Irregular Warfare Podcast - Fighting for Survival: Israel’s Counterterrorism Strategy

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Be sure to visit the Irregular Warfare Initiative website to see all of the new articles, podcast episodes, and other content the IWI team is publishing! In the first installment of a three-part miniseries on irregular warfare in Israel, we turn our attention to Israel’s counterterrorism strategy. We begin by overviewing the phases of this strategy before discussing the adaptation of terrorist tactics, how counterterrorism strategy evolves to address that adaptation, and what we are now witnessing as an evolution of cognitive warfare. Our guest is retired Colonel Miri Eisin. During her twenty years in the Israel Defense Forces, she served as an intelligence officer in combat units, assistant to the director of military intelligence, and deputy head of the Combat Intelligence Corps. Miri now serves as the director of the Reichman University’s International Institute for Counterterrorism. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

We're in the worst terror war that we've ever seen. I even want to say that the world has ever seen, and yet we're going to go forward and we're going to counter it and we will prevail. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Today's episode focuses on Israel CT strategy and is the second in a three-part mini-series discussing Israel and Hamas. Our guests today begin by overviewing the phases of Israel CT strategy before discussing the adaptation between terrorism, strategy and what we are now witnessing as an evolution of cognitive warfare. Our guest today is retired Colonel Miri Eisen. of Cognitive Warfare. Our guest today is retired Colonel Miri Eisen. During her 20 years in the Israel Defence Forces, she served as an intelligence officer in combat units, assistant to the Director of Military Intelligence and Deputy Head of the Combat Intelligence Corps. Miri now serves as the Director of the Reichman University's International Institute for Counter-Terrorism. Here is our conversation with Miri Eisen.

Miri, welcome to the Regular Warfare Podcast. Thank you so much for inviting me. Our absolute pleasure. Today's central focus is going to be around Israel's CT strategy, and we'll eventually get to the current events of today, but probably briefly at the back for practitioners. What have been the significant moments in Israel's history that have shaped, changed, or adapted Israel's CT strategy? Israel has been contending with counterterrorism, meaning with terrorism, pretty much from our establishment. But in the first almost 30 years, we were mainly looking at countries that sponsored local terrorists. That's something else. You can decide that you're going to take care of the country who is sponsoring those terrorists.

From the mid-1960s and certainly throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, we're contending with terrorist organizations that are both based outside of Israel, inside the areas that Israel controls, both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And that's a different challenge in itself. And I'd say that the third stage has been that change from Palestinian secular terror organizations into Islamist organizations, a different kind of ideology, a different kind of challenge. So it's three different stages that each have had different counterterrorism tactics to face each one of them.

That makes absolute sense on the evolution of the adversarial threats and then evolving CT strategies to either keep in front of the pacing threat or at least keep in time with it. Could you briefly unpack how that impacted the CT strategy across those three evolutions? In the first 20 years, it was very much the Israeli military, including what was the beginning of, I like the fact that we're called irregular warfare, it was the beginning of building irregular troops inside the Israeli military to contend with those kinds of threats, meaning you didn't just come at it with your regular military troops, you were going in specifically after terrorists who were inside neighboring areas that were controlled or ruled by other countries. So you needed to make sure, are you attacking the military of the other country, even when it's terrorists

that have been sent against you? Are you going against the terrorists themselves? How do you contain the whole aspect of the civilian population? So at that stage, it was both in the military and it brought about military units that were irregular military units. In the second stage, it went all over the world. Israeli counterterrorism is not based just inside Israel. It's not just military, it's military and a lot of additional forces, security forces. The threats of terror attacks against Israel is not just against Israel, it's against Israel, Israelis, and Jews worldwide. That means that you have to look very broad and have vastly different tactics. And the shift into the Islamist, and we're still inside that arena, and it's even much more challenging.

It's a combination of both looking at sponsor countries, so that you're looking again at foes that have a lot of real challenges, and using different tactics where you're not turning entire populations into your enemies by the way that you're contending with the terrorist elements among them. And this is probably the biggest challenge that we have, certainly one that we're facing right now. How do you contend with both the ideology and the capabilities? You can't really do a lot with the ideology. You are almost making it worse. And that still means that you need to take care of the capabilities that can bring out horrific atrocities. I think most practitioners would 100% understand the flow on effects or the echo of terrorism through time based on actions now,

that there are some ideological aspects that we just can't combat or confront. And we have to find ways in which to still compete and still combat terrorism, just not the head-on ideological component. I think I found it really interesting that breaking it down into those three major phases of how the CT strategy has evolved, could you unpack a little bit for the audience how the Israeli CT strategy separated the state component of state-sponsored terrorism from the terrorist organization component and how that affected the efficiency and effectiveness of Israel's CT strategy? The challenge still in 2023 that's been around for 75 years is to separate state-sponsored terrorism from, and I hate this

term, homegrown terrorism. In the arena that we're in right now, certainly for the first 20 to almost 30 years, the terrorism that was coming out against Israel was, yes, from the Palestinian local arena, but it was trained, facilitated, and made into ideology by the different state sponsors. I'm talking in the past. It could have been Egypt, it could have been Syria, it could have been Jordan. Yes, the same countries, Egypt and Jordan, that we have peace treaties with today. Palestinian terrorism evolved on its own in a time period when, once upon a time, Soviet Union, USSR, based on a lot of other very secular ideologies, was sponsoring terrorism, but it was much more homegrown. It was based on a younger generation. It was based on people who had grown

up and had not seen a future. It was based on bringing people into the terror organizations in a process where you're looking at the population and it's very difficult to say who's going to become an active terrorist and who's going to not become an active terrorist. And at that stage along the way, the Israeli control directly over the arena that Palestinian terrorism was coming out of both made it worse and made the counterterrorism tactics of what we were doing much more direct. You're ruling over the areas. You can go in and take physical action against the physical terrorists. In the actions that you're taking against the physical terrorists, you are inadvertently creating lots of new extremists who may become terrorists. At the stage where the

combination of going after those who were recruiting, those who were the ideologists, those who were the ones who were taking extremism into terrorism, what Israel focused on as the main tactic for a very long time is what we all call targeting. Targeting is a very diverse type of tactic. It's not something specific, but it means that you're gathering the information on those who are already terrorists. And within that, you're looking at the upper echelons with the understanding that if you take out the upper echelons, you are very much inhibiting the capability to actually do the terror acts.

It's effective. It is not fully effective. And it has been the main tactic that Israel has done, because when you have literally millions of people, that out of them come the leaders, that out of them come those who are the terror leaders, you need to have a different type of policy towards the millions of civilians and towards your military capability to preempt the physical terror attack. And Israel has been very focused on preempting the physical terror attack. The smaller ones and our great failure in October, a massive one, but it's the same kind of idea. We were trying to stop that and not focused in our

counterterrorism impact on how you stop as much the extremists from becoming active terrorists. That's very insightful, Miri, and I think we might leverage off some of those very important points you started to speak about, about the evolution of not just terrorist strategies, but how Israel tried to preempt as that evolved, especially over the past 75 years. I find the majority of discourse, especially the stuff that most Western practitioners looked at, focused on terror organisations. I know we briefly last time spoke about what we're now seeing is the evolution of a terrorist army versus a terrorist organization. Could you unpack for the listeners how you see the difference between a terrorist organization and a terrorist army,

and how that impacts the evolution of Israel's CT strategy? Inside the practitioner world, inside Israel, the last 10 years have brought out a new term, terror army. In academia, for those who follow it also, this is also known as a terror hybrid organization. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are terror hybrid organizations, meaning terror armies. They're not outsiders. They are insiders. They're part of the population. It is very difficult to separate Hamas from the Palestinian arena. It is very difficult to separate Hezbollah from the Lebanese Shiite arena because Lebanon is a complex country, but Hezbollah is an integral part of the Shiite Lebanese arena. What does that mean, that difference between terrorist organization or a terror army? When we're looking, it's not just numbers at all. It's about how embedded and part of the population it is, that it comes out of an organization, and in this case, in that sense, the army itself, that the terror organization, the hybrid part of it, is taking care of society,

is taking care of the people there, is part of the people there, and that ideology is something that does not focus on the terror element. When you're recruited into a terror organization, you rapidly are inside a cell which is focused on the terror physical action. In a terror hybrid organization, in a terror army, you view yourself as the legit representative. You're going into something which is kind of like a military, as I said, a terror army, and it's structured not in small separate cells that are very difficult to break into. No, no, it's constructed as platoons and battalions and brigades with commanders with a hierarchy very similar to a regular army. It's not dozens or hundreds or even thousands of participants,

it's tens of thousands of participants, and within them they already have different levels between the more trained terror personnel and the regular terror personnel. So as I said, it's more similar to a terror army than to that strict idea of what we had in the past of a terror organization that has cells and sleeper cells, etc. This is something that's based inside an entire population. And both Hamas and Hezbollah are both built in the same way and have been for over a decade. Fascinating. I find the distinguishability between a terrorist organization and terrorist army clearly quite vast. Because terror armies focus on a population-centric approach,

and they heavily embed themselves into every part of that fabric of society, it becomes really hard to unpick them from that without unpicking the society really in total. Do you think we need to broaden our conceptualization and idea of counterterrorism? We're at the stage that we need to look at the idea of what these ideologies and narratives are doing in our capacity to be able to counter them. It's not just about the physical terror capability of doing attacks, let alone atrocities. It's very much diving into that step that, as I said, I've been avoiding until now, which is the step backwards of how an entire society is swept along within the extremism out of which comes a terror army which uses atrocious terror tactics within a paramilitary segment so that worldwide people look at it as if it's military against military and then you get to that horrible aspect of some kind of moral equivalency when they're using harsh terror tactics within their terror armies. So we absolutely need to be looking at this.

Everybody thinks that this is an Israeli problem, that it's a Palestinian problem. And I go, well, the Palestinians have grown up Hamas. They also have non-terror organizations in other types of ways. Let alone Hezbollah, which, again, is a hybrid organization. It both participates in Lebanese politics. It impacts politics. But it's a terror organization. So when you oppose them, they kill you. It's just the sort of thing where we have to look at it in a broader way. I don't yet have easy resolutions. Here we are after a momentous failure when it comes to that. But I think that

by thinking about it and looking at it, I'm not going to fight the last war. I'm going to be looking at the next one. And this is a whole new watershed moment looking forward on what this means. Do you think that there's going to be a tipping point where a terror army is being perceived as using a legitimate use of force based on the society that they've embedded themselves into. And because of that tipping point, do they bring other elements of their adversaries' national power against them? So as an example, Hezbollah and Hamas, if they go past being a

terror army and almost become a conventional force just using terrorist tactics, does that bring other apparatuses of the Israeli state or other Western states to the fore that they might not have thought of in the current circumstance? One of the sad things about working in counterterrorism is that if you want to be successful, you have to think like a terrorist. So what you just said right now in that sense is what is the evolution of the terrorist mind? And at this stage along the way, it's like, did the terrorist manage to make himself into that freedom fighter so that both the people that they are part of and embedded in view them as freedom fighters?

And the challenge in that sense, and I say this from a counterterrorism perspective, is that to do so what they did, at least when it comes to the Palestinians, and I would say to Hezbollah Lebanese Shiites, this isn't about Lebanese and about Shiites, it's about the ones who support Hezbollah, is that it came, in this case, with an absolute dehumanizing factor against their enemy, meaning Israel. Meaning that what's happened in that sense, and again, that's within this counterterrorism world that what's happened in that sense, and again,

that's within this counterterrorism world that we're not always looking at, is that the bulk of the society that support the terror tactics don't view them as terror tactics. Why do they not view them as terror tactics? Because anything is allowed against the enemy. Why is anything allowed? We've been dehumanized to an incredible degree, and that has flown out in a horrific way in this specific conflict into rampant anti-Semitism. But when I look at it, I never thought of it in those terms before as an Israeli. When I was looking at counterterrorism, I wasn't looking at it as part of a fight that had in its undercurrent antisemitism. But if you look at ideologies and what they have to do, that's a big change that's happened in the ideologies themselves, is that they present themselves. It can be a completely

lying denial type of narrative. But how do you counter that at all when the entire population believes it? How do you prove to them otherwise? And in this world that we live in right now, where everybody lives within their echo box, the possibility that they'll actually hear a different narrative, let alone accept it and not think that it's lies, becomes even much more challenging. And that we're definitely seeing this year in 2023. Do you think therefore we need to focus more on the cognitive warfare aspect of CT as opposed to what traditionally has been the kinetic component of CT? So first of all, in its own way, it's funny how the ideas themselves are still similar. Here we

are. It's not like we haven't written into CT all of the years, psyops and the narratives and what that does. But when you get from a terror organization, which is expelled by its own society, as opposed to a terror army and a terror hybrid organization, which is part of their own society, embraced by their own society. And the terror tactics are not views as terror tactics, but it's like a necessity, which again, within the dehumanizing and also the denial, it's a combination. How do you get past that one? As I look at it right now, counterterrorism for me as a practitioner

has always been about finding the active physical terrorists, the ones that have already transitioned into the physical part that are going to be doing the attack and pre-empting. That's the way we're supposed to do. Get to them before, arrest them, put them in jail. If not, target, kill them before they kill you. And that's not counterterrorism in the modern day. Because in the modern day, we need to take a step backwards. And that's not counterterrorism in the modern day. Because in the modern day, we need to take a step backwards. And that step backwards is A, let's get to them before they've gone to the physical aspect. We can't wait anymore. We're looking at a society that is through the education system, through the denial system, building a whole aspect. And here I always

look at myself before I look at somebody else. I'm like, so what am I doing wrong? And in Israel right now, that's probably the hardest part is that in the last weeks of this war is we're all wondering how in the world can it be that at the end, we're the one who are being viewed as the bad guy. And this is all about counterterrorism. And it's about the portion of counterterrorism that we don't always access and assess as part of our own plan. It's looking at the overall framework. It's understanding what works and what doesn't work. And in this case, it is taking the terror of a terror hybrid organization and highlighting it. People do not understand what terror is anymore. I think that in the military world that I come from, I, of course,

say, you said before the word ethics and morals, and I live in a world of ethics and morals. How can you be a military person without ethics and morals? Inside the military, we spew out the military personnel who don't have ethics and morals. And terror tactics are being presented as if they are military and that they have ethics and morals. And we're not managing to make that distinction. And that's not something that you can start doing after the attack and after this overall thing. This is something that you have to start doing before.

And it's not something that you think of in counterterrorism arenas because we're so focused on the terrorists themselves that we're not focused on how they have built their own legitimacy within their own community that the tactics that they're used are either viewed in denial. Okay, be aware of that, deep, fake, AI, absolute denial, and even more than that, that they're viewed as okay within the circumstances, which is like, where are the morals and the ethics of that? It's just such a challenging combination. And as I look towards the future in this sense, the biggest thing that disturbs me above everything else is how there's a sense that it's being contained to the Israeli-Palestinian arena, or maybe the Israeli

Hezbollah, because that doesn't have to do anything with the Palestinian, right? But it's as if that's this closed arena, and I'm going, you know, let's go look at all the terrorism organizations that we look at, and start looking at what they are building as their basis of legitimacy they're building their legitimacy we're not managing to focus now on the terror of terror hybrid organizations as being illegitimate that's a fascinating point for me it draws back to it's a competition of narratives and that resonates no matter what you look at in the world since warfare was created it's always been a competition of narratives and it peaks and troughs throughout time. And I think what a lot of the listeners to the podcast will come to realize is terrorism

is constant and the acts and the tactics is constant. It just fades in and out of vogue depending on policy settings of superpowers and where they would like to focus on the world. And just by saying we're finished in Afghanistan for a reason and we're withdrawing, we're no longer fighting in the Middle East, doesn't mean that though the permutation of threats that have come out of the Middle East that are all the way through into Europe, they might have been generated from Europe to begin with or South America, it doesn't mean they go away just when someone says, we're done fighting

here. I think that's very important for a lot of practitioners to understand is that theme and the competition of narrative stays true no matter what you look at. We're just seeing a very violent example of that come to the fore now that a lot of people might not have seen before about the mobilization of that narrative to generate mass protests across the Western world. I definitely haven't seen it at this sort of scale in my career. And I think this is a really similar moment to sit back and look and observe and learn the lessons and truly understand what can be applied to combat anti-terrorism going forward all the way through to de-radicalization and the entire counter-terrorism apparatus. Do you have any other points around how we train soldier sales and

airmen in cognitive warfare? It's quite a complex subject. It's not the sexy thing on the brochure most people join up for, kicking doors in, dropping bombs. It's highly, highly intellectual in some circumstances where you need multiple languages potentially. Could you just go through some thoughts on how we could train the next generation of cognitive warfare operators? So right now, I'm not talking to you and me. I'm talking to the younger generation, to those who are coming in in the future, because I'm not a social media animal. I grew up in a different generation. And I say that because next-gen counterterrorism is all about the echo box of social media.

And social media is very diverse. I don't scroll through TikTok, but TikTok is called Terror TikTok. 90 seconds on how you show terror as being cool and fun and instant and with a result. And we need people to be able to go in and to dissect that. It's going into deep fake, into AI, to be able to see how you can build in there. Remember, you have to think like the terrorist, an alternative narrative that's going to be accepted because I saw it online, because I saw it in the TikTok video, because I understood on Insta. And I say that because right now, the combination of words that we look at

and don't always understand is going to impact, recruit, and change. It's already changing the world. It's already bringing out half a million people onto the streets of London, and you go, they don't all look the exact same. It isn't just, you know, it's like people want to always show, you know, the ones that are vehemently, you know, they're going to be violent themselves. But half a million people that came there, you know, 490,000 were not violent. And I need to understand in my counter terrorism, how I reached the 490,000 who went to a protest like that, and think that they're going to protest something that is not terror, meaning they're supposed to be the ones who are protesting

terror. And so it's rethinking within that social media echo box, how you get past that. And to be able to do so, you have to understand what it does to every single one of us. It's the basic social socialization of today. It's how you meet people. It's how you meet people who are like you. And you have to be able to look at that. And at the end, I want to say, you know, counter-terrorists, yes, we need the people to go and to target and to arrest and to preempt. But to be able to impact in a real way your generation, you next practitioners, is to go in and to impact the deep counterterrorism capabilities that are inside the terrorists that have just taken over social media in the last weeks of this specific war. But this is not new.

This is something that has been growing and becoming much more challenging, and we all need to focus to be able to preempt there. Because there's so much stuff rushing at society's face now, it's almost taking away individuals and society's agency to make decisions for themselves because they don't actually have the time and space to make those informed decisions anymore. I think and I'm hoping the listeners are going to find that extremely useful to reframe how they conceptualize CT at least if they're trying to combat it. If not sitting back watching the news feeds every night and sitting back watching the news just flood you with vision, at least take a minute to pause and really think about what you're seeing. If you could offer some

advice to the junior generation national security practitioners regarding how to view CT, what words of wisdom and encouragement specifically could you give them? Sadly in CT you will have a job for life I'm not sure that that's a word of encouragement but is it something that is with us and around us and so my advice in that sense is not just to come in with our regular gung-ho knife between the teeth I mean I'm there I'm there. I'm with you. It's to actually come in, and as you perhaps said before, Adam, it's the thinking mode that we need to think like the terrorists. And the terrorist is not only focused on killing whoever their enemy is. They're focused on changing all of the public opinion. So in counterterrorism, let's look at both.

That's great. And that sums up, I think, the tagline for this podcast. Miri, thank you for coming on the Irregular Warfare podcast. There's nothing like being on a podcast that talks about terrorism and counterterrorism at a time that we're at war. We're in the worst terror war that we've ever seen. I even want to say that the world has ever seen. And yet we're going to go forward and we're going to counter it and we will prevail. Thank you for listening to the Irregular Warfare podcast. In the final episode of our mini-series, we bring our guests Levi and Miri together to discuss the day after the violence stops.

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