AboutDon Radlauer Expertise I`m originally from the United States, and now make my home in Israel - after living for some years in Hong Kong and England.
In addition to handling general questions about Israeli life and history, I can field questions relating to strategic aspects of terrorism and counter-terrorism, as well as some tactical aspects. As an Associate of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), I can draw on ICT`s accumulated expertise in this area. As the Lead Researcher for ICT`s "al-Aqsa Intifada" Database Project (and author of "An Engineered Tragedy", ICT`s report on the findings of this project), I have become the world`s leading expert (indeed, as far as I know, the world`s only expert) on the demographics of the victims of the phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that began in September 2000.
Going beyond terrorism per se, I can answer questions regarding pretty much all aspects of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Experience
Experience in the area I've lived in Israel for over eight years. For more than five years, I have been associated with the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. My own role there is, to a degree, that of "expert in everything else" - that is, I'm less of a security expert than many of the other researchers there, but I have a broader background in other areas, including banking and finance, general scientific subjects, and so on. I also can draw upon the knowledge of other ICT staff.
Publications ICT website, http://www.ict.org.il
My blog, "On the Contrary: Don's Mideast Musings" is at http://radlauer.blogspot.com .
Question To end the bloodshed, why can't Hammas just stop shooting
rockets into Israel? To me this is the easiest most sensible
way to to stop the destruction, or doesn't Hammas care if
their actions has resulted in hundreds of dead
Palestinians?
I.A.M.
Answer Dear I.A.M. -
It may appear to Westerners that Hamas isn't being "sensible" - after all, they're choosing to provoke a much more powerful neighbor into attacking them with overwhelming force, which doesn't make any kind of strategic sense by "normal" standards. However, I can assure you that Hamas is very much a rational, goal-seeking organization; it's just that their goals are not quite the same as the goals of a Western political party.
Hamas' whole existence is based on a philosophy of "resistance" to "occupation" - with the important understanding that to them, "occupation" has nothing to do with the results of the 1967 war that left Israel in control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but instead refers to Israel's existence on *any* land anywhere in the Middle East. Reaching a peace agreement with Israel is pretty much impossible for Hamas, since acknowledging our existence would negate their whole raison d'etre.
Part of the problem of being a "resistance organization" is that you have to have something to resist, and you have to do some active "resisting" - at least once in a while. This means that for Hamas, an Israel that is attacking is much better than an Israel that's quietly minding its own business; the more oppressive we are, short of total genocide, the better. And the Kassam (and now other) rockets, while not very effective militarily, are a fantastic way of "resisting": they effectively demonstrate defiance, while killing few enough Israelis that most of the world refuses to take them seriously as a threat to which Israel has the right and obligation to respond. (The fact that many thousands of Israelis have been traumatized by the threat of these rockets is irrelevant to most of the world; if we're not dead, our problems aren't very important. And even if we're dead, not enough of us are dead to interest most of the world. I'm venting a bit here, I know.) I tend to believe that there is also something Freudian about Hamas' use of rockets in particular, but I'm not sure if any reputable psychologist would agree with me.
So from Hamas' standpoint, the fact that Israel has sent its army into the Gaza Strip and is killing a lot of Palestinian civilians along with a lot of Hamas fighters is not at all a bad thing. While we are certainly causing the organization a lot of short-term harm, their calculus is that the increased misery of the Gaza Strip's inhabitants will only increase Hamas' ability to recruit in the future; and by maintaining their "resistance", Hamas comes off as heroic even though their strategy makes no sense in conventional strategic terms.
Of course, it's quite possible that Hamas' strategy could backfire. There are people in the Gaza Strip who will say that Hamas has created nothing but poverty, oppression, and death for the people living there, and that some other leadership should be found. But it's far from certain that such voices are anything other than a minority; and given what I've been able to gather about the psychology of many Gaza Strip Palestinians, it's quite common for people there to identify *more* with Hamas when Israel invades.
If Hamas is correct in its understanding of its people (and there is no question that they know their own constituency well), the conflict here is likely to continue for a long time - with periods of greater or lesser "calm", of course, but without any real resolution or peace.
