions, animals soon learn always to choose the reward card and to avoid the punishment card,” the author, Norman Maier, stated in his report.

After the discrimination is well learned the situation is changed so that only one of the cards is presented (Fig. 4). If this card happens to be the punishment card, the animal, as may be expected, refuses to jump. In order to cause the animal to jump to the punishment card, it is necessary to drive him. This is done by using a jet of air and directing it on the rat. When released, the air makes a hissing noise and is irritating to the rat; consequently the resistance to jumping is broken. The condition of driving the rat to make a response to a card it has been trained to avoid was considered a conflict between doing and not doing, and it was the condition under which the violent seizures most frequently were produced. (Maier, “ Experimentally Induced Abnormal Behavior,” p. 211, paragraph spacing and emphasis added)

Posing the question as to whether it was the conflict that caused this behavior and not merely the sound, Maier noted that another researcher had found that animals who are irritated by a sound source that is attached to the body still enact escape behaviors and do not devolve into seizures.

Certain sounds are irritants and arouse generalized escape behavior. However, when the animal is confined it is driven to escape, but at the same time its escape is blocked. Thus the animal is trapped in a situation which demands responses and yet inhibits those responses. It has been shown by Dr. Marcuse, of Cornell University, that seizures do not occur when the sound source is fastened to the animal. Under these conditions the escape behavior is permitted even though escape is not accomplished. [...] Since the expression of escape behavior prevents seizures, one is led to conclude that behavior must be blocked while irritants are applied. (p. 212)

The people of Gaza, who I must stress are people and not laboratory animals, are being herded from their homes in various places in the Gaza strip to the south. They are being driven relentlessly through strafing and other forms of compulsion by the Israeli military. The sound of drones overhead are a constant. The people who had huddled at the hospital were confronted with a basic conflict, one in which they had to solve a basic conflict that was insoluble. They were told to flee but were attacked while complying with that order.

The mere fact that conflict and unresolved tensions seem to be essential for producing seizures makes the seizure appear to be a form of neurosis rather than the epileptic attack of a defective organism. Perhaps Dr. Goldstein's classification, "catastrophic reaction," is more adequate than neurosis, since this term implies a form of disorganized behavior which occurs when the environment places demands on the organism that it is incapable of handling. Either "neurosis" or "catastrophic reaction," however, places the emphasis on the abnormality as being one that is situation induced rather than the response of an injured or defective organism. (p. 212, paragraph spacing and emphases added)

This, too, called to mind another paper that I had come across long before the events of this month, a paper that dealt with the phenomenon of catastrophizing. It spoke to the physiological reactions that occur when a person is seized with panic: they shut down and become near-automatons. As I noted in a previous diary,

Panic does strange things to people. There are accounts of people lying down at their captor’s feet, awaiting the inevitable blade through their throats. In fact, according to a centuries-old account of Mohammed Nessawi, one man helpfully remained stationary on the ground while his soon-to-be murderer retrieved a sword with which to dispatch him. Someone told me that a Tatar rode alone into a village with many people, without a person daring to defend himself. I heard also that one Tatar, wishing to kill a prisoner of his and finding himself without a weapon, ordered his captive to lie down. He went to look for a sword, with which he killed the unfortunate, who had not moved.

Returning to the lab study, Maier went on to describe an alteration of the training, where the reward and punishment were not consistent.

When a rat is placed in a card-discrimination problem situation in which reward and punishment are applied in a random order, the animal is confronted with an insoluble problem. This fact is soon recognized by the animal, and it expresses its recognition of such a difficult problem by refusing to choose between cards. This refusal is so intense that hunger is not sufficient to cause the animal to take a 50-50 chance on happening to strike the reward card. In order to overcome this resistance, the animal is driven with a blast of air, as described earlier. Occasionally, seizures are produced in this situation, but more commonly the animal jumps at one of the cards, and soon its choices follow a consistent pattern. Usually the rat chooses a card on a position basis, i.e., it chooses the card on the right (or left) side, regardless of which of the cards it is. Once the rat ceases trying out various possibilities and makes its choice on a position basis, this way of choosing becomes the response to the insoluble problem, and the animal never deviates from this procedure once it is established. (p. 213, paragraph spacing added)

This solution to an insoluble problem seems quite clever, considering the limitations and parameters of the situation. The problem is that the subject cannot break out of this pattern once established, no matter what future conditions end up being. Maier described an instance where food was openly available on one side of the platform but where the other side to the right, where the subject had built this location fixation, held the punishment card. He said the animal “sniffed longingly at the food” before taking the “foolish” decision to jump to the right.

Considering this result, Maier concluded that “frustration makes behavior rigid and unchangeable,” remarking that other animals who were trained under conditions of motivation did not exhibit this behavior. (That is, unless they were punished too severely. Then they too began to make decisions out of frustration.)

Why am I going so deep into the results of this experiment? These laboratory conditions replicate in miniature situations that confront human beings, both historically and in terms of what is going on right now. Finkelstein said that, to resolve his moral quandary in the wake of the terror attacks by Hamas, he had to go back to the words of abolitionists during the time of slavery in the United States. He brought up Nat Turner’s rebellion as well as that of John Brown; and he noted that the abolitionists were careful to condemn the conditions that led to the revolts. Those conditions were what put those who were in captivity into an unwinnable situation.

Language is inadequate in these situations, because almost no matter how these concepts are phrased, it will sound as though this perspective-taking is giving a pass to terrorism. From my own perspective, as someone who has spent quite a bit of study trying to understand extremism, it’s more from a perspective of trying to comprehend why these things happen, what drives people to take these extreme and destructive actions.

One resource that I found extraordinarily insightful was a lecture by Dr. Eric Zillmer, “The Psychology of Terrorists.” About an hour long, it goes into detail about the nature of terrorist groups, how the individuals in them relate to each other, and how group terrorism can be distinguished from lone wolf terrorism. Motivations differ due to the nature of the bonds (or lack of bonds, depending). Individuals in extreme groups are likely to have strong bonds to those in the group, as they tend toward establishing with the others a form of camaraderie. The group becomes a type of second family.

“So this sense of belonging provides a primitive sense of attachment. I think it’s at the core of many terrorist groups. It’s a very seductive psychological force to bring people in. Everybody wants to belong to something.” (~32:45)

This is important to recognize, because as Finkelstein and others noted, the youth in Gaza have few outlets open to them. Unemployment is astronomical, and one cannot get married without employment or resources.

So, what option is left to these youths, especially those who have grown up only knowing the extreme captivity in which they’ve been locked since birth? They can’t enter into marriage, which otherwise forges a bond with the larger community. Instead, the avenues open to them include joining a religious sect or entering into the military. The military in Gaza is aligned with Hamas.

Another resource I found quite eye-opening was that of a panel that discussed the three motivators behind extremism, what they called the three Ns: Needs, Narratives, and Networks. Professor of Psychology Arie Krugalanski, one of the panelists, noted that one need that can be instilled is “the human quest for significance and mattering.” He defined this as “to be somebody; to have dignity; to be respected.”

“Take, for example, vengeance. Vengeance comes in response to perceived humiliation, perceived injustice, perceived disempowerment, perceived exclusion; and, in avenging that humiliation, one asserts one’s significance. ‘I am not to be trifled with. I can be important. I can hurt you, I can be powerful.’” (~9:29)

The quest for significance must be activated, Krugalanski said.

He went on to explain that significance is to be attained “in the cultural narrative—it tells you what you need to do in order to be significant.”

“And to be significant, you have to demonstrate, maybe through sacrifice of your life, of your other interests, sacrifice your commitment to the value, the group value. It could be courage, it could be honor, it could be honesty, it could be materialism, to be rich. But it’s the group values to which you demonstrate commitment that lends you significance. “So significance trickles down from the value that the group upholds and it’s spelled out in the narrative to your actions in service of that value.” (~14:30) “In the case of a violence-justifying narrative, that justifies and promotes violence, the narrative links violence as a means of gaining significance.” (~15:19)

Lastly, he linked these in terms of networks:

“The networks have two cardinal functions: “First, they validate the narrative.

“Second, they dispense rewards to those who abide by the dictates of the narrative.”

The group, Krugalanski informed the audience, has epistemic authority: “Our ingroup defines for us what is real.” This explains why the terrorist group is able to influence its members so deeply: it crystallizes their form of reality and, as it is the source of that reality, causes them to continue to seek renewal of that narrative from that very source. It is a honeypot.

Those who are frustrated may funnel themselves into groups where they find meaning. This is on the one hand understandable and on the other heartbreaking. Growing up in Gaza is kind of a trap, in more ways than one.

None of this excuses homicidal actions, and I want to make that clear. Being in one of these groups, however, makes it more likely that an individual will commit such acts, because they’re deriving meaning from the group, and the group has determined that this type of quest for significance is the most meaningful thing. They receive social rewards from the group, which replaces the dignity that they may have gotten from, say, steady employment or another avenue of fulfillment that we in the West take for granted.

Frustration is what drove those lab rats to convulsion and neurosis. Maier took his results and applied them to the human dimension:

The abnormal fixation is akin to rigid responses found in human beings. [...] The studies of abnormal behavior in the rat lead to a new theory of frustration. They demonstrate that behavior elicited during a state of frustration has certain unique properties, and that these properties make frustration-induced behavior different in kind from that produced in a motivated state. This basic separation between motivated and frustrated behavior is in contrast to the view which postulates that all behavior has a motive. When it is assumed that all behavior is motivated, it follows that any behavior expressed is a means to some end. [...] If, on the other hand, we recognize that there are two different kinds of behavior, then it follows that there may be two kinds of [behavior], one that is motivated and solves the problem of gratifying needs, and one that is frustration-instigated and compulsive in nature. The latter type of behavior solves no problem and has no goal to direct it. [...] Once we accept the belief that behavior produced under frustration follows different principles from behavior motivated by goals, we can reorganize our knowledge of the subject of frustration. For example, it is known that destructive (aggressive or hateful) behavior is associated with frustration and that a frustrated person attacks his enemy. This behavior may appear to be problem solving in nature, but difficulty is encountered in explaining why people who are frustrated so often strike out at innocent bystanders. One can see how the destruction of one's enemies would achieve objectives, but the fact is that frustrated persons do not always express their hates in such a manner as to solve problems. Instead, they create more problems by their hateful behavior. (Maier, pp. 214-215, paragraph spacing and emphases added)

It is clear that Hamas created more problems by their egregious and terrible strike against innocent people on October 7.

Is it fair or permissible to draw a line from animal behavior to human motivation? That can be debated, but what does seem to stand is that if we take the premise to be true, then we should be able to see that certain behaviors are not taken specifically to gain something. Violence may not always be instrumental. Once we accept that, we have to look for why things are frustrating, and we must attempt to reduce the source of that frustration.

Now, it’s important to separate ordinary Palestinians from those who have joined Hamas or other militant group. These populations may have overlap, but they are not equivalent. While keeping that in mind, it’s important to see also that there is a relationship here: those who grow up in such deprived and repressive conditions are not destined to become extremists or terrorists, but the door is opened.

Given conditions that drive frustration and the limited number of avenues to find self-fulfillment, it’s nearly a foregone conclusion that the type of strikes that the state of Israel is planning to unleash on Gaza will convert more ordinary people into the terrorists the state wishes to eliminate. This is a never-ending cycle.

Yet the state of Israel plans to go forward, despite the international outcry over the devastation at Al-Alhy Hospital and the tremendous death toll there. The fog of war has created an emotional smokescreen, rendering those five hundred deaths as negligible, although the trauma has been visited upon those who were seeking shelter as well as those who sympathize with their pain and loss. I cannot say who was responsible for the devastation, but at least one side benefits from the confusion over the narrative. As Dr. Ajit Maan, military consultant, said about narrative warfare (~4:25),

[END]
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