How to kill an idea

Israel can take advantage of the window of opportunity that Nasrallah’s death opened to end Islamic Imperialism

Over the past year we’ve heard repeatedly that, while it is possible to kill Hamas’s or Hezbollah’s leadership, it is impossible to kill an idea. We were told that while Israel should do its best to defend against threats (which includes preemptively destroying offensive infrastructure), there is little to nothing we can do about the ideas that drive the Sunni (Qutbist) and Shiite (Khomeinist) versions of Islamic Imperialism. That the best we can do is draw our swords and wait.

This defeatist attitude not only leads to the pessimism of militarism, it is also simply untrue. There is no way to have victory if the enemy continually reforms and regroups. Countless ideas have been killed over the course of human history, dozens of political movements squashed in recent memory alone. Even if embers continue to burn in odd pockets, the animating spirit of ideas including fascism, Leninist communism, and Klanist white supremacism, to name a few, have been defeated.

This is how it’s done:

1. 1. The idea’s champions need to be either silenced or defeated
   2. The idea’s adherents need to be starved of resources
   3. The idea’s recruits need to be targeted with a more enticing alternative

For example, in the 1930s, fascism as an idea was on the march. It used the new social media channel of the time – radio – to ride a wave of populism to capture the mechanisms of state. It then recruited the economic engines of Europe and developed for itself a solid foundation for continued growth. It used its success to convince those on the fence that they would be better off wearing the red armband than waiving the flag of liberal republics. Despite remaining a minority party as it rose, Nazism terrorized the opposition through shows of brute force to silence opponents.

There are still armband-wearing Nazis today, but they keep to the shadows because they are unwelcome in the limelight. This is not only because Adolf Hitler and his band of miscreants and propagandists are dead. It is because the enemies of Nazism worldwide banned the movement and took industrial capabilities out of the hands of those who fed it. It is also because they understood that to prevent a Nazi resurgence, they needed to offer an alternative.

The vision of a united Europe with Germany at its heart, financed through the Marshall Plan with the support of Germany’s former enemies, was sufficiently enticing to convince former Nazis they were better off with us than against us. It justified a re-writing of the educational curriculum, a retelling of the German story. The result: a continent that knew only war for millennia has experienced nearly a century of peace.

Importantly, it isn’t enough to kill the leaders and destroy a movement’s economic base to end its influence. The aftermath of the first World War provides a good example, where defeat on the battlefield and economic collapse led to the mutation of Germany’s imperial ambitions into Nazism. Similarly, despite the West routing the Soviet Union on battlefields and overwhelming its economy, the decision to leave Russia out of Western Clubs opened the door to a former KGB agent to seek Russia’s return to glory while other former Soviet Republics included into the West have flourished.

Without the victor proposing an alternative – one that credibly benefits both sides and provides the second and third-rung leaders of former enemies an opportunity to gain the dignity they desire within a new power structure – we restart the cycle all over again.

Another, more local, example: the attempted elimination of Baathism from Iraq. After America eliminated Baathist leadership and crushed its industrial base, it made no room for former Baathists by name or function, driving them to join with former enemies who offered them a dignified way to make a living. Without a credible alternative, the myriad peoples of Iraq found themselves under the power and influence of their former arch enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran, who were more than happy to pay the bills of reconstruction. The culprit? America’s allergy to nation building, leaving a vacuum that Iran was able to fill with an alternative.

Or even more local: Israel has eliminated the top leadership of both Hamas and Hezbollah multiple times in the past. Yet each time we’ve stopped there, leaving Qatar and Iran to finance their reconstruction while providing no alternative path to their potential recruits to find dignity outside their ranks. If we would like this set of assassinations to break with past patterns, we need to propose an alternative, not only from the floor of the United Nations, but directly to the people who are most likely to fall into the orbit of the Islamic Imperialist movements. An alternative that we can credibly live with, a shared dream they can see themselves part of.

If we intend for Israel to win — if we intend for the world to relegate Islamic Imperialism to the same heap as Nazism and Leninism — we need to promise the people of the region a better future. We need them to join us to kill the idea so many have died for in this past year alone. We need to envision a future in which we are on the same side and then back that up with the resources required. Israel has completed the first two steps, and the Abraham Accord countries plus Saudi Arabia are waiting for us to present the vision to make the third step possible. Now all we need is leadership courageous enough to make that happen.