By Arie W. Kruglanski and Joel Singer
A common criticism of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is that Hamas is an idea, and because an idea cannot be defeated, it is futile to fight Hamas. Writing for the New York Times in 2010, Amos Oz, the celebrated Israeli author, made this point forcefully. He wrote: “Hamas is an idea... No idea has ever been defeated by force—not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads, and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one.”
Subsequent commentators largely agreed. Writing in 2023, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Steven J. Erlanger, a distinguished diplomatic correspondent for the Times, faulted the Israeli reaction “because Hamas represents a political and religious idea that cannot be dismantled.” A somewhat different opinion was voiced by Brett Stephens, a New York Times analyst who noted that “You may not be able to kill an idea but you can defang it, just as you can persuade future generations that some ideas have terrible consequences for those who espouse them."
The question, however, is how one can persuade people that "some ideas have terrible consequences," and how, in this case, an alternative idea can be made to appear better, more attractive, or more acceptable than Hamas’ conviction that Israel must be obliterated by force. Even more to the point, the question is whether the Israeli effort to defeat Hamas in Gaza facilitates that persuasion, and helps to banish that notoriously bad idea from people’s minds—thus freeing them to consider a better idea. To address these issues, we turn now to the psychology of ideas to explain when and how they are embraced or abandoned.
A well-kept secret about human beliefs is that they are motivated not only by our (explicit) desire for the truth but also by hidden, ulterior motives, producing so-called “wishful thinking.” As psychological research reveals, ideas are functional; they serve as means to the satisfaction of basic human needs. An idea is accepted if it is seen to serve an important need, and is abandoned if no longer seen to serve it; at that point, individuals become open to alternative ideas that appear to better serve the need in question.
For instance, in 1997, a major Egyptian terror organization, Jemmah Islamiyah (the Islamic Group, or IG), abandoned its virulent ideology after its leaders were incarcerated, and its weapon caches were confiscated by the Egyptian security services. In that circumstance, its leaders got........