Part Four:

Armed capability and administrative control do not fully explain organisational resilience. A supporting ideological ecosystem fixes grievance, prescribes duty, and allocates status. Its core propositions are stable: collective victimhood, resistance as obligation, martyrdom as social advancement, and divine sanction. The question is whether durable change is possible while this environment retains agenda-setting power, and whether it can be weakened without an assault on religion or identity.

Demand conditions help to explain persistence. Repeated shocks, weak labour markets, and uneven rule of law create appetite for scripts that offer certainty and meaning. Where institutional performance is poor, a repertoire that equates violence with duty and endurance with achievement faces limited competition. Electoral cycles and diplomacy do not alter this preference unless they change incentives in daily life and in the local status economy. In such settings, a worldview that bundles grievance, obligation, and status tends to dominate.

Supply conditions matter as well. The ecosystem is not purely local. Regional satellite channels, cross-border religious movements, exiled political offices, and foreign clerics transmit messages that present confrontation as piety in action. Content from Doha, Istanbul, and Tehran can stabilise obligation long after local institutions are disrupted. Digital platforms amplify this flow. Social networks, encrypted channels, and online sermon archives circulate funerals, testimonials, and recruitment materials in short formats optimised for phones. The same environment rewards public displays of loyalty, raising the social cost of disengagement.

Addressing the ecosystem requires more than........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)