"The first thing smart militants do is recognize that civilian attacks are a recipe for political failure," writes Max Abrahms, a political science professor at Northeastern University and author of Rules for Rebels: The Science of Victory in Militant History, a lengthy study of terrorism and insurgency. "You might say that the first rule for rebels is to not use terrorism at all."
It's for this reason that Abrahms believes that Hamas' brutal attack on Israeli civilians is not only immoral but "a major strategic mistake" for the Palestinian cause. Abrahms traveled to the West Bank shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks amid a wave of Palestinian terrorism known as the "Second Intifada." What he found became the subject of his dissertation. While a previous influential study had concluded that Palestinian terrorism often resulted in "success" in achieving "significant territorial concessions," what Abrahms discovered by talking with Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank is that the terrorism "eroded support for territorial concessions while creating support for a fence" and likely blocked the possibility of independent statehood.
