Unintended consequences and October 7

The theory of unintended consequences applies to how the Arab and Islamic world and Arab diaspora respond to the Jewish community and Israel and may suggest that a rethinking of the Arab relationship with Israel and Jews needs to happen. The Arab and Islamic world needs to confront the cost to Arab society of its unrelenting pursuit of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatred. The pursuit of unrelenting hatred of Jews and their only country by Iran, Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah is what led to the attack on Israel on October 7.

The 20th-century American sociologist Robert K. Merton popularized the concept of unintended consequences in his work, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” (1936). Merton tried to apply a “systematic analysis to the problem of unintended consequences of deliberate acts intended to cause social change”. Merton followed in the footsteps of other social scientists and economists such as John Locke, Adam Smith, Marx and Engles, Friedrich Hayek, and Carl Menger, in what I like to call the “oops factor.”

For more than one hundred years Arab, Turkish, Syrian, and Iranian governments, Islamic militants including the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaida, ISIS, and various Shi’ite militias, and Iranian proxies as well as the Palestinian Arabs have waged war against both Israel and the Jewish people. That war has had multiple forms from armed conflict with full armies to guerilla attacks to lonewolf bombings, stabbings, car-ramming, and kidnapping.

This warfare also has asymmetric aspects including a propaganda war, an academic war, economic and intellectual boycotts, a war using the UN and various so-called humanitarian organizations and aid organizations, and a media war.

This war has political dimensions as well with the Palestinian Arab diaspora flexing its muscles in the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere and Iranian, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Qatari, and Turkish hackers and government-supported media organizations such as Al Jazira pursuing both anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda, spreading conspiracy theories and blaming every ill confronting the Arab and Islamic world on the Jews.

Nurturing hate

The Arab world population as of 2023 is over 473 million people representing 5.9% of the world population in twenty-two nations that make up the Arab League. About twenty million Arabs live abroad. The worldwide Jewish population in 2024 is just around sixteen million with 7.6 million Jews in Israel out of a population of just over ten million. Jews make up around 0.2% of the world’s population. These are important statistics.

Why does such a small worldwide Jewish population get so much attention? Modern propaganda theory and practice pioneered by both the Nazis and the USSR understood that creating an enemy, especially an enemy who is weak or incapable of fighting back, is good for distracting the public away from what your real intentions are. Iran, the Islamic Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaida, and ISIS, have all portrayed Jews and Israel as weak, corrupt, evil, and the root of all the bad that has befallen the Arab and Islamic world. They have nurtured their hatred of Jews and made it an integral part of their religion, culture, history, and policy. They have squandered billions of dollars and thousands of lives pursuing their lovingly cultivated hatred. The leadership of the Arab world in particular but other non-Arab Islamic states as well have used this singular hatred of Israel and the Jews to distract their populations from their own kleptocratic, greed and avarice.

This hundred-year hate campaign exemplifies the first and primary unintended consequence. The billions of dollars of Arab wealth expended on attacking Israel, the thousands of lives lost in unwarranted wars and terrorism against Israel, and the worldwide Jewish community had the unintended consequence of forcing generations of Palestinian Arabs to remain in refugee camps with nowhere else to go, impoverishing much of the Arab world, hindering Arab nations’ ability to provide for their citizens.

Ironically, it also helped unify Israel and forced it to become self-reliant, innovative and, above all, a military, intellectual, and technological powerhouse rivaling many larger first-world nations. All of this has made Israel and the Jews one of the only completely successful indigenous people (except for the Armenians) to rebuild their national home, language, and culture after centuries of Roman, Christian Byzantine, Arab Muslim, and Ottoman Turkish Muslim occupation and colonization.

What are the unintended consequences of the Arab world’s latest attempt to irradicate Israel and foment anti-Jewish hate across the globe? On October 7th, 2023, when Hamas launched its attack on Israel killing 1,200 civilians, raping, mutilating, burning — murdering children, infants, and the elderly, and taking hostages, Hamas believed that it was taking advantage of a weakened Israel and Netanyahu. They thought that they would take a bit of land and a large number of hostages and get the release of thousands of their terrorist friends from Israeli prisons. They also believed that their erstwhile friends and partners would join them in their great quest to deliver a severe blow to the Jewish enemy. They believed that Israeli Arabs would rise to join them and that their minions in the West Bank would rise up and overthrow the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority. They believed that Hezbollah, their Shi’a Lebanese partner would launch a similar attack in northern Israel and that their master, Iran would join them on the battlefield. Other than Hezbollah’s shelling of northern Israel starting October 8, none of those things happened.

The unintended consequence of Hamas’s actions was the opposite of their aim. Israelis unified immediately and put aside their differences temporarily which Hamas had not expected. The United States under President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken chose to make their support of Israel unconditional. And Arab Israelis rallied around their Jewish compatriots in ways never before demonstrated.

This was possible because Hamas killed and took hostage many Arab Israelis. The Abraham Accord nations responded with little or no public support for Hamas and did not revoke the Accords. Arabs unaffiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas showed little or no support for Hamas. Most importantly, while one of the goals of Hamas was to end any idea of Saudi Arabia entering into the Abraham Accords, all they did was delay that entry. In addition to all of the above, Hamas expected both Hezbollah and Iran to join the conflict directly against Israel. All Hamas got was from October 8 onwards Hezbollah missile attacks on northern Israel. Hezbollah could not carry out the same kind of armed attack on north Israel on the Hamas model because Israel had not moved any of its thousands of troops from its northern border.

Israel killed most of Hamas’s military leadership and a critical number of its political leadership. It destroyed Hamas missiles, and missile production, illuminated any resupply of arms; killed between 18,000 and 20,000 of Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters; destroyed or damaged 60% of the buildings in Gaza; and destroyed or made harmless two-thirds of the tunnels in Gaza.

All of these happened because Hamas invaded Israel: The destruction of Hamas and of Gaza; Hezbollah’s fall orchestrated by Israel; Iran’s failed attack against Israel; Iraqi Shi’ite militias pull back; Yemen’s Houthis under attack; Assad’s exile; and Russia pulled out of Syria.

Are you better off?

So, my questions for my Arab brothers and sisters are simple ones. What is the cost of your hate for Israel and Jews? Are you better off because of all of the war, destruction, and chaos caused by your inability to simply say that you will live in peace and accept as a neighbor, the indigenous Jews living in the land of Israel?

Some say that Islam itself is at fault here. Yet, anyone who has read the Quran, knows that it says some negative things about Jews, but that it also says some very positive things about Jews as well as neutral things. So does Christianity. Christianity after the Shoah, began to confront the issue of anti-Judaism, which culminated in the murder of six million Jews, recognizing that if Jesus himself had been alive during the Shoah he would have perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. So, the Catholic and Protestant denominations of Christianity began to revise their perspectives, and rather than focus on the negative hateful things that their sacred writings said about Jews they would focus on the positive things and recognize that without Judaism Christianity might not exist at all.

Islam in general and the Arab world in particular is in a similar place to Christianity. Islam owes much to the influence of the Torah, Hebrew and Aramaic languages and writings, and Jewish philosophy and theology which influenced the Prophet’s vision of his new religion. At the heart of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity is that we are all children of Abraham. The tie between Jews and Muslims may even be stronger because as the Torah notes, Ishmael and Isaac were brothers.

The wise leaders of the UAE have recognized this connectivity between Jews, Muslims, and Christians and have created institutions in the UAE to foster this movement away from hatred to brotherhood, sisterhood, and reconciliation. They have also been central sponsors of the Abraham Accords which can be the basis of reconciliation and peace between Israel and the Arabs, including the Palestinians, and lead to the aspirational creation of a Palestinian Arab nation when Palestinians stop blaming Jews for their situation, put aside their hate and focus instead on putting their intelligence, wealth and resources into building their nation, not trying to destroy the only Jewish nation.

I am not a prophet, just an analyst, yet it is my analysis that one of the unintended consequences of October 7 will be that the Arab world and Palestinians specifically will wake up to the understanding that enough is enough of hate. It has not benefitted you in any way except to bring you destruction and death. I hope that you will wake up to the understanding that you have been betrayed by your leaders and that you begin to understand that all of this pain and destruction could have been avoided in 1948 if your leaders had said simply, yes to the indigenous Jews of the Land of Israel rebuilding their home next to your home which you occupied 1300 years ago when Arab Muslims conquered the territory and occupied and colonized it. I am not a prophet, but I can hope.