The One and the Many |
Terror’s advantage is the high multiplication factor it creates.
There was a story during the First Lebanon War about a battle between Israeli and Lebanese forces. The fighting went on for hours, and when it was over, the Israelis found that a single Lebanese youth had run to different positions and fired on them. The Israelis had assumed that they were facing a reasonably large force instead of one child running with his AK-47 here and there and pinning them down for an extended period of time.
One of the purposes of terror is to leverage a small number of terrorists into scaring the daylights out of thousands or even millions of people. Let’s look at Bondi Beach. On the assumption that a father and son from Pakistan fired several dozen rounds at people attending a Chanukah celebration, you have a classic terror situation. In the event itself, two people had over a thousand potential targets. Let’s ignore for the moment whether the shooters had help from others or instructions from Tehran or Damascus. These two guys shot nearly four dozen people, 15 of whom were killed. But let’s move past Bondi Beach. How many people who planned to attend Chabad public candlelightings, not only in Australia but throughout the world, have second thoughts? How many people will stay home or avoid large gatherings because of the actions of two Muslim terrorists? How many resources were thrown into protecting similar lightings in Europe and the U.S.? The point is that two people, in the space of 15 minutes, could change the behavior of thousands or tens of thousands of people throughout the globe. And that is the multiplicative effect of terror: one or a few attacks can completely change the way large populations behave.
There was a period during the second intifada when Israel decided to take out the Hamas leadership in Gaza. The biggest strike was against Sheikh........