Irregular Warfare Podcast - Taking the Long View on Hamas

Episode Date: November 14, 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, Adam Darnley-Stuart speaks to Dr. Levi West, a renowned counterterrorism analyst, about the history and strategy of Hamas. Dr. West offers nuanced insights into Hamas operations and the likelihood that the organization's tactics might spread and be adopted by other groups around the world. The discussion links the tiers of national security together from tactics to strategy, exploring the effects of current events on the enduring friction between Israel and Iran, for example, and the broader impacts on the geopolitical environment. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

They are not seeking to establish a democratic state in Palestine. Never, ever underestimate the capability of a well-established terrorist organisation. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. Today's podcast is a special release within a series of episodes focused on Hamas and Israel, their violent history and lessons for policymakers and tactical operators. I'm your host, Adam Darnley-Stewart, and my guest today is Dr. Levi West. Dr. West's extensive academic and field research on terrorism will form the foundation for today's discussion. Here is our conversation with Dr. Levi West.

Levi, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. Thanks, Adam. Really looking forward to the chat. Let's crack straight in. For the listeners, it would be good to baseline with a few definitions before launching into the good oil of the discussion. Based on your background and your knowledge, could you define how you view terrorism? how you view terrorism? Terrorism, as I think most of our listeners would know, and defining it is a rabbit hole that we would need a thousand podcasts to not come to an answer on. In its most simple terms, in my view, terrorism is the use of violence or the threat of violence for ideological purposes by non-state or illegitimate actors within the international system. And the key difference

there is that nation states use violence for ideological purposes all the time. The difference is that they're legitimate actors and in the system that we have, they're allowed to do that. Non-state actors generally or illegitimate actors, terrorist organisations engage in it in an illegitimate way and that's the key delineation, I think, really. That makes perfect sense and I think that's a good baseline

to crack into the point of today's discussion. Could you briefly outlay some foundational facts about Hamas and how this relates to what you just unpacked as the view of terrorism? Hamas itself as an organization was established in 1987, essentially as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. And anyone who's spent time around jihadism will be familiar with the sort of high profileprofile figures and influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, so Hassan al-Banna, who established the Muslim Brotherhood, and the key ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, Saeed Qutb, echoes all the way through modern

jihadism. Hamas is a militant Islamist organization in their foundational documents and their revised foundational documents in 2017. They are committed to the destruction of Israel and the establishment of a militant Islamist Palestinian state. It's a key delineator here, right? They are not seeking to establish a democratic state in Palestine. They are seeking to establish a militant interpretation of Islam-run state in what they consider to be Palestine. It's important, I think, too, in understanding Hamas that they sit well and truly within a long history of various forms of jihadist militant resistance to both the early establishment of Israel at the end post-1948 Israel itself. We can go back to the 1936-39 Arab revolt led by a guy by the name of Qassam, which quite

explicitly is where Qassam brigades and Qassam rockets get their names from. It's also where the Kafir first becomes an iconic symbol of Palestinian resistance, and I use the term the way that they use it. So as soon as you, FAMAS sort of emerges out of a vacuum, there is a long consistent line, at least from the Arab revolts in the 30s through 48, and then in particular post-68, of militant terrorist or at least non-state resistance, violent non-state resistance by various Palestinian organisations, and Hamas is one of them. One of Hamas's unique characteristics is they are,

unlike most of the other components of the axis of resistance, to use the terminology that is used to describe the various elements of IRGC tentacles across the Middle East. Hamas is a Sunni organization rather than a Shia organization. And probably the thing that makes them really quite unique is that not only are they Sunni jihadists, but they're also nationalists. And most Sunni jihadist organizations are not about establishing a nation state like Palestine. They are about establishing some formalized form of a global caliphate. So Hamas is a complex and unique organization. What they benefit from, and I think this is useful for contextualizing Palestinian terrorism and insurgency and

resistance against Israel, is one of the things that they benefit from enormously, and I think we see this playing out in a slightly different way, is that in the late 60s, the Palestinian movement broadly engaged in what I've referred to previously in other places in strategic innovation. And what it did is it reframed its struggle. Instead of it being a conflict between Israel and Palestine, it reframed itself as part of a broader struggle against imperialism and colonialism and capitalism, and it found bedfellows with the Viet Cong and with the FLN in Algeria and in Moscow and in Beijing, all in the context of the Cold War. And it turned a conflict that was mostly about little bits and pieces of conflict happening on the borders of what was Israel and the pieces of

Palestine into part of a global struggle against the United States with Israel as a representation. And by doing that, not only did it expand its target set dramatically, suddenly it could target LL check-in counters at airports in Europe, et cetera. It made the conflict resonate with an audience well beyond just Israel, Palestine, and just Palestinians and Jews. It made it resonate with people. The weather underground in the United States and the Betelmein Hofgang in Germany could find solidarity with the

Palestinian struggle. I think that's perfect for the listeners to understand the reach of Hamas's ideology that permeates well beyond what, at the moment, the media is portraying as a Middle Eastern security issue. And that becomes really important, I think, as we launch into the next part of the discussion. From your perspective, why was Hamas so successful at the tactical layer? So I think there's two or three pieces that matter in understanding the tactical components of what happened on October 7th. The first one of those is that for reasons that will become clear in time, or at least become more clear in time, the Israeli counterterrorism and intelligence apparatus, for reasons that we don't have facts on yet,

seemingly made some errors in their assessments about what Hamas was wanted and what Hamas was willing to do and prepared to do. If you pull all of the Hamas books off of my bookshelf here, you will find most of them concentrating on the post-2005 governance or post-2007 election governance components of Hamas with a chapter on the militant components of what Hamas does, rather than big books about the military capability of Hamas with a small section on their governance stuff. There's, I think, some

sort of deductible reasons for that, about wanting Hamas to want to be more interested in governance because otherwise we have to keep doing this thing in Gaza that we've been doing for a long time. And CT has fatigue on states. I think we're living on the backside of that across the West now. But the other one is somehow or other they created sufficient time and space.

So there is a tactical sophistication of the operation that's that's really quite phenomenal i mean sketching some of my notes for this i particularly refer to it as a multi-domain terrorist operation it is an air land sea cyber and information operation all integrated into one fairly seamlessly to do that they needed to do things like build mock-ups of some of the kibbutzes. To do that, you need a whole bundle of time and space that, generally speaking, Palestinian terrorist organisation like Hamas or Hezbollah is actively denied.

So in being able to pull off something that was as sophisticated as it was, it was contingent on some errors and some failings. I think it's a reasonably uncontroversial take. But then looking at the actual tactics that they deployed, the surprise element is quite phenomenal. There's some key things to me. The first one is that the body count is off the charts, the number of fatalities that they were able to inflict

because of the surprise element and because of some of the really sophisticated pieces of this, and I think this ties to some of the regional pieces we'll talk about in a minute. For instance, when they went into the police station in Storot, which I've been to a number of times, I know plenty of people have been, they knew where the servers were

and they knew where the communication systems were and they targeted them. And that kind of tactical activity, you have a forethought to kill the comms capability of the local police station, who then can't send full help from the IDF, is the reason for the delay in support coming, which is the reason that they buy themselves the time and space

to be able to inflict huge numbers of casualties. Normally, you have maybe an hour, right? Israel isn't big. Storot and the southern border is remote relative to Tel Aviv, but it's not that far. So in addition to that sort of sophisticated tactical activity is that they put something in the vicinity of 2,500 Al-Qassam Brigade fighters through the border. And that in itself is a difficult thing to respond to if all you've got is the local kibbutz security guys will have done their three years of active service but there's only a handful

of them there and if a thousand guys with one unit with ak's another unit with rpgs and vehicles all arrive there's a simple asymmetry there that's going to put a ceiling on how much you're going to be able to defend your remote little community. And so I think the other parts of the tactical pieces, I think, matter. The intentional barbarism of the violence, and I think this is the lesson that Islamic State teaches terrorist organisations across the world, is whilst this isn't owning the news coverage quite the way it was a week ago, it's still sitting at the top of most newspapers' coverage. To do that, and I say this with a degree of melancholy, you need to engage in forms of violence that are more horrific

than the last thing that dominated the news for two weeks. And that means, in this context, getting beyond beheadings, which is difficult to do because that is a fairly horrific form of violence. Regrettably, by intent or by zealousness and fervour, those operatives that went into the south of Israel managed to do that by engaging in some genuinely horrific activity that then enables tactical activity to have strategic implications and i think that's the key to sort of measuring the effectiveness of a terrorist attack is that the tactics by

themselves okay great you're very sophisticated terrorist attack but unless that was all integrated and lined up in a way that meant that it had the big second and third order effects then it's it's kind of redundant and i don't think there's too much debate about whether or not this one had significant strategic implications. Thanks, mate. I think that highlights two key points that are important for the listeners to understand to bring it back to a tactical practitioner's perspective.

From a manoeuvre warfare theory perspective, we look at three major components that come out of this, surprise, speed, and rehearsals whilst the simplicity component comes with rehearsing i think surprise speed and rehearsals are the three key tactical takeaways from this that are enduring through no matter what type of violence we see if you're successful at those three you've got a high chance of immediate success in whatever action especially in the offense that you're taking will be successful. I think the second thing also maybe to now launch from is you mentioned we're talking about what is the scale and type of violence that now meets the top

of the headlines if it bleeds, it leads, obviously against the backdrop of Russia and Ukraine. That obviously provide a launchpad and justification to increase the type and sophistication of violence to then obviously supplant Russia and Ukraine from the top of everybody's newsfeed. So maybe briefly, could you unpack why that sophistication worked and the nexus between the information component and IO component and why this type of violence worked against the backdrop of Ukraine and Russia? So I think it's probably important to note at the front end that the IO components of this, separate from the inherent IO

of the terrorist attack itself, which is a propaganda act, first and foremost, in my view, is probably best demonstrated by the fact that I think it was yesterday or the day before Israel released a 40-minute compilation of video footage from the GoPros and body-worn cameras of the attackers to try and prove that the somewhat contested story about infants was true. But the wearing of body-worn cameras and GoPros speaks volumes of the centrality of the consideration of the IO or the information components of the attack. But those information components are also beyond just content. So the

timing on the anniversary of Yom Kippur on the Sabbath of the high holidays of the Jewish calendar is significant and an important part of communicating a thing about this isn't the first time that Israel has been surprised, I would suggest that they might have spent some time looking at what happened after Israel got surprised in the Yom Kippur War. Probably would have given them some insight into how things were going to play out for them. But that information component is important in that I think there's two parts to that.

One is the barbarity that we spoke about before, right? You need to engage in forms of violence that demand front page coverage and demand discussions about horrible, horrible things. But the other part of it is in the sort of complexity of the operation itself and trying to demonstrate that we are something more than just a ragtag terrorist organization. And in chatting through this with a colleague of mine, he pointed out that this was more, if only in terms of weight count, but certainly in terms of integrated, complex operational stuff. Bigger than Mumbai in 2008, bigger than Westgate in Nairobi in 2013,

and bigger than Paris in 2015. In terms of the number of offerings involved, the number of units with dedicated tasks, a vastly, vastly more complex operation. That means that the other thing that's being communicated is that we are not just Hamas. You might view us as an organisation and anyone who's been to that police station in Sderot will have been shown the collection of DIY rockets out the back of that police station. They are not indicators of a sophisticated multi-dom, manoeuvre warfare organisation. It's a welding shop at the back of a concrete building

making DIY rockets with no-glide systems that are launched into Israel to hit something, maybe, often landing in Gaza. This is a communication that, actually, we are something vastly more than that, and you should probably start to take us vastly more seriously. And I think that was an attempt by much the same thing that LAT tried to do with Mumbai, didn't follow through on that,

which is a strange open question about why they didn't do anything more. But, you know, I think that there's a whole range of things that are being communicated. And then I think the other thing that they sought to communicate, and I think they did pretty well, was that they had a pretty good read on what the Israeli response was going to be, that they deserve bog-standard terrorist provocation exercise. They knew that if they got this right, that Israel would have to go into Gaza with a ground invasion, which doesn't go well. In discussions I had last week with some people

when I was in Berlin, we were discussing the fact that if I was advising anyone on this stuff formally at the moment, I would point to the last time Israel went into Gaza and the last time Israel went into Lebanon and follow that up with, please don't do either of those things because it's not going to go well. It might be the cathartic piece that's necessary. And I think this speaks to the strategic effects part of the operation, which is, and I'll paraphrase my own definition of strategic effect,

which is about getting inside the decision-making processes of your adversary and messing with their loop. And this did that. It means that Israel's decision-making processes are based on rage and revenge and emotion rather than calculus, strategy, considerations of our second and third order effects. And that's exactly what the terror of an attack like this is designed to do, is to make us make very poor decisions.

Can we go into a Gaza and assert dominance? Yes. But then what do we do? What do we do after that? We get stuck. In the same way, anyone who's been involved in the last 20 years, we know these things, but we still do them because we make decisions based on the

emotive response that we have to a horrific terrorist attack. It's designed to make us make the decisions that we make. It's a horrible, horrible feedback loop that we struggle to get outside of. So I think now, using some of your examples before on Mumbai and the parallels between Hamas' attacks here, but obviously to scale, which is significantly larger, and the parallels between Hamas' attacks here, but obviously to scale, which is significantly larger. Maybe we now expand it to the regional impacts and the regional interconnection of the Middle East. Could we look at now and discuss around escalating violence

and how Hamas has used this in combination, potentially with IRGC levers, to fracture the Saudi-Israeli relationship? Your thoughts on this would be great. Israel-Saudi relations in the context of the Abraham Accords where Israel had signed agreements with a handful of Gulf states to normalise relations. Keep in mind, sorry, I should start at the front of this.

Israel already has a peace treaty with Egypt and Jordan. This gets forgotten in the context of all discussions about the Middle East. They have peace treaties with those two countries. They have strong sharing and cooperation relationships over matters of national security, strong lines of communication underpinning all of that. They normalised relations with a handful of Gulf states as part of the Abraham Accords, and Saudi-Israel normalisation was a long way down the path towards being formalised. There was some components in that and in the chessboard that is US politics, Israeli politics, Saudi politics and Middle Eastern politics.

Part of the normalisation benefit for Saudi was the potential to obtain F-35s, which would have fundamentally altered the dynamics between Saudi and Iran in the sort of ongoing regional Cold War in Yemen, the Cold War dynamics of Saudi-Iranian relations. They would have had air superiority, essentially, across the region. That not only air superiority themselves, but normalised relations with Israel and those two things combined means that that's running the Middle East as you place. So in my assessment, the first order objective, strategic objective, was to stop the normalisation of Saudi-Israel relations. On that front, it's 100% achieved that.

Best is delayed significantly. At worst, that will never happen again because the Saudis now wind up in a position where they're unable to... The rhetoric demands of every Middle Eastern country other than Israel, genuine or not, is to call for humanitarian corridors, ceasefire, et cetera.

So on that front, I think it's 100% achieved a significant strategic objective. That's actually got very little to do with Hamas and everything to do with Iran. And that is probably the most important component of this. There's a neat strategy, or at least a term for a strategy, that the IRGC and the Iranian government have been deploying for a while now called Unity of Fronts, which is about trying to get, and we forget about some of the components of this, right, most people who pay attention are familiar with Hamas, familiar with Hezbollah, and keep in mind here that if Hezbollah

gets actively involved in this, then there are deep and inviting problems for Israel. They have hundreds of thousands of rockets sitting on the northern border of Tel Aviv that make Hamas look like the way that we thought about Hamas before October 7th. By comparison, Hezbollah is a military capability on the northern border of Israel that's largely under the tutelage and control of the IRGC specifically.

But in addition to that is the Houthis in Yemen and their capability, but in particular the very substantial Iranian militia component in Iraq. There's already been a number of incidents and attacks targeting U.S. interests in Iraq in the aftermath of October 7th. So Iranian influence and capability across the region has been mobilized in a way that we haven't seen happen for some time. It's difficult to see, so I can see the logic and the end state of disrupting Saudi-Israel normalization. I can't quite see where Iranian calculus goes after that. If they keep pushing, and I'm reminded of some of the assessments that were made of the miscalculations that al-qaeda made with 9-11 which was not quite understanding what happens when you

poke that bear really well and it decides that you yeah okay great ukraine sure no no we're going to do this now is that the full force of Western capability rounds on you, and that is a completely different calculus to delicately with a scalpel picking off individuals, is that's hundreds of thousands of troops somewhere. And that's a different calculus, the mastery of Iranian asymmetric strategy. And then things kind of grind into the deck for a while.

So there is a significant regional piece to it all that's as much about US politics and Saudi politics and Iranian politics as it is anything to do with Israel and Palestine. And I think the Saudis have some capacity to shape and enforce that still. It's a question of what their appetite is, particularly domestically, for that. I think every state in the region other than Israel has a dilemma between what they might think about in strategic terms and within the political elites of the country and what they know the famous Arab street will think of that.

And I think every country, Egypt, Jordan, all of them have that same dilemma. There is a gap between those two things that's problematic for all those states of what they'd like to do strategically and what they know the public will react to if they don't. I think understanding from an irregular warfare perspective how non-state entities through a multi-domain approach can be sponsored by states to generate, in essence, what we would deem a conventional warfare mechanism, but used in an irregular warfare sense. And I think that's really important for the listener to understand because this really blurs the line between what most Western nations would understand. There's a line here of regular warfare, and then this is

conventional warfare. What we're now seeing is the adaptation process of adversaries and competitors significantly blurring those lines through tactics, techniques, and procedures. And I think we're now seeing the next evolution of that. So obviously, over the past 20 years, we've seen terrorist tactics evolve and permeate across the entire world. We've seen stuff spring up or created in the Middle East. And then all of a sudden, a couple of weeks later, there's attacks across Europe or there's

attacks in Africa or South America. I think it'd be important now for the listener to understand how potentially the violence we're seeing now, especially from a terrorist organisation perspective, begin to seep and permeate into the Indo-Pacific. At the macro level, I think the way to think about that is that successful terrorist tactics echo. Terrorist organisations read the news too and tend to be like, oh, that worked really effectively.

We should try that. There's an old, old story of Bin Laden sending operatives to train with Hezbollah and to pay specific attention to the success of the Marine barracks bombing in 1983 and that that provided the basis for the twin embassy bombings in 1998. So there's no question that the tactics bleed and echo across geographic regions and so on and so forth. I think the sort of takeaways from the tactical side

of what happened on October 7th probably has less to do with the barbarity side. I think they all understand that fairly implicitly from a media and news coverage perspective, that they have to do things that escalate to get news coverage in this part of the world, in the Indo-Pacific. That's things like, you know, if we think of Morali as a small-scale effort to replicate Mosul,

if we can take the key parts of the town, then we can take the town as a whole, we can get most of the civilians to leave, and then they've got to come in and destroy the city to retake it. It's a pretty soft playbook. But I think what it will be is the integrated piece, right, is that you need to almost start to, and I think they're doing away already, but I think really starting to think much more like a proper

military organisation in that which domains are we going to operate in for this attack? What does our target provide us? Or should we find a target that gives us maritime entry point? Can we find a way to get some level of air operations into the attack? You know, how many men do we need? Let's double that. And if we've got access to enough firearms, then that just increases body count.

And for a terrorist organisation, that's just generally good. I think the other one is that even though this was not the kind of amazing, sophisticated, sustained, long-term information operations activity that Islamic State was engaged in, it very much centralised a distinct and active information campaign, quite distinct from the inherent information components and propaganda components of the terrorist attack itself. Hours after it happened, I was watching the two first videos that came out, one of the maritime team leaving the beach in Gaza and the other one,

the announcement of, I can't remember the name of the drone capability that's there is named after a Tunisian guy. And so even the integrated pieces of that, naming your drone capability after someone who's famous inside the universe that you exist in, I think that we'll start to see a much more intentional information operation component to terrorist activity, distinct from the bog-standing propaganda stuff. I think they also did a really, really good job, and I think this will be part of it, is that someone has sat down, whether from Hamas, probably from the IRGC, and done a pretty decent analysis on their adversary and what their likely reaction is going to be.

So rather than terrorism as an act that's anchored kind of in rage and resistance, you're much more strategically and sitting down thinking through, okay, if we do X, Y, and Z, what is A, B, and C going to look like in response? X, Y, and Z, what is A, B, and C going to look like in response? And maybe we need to adjust X and Y a little bit because we're actually seeking this kind of response and being a bit more strategic. Because I think what it demonstrates more than anything else, and there's only a handful of these throughout history, is that when you integrate the key components of terrorism well, you can 100% achieve dramatic and consequential strategic effect. No one wants to play with the Israel-Palestine problem. Nobody. There's no wins politically, operationally, strategically. It's really only downside. And what this operation

did was drag everyone back in to the Indo-Pacific again, or at least diminish attention from that. And in a universe where attention is a huge component, both government attention, but also public attention. For instance, I'm not sure what's happened in Ukraine over the past couple of weeks, but I am confident a bunch of stuff has happened in Ukraine because we weren't paying attention. Again, understanding how to grab the attention of the public and general populations in society who might not even know about what's actually happening in parts of the world. All of a sudden, parts of society have been triggered onto learning more about the plight of the Palestinians and the Israel and Palestine conflict since partition.

And I think that there is a key takeaway for the listeners, is through horrendous acts of violence, whether in good intention, emotional, rational, irrational, doesn't matter, it grabs the attention of different parts of society to bring them into the fold to mobilize thought and mobilize influence. I think that's key. I think the best indicator of that is the protests all over the Western world. Some very small gatherings of pro-Israeli groups and a whole bundle of enormous protests in sympathy with Palestine. And that cleavage point that this exploits

and the pushing of everyone deep into their corners and to their sides on what is an issue that is so divisive, mostly because people don't know jack about the topic. Everyone has a very firm view about which side of that conflict is right, often without any real understanding of anything prior to October 7th. And I think those protests are the kinds of things that during the Cold War that KGB would have been proud of. Mobilising those kinds of numbers is a phenomenal achievement.

Agreed. And I think for the listeners, that's a really good key takeaway, is the different mechanisms to mobilise or radicalise. They have stayed tried and true. They're just being weaponised to a different degree now based on technology, state and non-state proxy wars, and the ability to influence other actors to do your bidding for you. Another bit of that that I think is important too

is that the vast majority of that activity is being done through mainstream media. It's setting conventional news agendas, right? This is not a Islamic State sophisticated Twitter-based video,

indigenously generated video campaign. This is mainstream news covering mainstream news topics and talking about it to audiences that aren't radicalisation audiences,

they're mobilisation audiences about a political issue that's well within conventional politics and that requires the New York Times or Washington Post and the BBC as your main vehicle. Could you offer one key takeaway for operators and practitioners who predominantly listen to this podcast regarding what we can learn from Hamas? I think the lesson from Hamas and from what happened and is happening as a consequence of October 7th is that, and this is a lesson

that we ought to have learned over the past 20 years, is to never, ever underestimate the capability of a well-established terrorist organisation, that they can be smarter and more sophisticated than we tend to give them credit for. We tend to still, I think, regrettably think of them through a lens that's anchored in the fact that because they don't have a nation state behind them and they don't have what we consider to be legitimacy, then they must be average at best. And that's simply not true. If we're thinking about how we train future operators and practitioners, either from an academic perspective, like junior policy advisors or future warfighters to work in the irregular warfare space. I think that sums it up pretty well.

I think the other part, and there's an extension of the same notion, is we should study them the same way we study class fits and the same way that we study famous battles that we fought. We should be studying this operation, Mumbai, and so on and so forth, especially from an irregular warfare perspective. Thank you, Levi, for coming on the Irregular Warfare podcast. Thanks, Adam. That was a really great chat. I hope the listeners take some of my work from it. Thank you for listening to the Irregular Warfare podcast.

Stay tuned for the next episode in our mini-series discussing Israel's CT strategy. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals.

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