What Yuval Noah Harari got wrong about terror

In 2017, Yuval Noah Harari wrote about terror as theater, as a mechanism to make your opponent act. He compares terrorists to a fly that wants to destroy a china shop. The fly cannot destroy the shop itself, but if it provokes a bull, making it overreact, the bull can destroy the porcelain shop with its massive weight and anger. The bull represents the will of the people in states like Israel or the USA, with their massive armies and capacity for destruction. What we should do in the face of terror, therefore, is to act measured and calmly, trying to understand that we are dealing with a fly, not a bull.

I think of this when the Houthis from Yemen launch drones and ballistic missiles at Israel in the middle of the night, around two or four o’clock. This ensures maximum disruption for the largest number of citizens. They rarely manage to kill anyone, I can only remember one person killed in Tel Aviv. If they are lucky, perhaps an elderly woman breaks her hip on the way to the shelter. The logic of terror is so absurd that this might be the point of attacking at night — someone falling down the stairs might as sure a sign of victory, of God’s greatness, as when someone dies in an explosion.

If it weren’t so tragic, it would be comical. There are those who have indeed made comedy out of terror. The best film in this genre is Four Lions (2010) by Christopher Morris. He wrote it after reading the trial transcripts of the surviving terrorists who planned the 7/7 bombings in London’s underground and noticing how absurdly comical their thinking was. One of the film’s golden nuggets occurs when one of the group accidentally blows himself up, while testing the bombs in a field, and, in the process, blows up a sheep. One of the others watching tries to justify this by reasoning that the dead sheep “disrupts the food supply.”

Is there another way to look at the over 200 ballistic missiles and many more drones launched at Israel from Yemen? Most of which, at best, result in some sprained wrists on the way to the basement? This is by the same people, the Houthis, that have a starving population on their hands and have legalized slavery in the area they control, yet they magically find hundreds of millions of dollars in order to sprain some wrists around 2,200 kilometers (some 1,375 miles) away.

However, the very fact that terror seems so pointless, so symbolic, so theatrical, and even comical, can lead us to underestimate and misunderstand the kind of opponent we are dealing with. That is why I think Harari’s metaphor feels outdated. It is very much influenced by the old debate around the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, to invade or not to invade. By 2017, most people thought this had been a bad idea, Harari was creating a metaphor for how most people thought about a specific policy at a specific time. But the whole idea places the Western world at the center of the world. All focus is on the bull, none on the fly.

The only reason Harari uses the fly in the metaphor is because it has less power, fewer weapons, and less money than the bull. But if they acquire weapons and more power, they can no longer be dismissed as flies. Groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis (and ISIS before they were defeated) are not flies because they have power over so many lives. They all controlled a significant portion of their respective countries, with armies and educational systems at their disposal. The difference between the wannabe Paki-Rambos of Four Lions and Hamas when they controlled Gaza is not any deep ideological chasm, but a difference in power. Indeed, the idea of spending billions of dollars on rockets and hundreds of kilometers of tunnels to start a war you cannot win, instead of investing in your impoverished population, is as absurd as a dead sheep somehow “disrupting the food supply.”

Yet the problem with the metaphor is not just about the fly but also the ultimate goal. The end goal is not a shattered china shop; that’s more of a byproduct. None of these groups wants war for war’s sake, even if many young men who follow them revel in chaos and war. What they actually want is the power to reshape their society according to their ideals. Terror is simply the way they would like to achieve it. The goal is to become an even bigger bull and own the china shop, even though bulls don’t own china shops, and the metaphor is dead as a doornail.

Dismissing the jihadi threat seems as foolish as when Amos Oz’s relative from Russia, in the 1970s, tried to dismiss Communists as small-time gangsters as they once had been in his town in Russia. Oz had to remind him that these small-time gangsters now had nuclear weapons. Harari made the same mistake. That all the societies these groups control become miserable hell-holes should not distract us from the fact that this is what these movements want. Just because ideas don’t lead to the kind of society that we in the West think everyone should aspire to, with freedom and democracy, doesn’t mean these alternative ideas can’t inspire millions of people.

In the real world, Bin Laden wasn’t sitting in his cave hoping for some jolly good wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when he planned 9/11. Hamas never thought the point of all their terror was to destroy the Israeli peace movement and create more chaos in the Palestinian territories. These were the consequences of their actions, not the goal. The goal of 9/11 was to make Americans think the Middle East wasn’t worth it anymore, to withdraw troops and support from regimes like Saudi Arabia, and, most importantly, to withdraw American support for Israel. The goal of Hamas is to defeat Israel and liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque to become the spearhead of Islamic resistance against the Western world.

For both movements, and for others like the leadership of Iran, crushing the Jewish state is a key part of Islam’s resurgence — to become a religion that can expand and conquer more land again for theological reasons, just like in the time of the four rightly guided caliphs. The fact that both movements misunderstand the West and misunderstand Israel, just as we in the West misunderstand them, is yet another ironic twist. No, Israel is not a colonial implant that can be stamped out like the French in Algeria. No, the USA cannot just “leave the Middle East” and abandon its alliances without serious global consequences and without other less benevolent global powers like China filling the void.

The problem we are grappling with is those who believe in Palestine, from the river to the sea, as an Islamic Waqf that must therefore be liberated from Jewish control, those who believe the world is divided into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, those who truly believe in paradise and that one reaches it by dying in combat against those who disagree with them.

We cannot chose whether to be at war with them; they are at war with us. Whether we want to be at war or not is not relevant.