Indyk, along with Dennis Ross and a small handful of other men, dominated American policy toward Arab-Israeli issues since being surprised by the secret negotiations in Oslo between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators in 1993. The defining strategy of this small circle of men was to allow “no daylight” between American and Israeli positions.  Such a close embrace, they argued, would convince all Arab parties of the futility of trying to drive even a small wedge between American and Israeli interests, which, in turn, would provide more peace and security for Israel.  They posited that an Israel secure and at peace would be beneficial for broader US interests in the Middle East. 

This was their project, and it has failed miserably.

As Ross acknowledged in his obituary for Indyk, neither man came to the issue from a neutral position.  Rather, their efforts were informed from the beginning by a passion for Israel.  Such a passion was part of the problem.  Throughout the peace negotiations of the 1990s, in the words of their colleague Aaron David Miller, America acted as “Israel’s lawyer” instead of as the world’s sole superpower seeking to grab a golden strategic opportunity to end a conflict that had bedeviled American interests for decades.  Indeed, the failure of the Oslo peace process was among the greatest strategic failures in American diplomatic history.  With the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR, and the defeat of Iraq, everything was in place for the US to compel an agreement between two parties who were willing to deal but needed firm American leadership to get the job done.  Instead, Indyk, Ross, and their colleagues dealt in “confidence building measures” and other inconsequential small steps, failing to recognize and decisively act upon this strategic opening that had been presented to them.  The prospects for peace were then killed off by rejectionists on both sides, who were given years to mobilize and organize – including Hamas on the Palestinian side and Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing allies in Israel.

But the “no daylight” mantra has continued to live on beyond the moribund peace process in every US administration since.  Even Barack Obama, who clearly had (prescient) reservations about Netanyahu, signed on to the largest US military aid package in history for Israel, at $38 billion over ten years.  The Biden administration may well match that number in one year, even as Israel undertakes obviously escalatory strikes, such as bombing the Iranian embassy in Damascus and assassinating in Tehran the very Hamas leader with whom it was negotiating for a ceasefire and hostage release.

The premise that underlay the “no daylight” strategy has come to ruin.  Clearly, Israel is less secure today than it was in 1993, as was shown on October 7 and in the subsequent depopulation of swaths of Israel surrounding Gaza and the Lebanese border.  The prospects for peace now lie buried in the rubble of Gaza along with the bodies of tens of thousands of Palestinians.  How many suicide bombers will emerge over the next decade from those who have lost their families?  As the slaughter in Gaza permeates social media, the possibility of Israel being accepted as an ordinary neighbor by the region’s nearly 500 million Arabs and the world’s two billion Muslims is now lost for at least a generation.  This was a prospect that was real and exciting in the 1990s, before Indyk and his team wasted such a golden opportunity for peace.

It is time for the US to step back from the failed “no daylight” approach to Arab-Israeli peace-making.  Israel must begin to pay a political and economic price for its ongoing and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, and for its acts of provocation that have invited regional conflagration.  Constant American support for Israel’s worst actions has allowed Israel’s basest influences to come to dominate a country that is now very much at risk of losing its status as a democracy under the rule of law.

Some political projects in history fail because their underlying strategy contradicts the goals of the broader project.  The American strategy for the past three decades, of hugging Israel so tightly that peace and security would flow, has clearly failed.  If the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same failed thing, then US policy today toward Israel and its neighbors is, indeed, insane.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English Video: “Blinken says ‘decisive moment’ for Gaza ceasefire talks”

Prior to his November 2 shooting rampage in Vienna, Kujtim Fejzullai’s affinity for ISIS was known to Austrian police, given his earlier unsuccessful attempt to cross Turkey’s border to join the ‘caliphate.’ But as far as is known, Fejzullai never actually made contact with ISIS before he swore his allegiance and took out his guns. Rather, he was inspired to violence by the ISIS ideal of global jihad. In other words, he fit the same pattern as Omar Mateen (Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando), Syed Rizwan Farook (San Bernadino shooting), Sayfullo Habibullaevich (Lower Manhatten truck attack) and a host of other jihadi militants: attacks inspired by but with no logistical coordination from ISIS or other global jihadi groups.

Fejzullai’s terror attack epitomizes the fourth wave of global jihad, the idea of nizam, la tanzim (system, not organization) and jihad fardi (personal acts of violence), in the phrasing of ideologue Abu Musab al-Suri. Suri, a committed global jihadi who was arrested in 2005 in Pakistan and handed over to the Americans, had constructed an ideology for 21^st century global jihad, making full use of modern information technologies.

Glenn E. Robinson, Global Jihad: A Brief History , (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2020).[Click]

Modern jihad, he argued, could not rely on old-fashioned organizations, which could so easily be defeated by police, security, and military forces. Rather, it must depend on small scale acts of violence – or irhab, terror, as Suri embraced the word – that rely on modern media to amplify their impacts. Put into contemporary discourse, fourth wave global jihad needed an ever-evolving wiki-narrative constructed by hundreds, even thousands, of jihadi ideologues to weave together many small acts of violence into a fabric of broad, violent, and ultimately effective jihadi resistance.

Violence that is inspired by ISIS (or similar group) but without any logistical or financial connection, is global jihad’s contribution to stochastic terrorism. Ironically, one of the founders of the idea of inspired but logistically unconnected lone wolf attacks, Tom Metzger, died in Southern California two days after Fejzullai’s bloody rampage.

Metzger, Grand Dragon of the KKK and head of the White Aryan Resistance, was one of the first militants to recognize the power of the nascent information revolution to get a message of violence out to millions of followers without ever knowing which of the followers would actually act on that message at any particular point in time. In probabilistic terms, some followers would take up arms, making it a form of stochastic terror (and since such violence almost always targets civilians, it clearly qualifies as terrorism).

Even today, decades after Metzger first envisioned the idea of stochastic terror, followers of white nationalism have perpetrated the most lethal acts of such violence in the west. Recent white nationalist attacks include those by Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo (killed 77) and Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch, New Zealand (killed 51), both of whom claimed inspiration from various Islamophobic authors and, in the case of Tarrant, from Donald Trump as well. The 2017 neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was similarly inspired by Trump, but he had no known logistical connection to the organizers of the deeply anti-Semitic march. All are examples of stochastic terror.

Indeed, in my recent book Global Jihad: A Brief History (Stanford University Press), I argue that global jihadis share much in common with other extreme movements, both religious and secular, over the past century. Global jihadis, white nationalists, Khmer Rouge, Red Guards, Nazi Brownshirts and a handful of other “movements of rage” share the twin characteristics of nihilistic violence and apocalyptic ideologies. These linked characteristics make movements of rage a unique form of violent socio-political movement.

Nihilistic violence is not meaningless violence (in the philosophical sense of nihilism), but rather root-and-branch system-destroying violence (as adopted by 19^th century Russian anarchists). It is violence that represents the apocalyptic ideologies espoused by adherents of movements of rage, and is fundamentally anti-Enlightenment. While movements of rage are by necessity generally weak and almost never come to power, such groups can be particularly deadly. Among the groups movements of rage frequently attack are the modern educated classes, a trait I refer to as gnosicide – the killing of knowledge or those who possess it, who represent a form of “cultural contamination.”

Global Jihad: A Brief History details all four waves of global jihad in an interpretive history, from the ‘Jihadi International’ first wave seeking to liberate occupied lands, to the “America First” second wave seeking to drive the Americans out of the Middle East and pave the way to overthrowing local ‘apostate’ regimes, to the state-building third wave seeking to eliminate apostasy itself in a puritanical state ruled by sharia. ISIS’s extensive use of “jihadi cool” recruitment techniques is likewise explored. The current fourth wave noted above is also examined, as is the broader comparative framework that links global jihad with similar violent groups over the past century.

Glenn E. Robinson, Global Jihad: A Brief History , (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2020).[Click]