Does Violence Lead to More Violence?

does it always?

Iwo Jima plus seventy years

One of the things everyone knows about Gaza is that the Israeli attack is just creating more violence, as the next generation of Palestinians watches the bombs fall. Inevitably, the story goes, the young are learning hate and rage, and will pay it forward. Here’s the upscale think tank version of the argument, under the headline, “Israel risks creating a newly traumatized and radicalized generation of Palestinians”:

What will remain of Gaza’s population, and among Palestinians elsewhere in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and inside Israel proper, will be a newly traumatized and radicalized generation of youth, none of whom were born or of voting age when Hamas was elected…As a result, Hamas’s self-declared raison d’etre—“resisting the [Israeli] occupation with all means and methods”—will only grow in the minds of Palestinian youth. This will render unsuccessful Israel’s attempts to eliminate Hamas militarily.

Here’s an example of the Twitter rando version, which you’ll see over and over again if you engage with social media at all:

But is that true? Without advocating for brutality, I find myself looking for historical examples and mostly coming up with the opposite. To start managing the “yes, but” up front, there are many ways of waging war, and the extractive nation-building warfare of an imperial constabulary — low-grade fighting, prolonged counterinsurgency without decisive violence — does seem to often lead to more violence and “blowback” over time. But what Israel is doing now in Gaza seems like something else entirely.

If this violence will create “the next generation of Hamas,” then the children of the Germans who were firebombed in Dresden and Hamburg should be constantly strapping on suicide vests and attacking Ramstein air base. After the Wounded Knee massacre, it shouldn’t be safe for white settlers to live near the Lakota, and South Dakota should be a hellscape. Or consider North Vietnam, which won its war: “The US carried out more than a million bombing raids during the 20-year conflict, dropping some 5 million tonnes of ordnance on the Southeast Asian country.” After the war, a substantial Vietnamese population resettled in California. Violence trains the next generation to hate, right? So the Vietnamese must constantly attack Orange County.

The horror of total war has mostly not seemed to produce more violence. It seems to have mostly left later generations brutalized and horrified, and highly unlikely to go on fighting. Waging war decisively seems to be historically….decisive? The experience of crushing defeat seems to be a cycle-breaker, and even a horrifyingly costly victory — as for the North Vietnamese — seems to limit the appetite of next generations for more war.

Japan nurtured a profoundly violent warrior culture for a long time, with the nation’s soldiers serving as brutal invaders and horrible occupiers, then faced a ghastly campaign of firebombing and two nuclear bombs. Japan no longer has a brutal martial culture; the next generations didn’t become the new warriors. The currently popular theory says that they had to: the children witnessing this horror will be the next generation of militants, because trauma teaches violence. Tomorrow’s Hamas comes from today’s JDAMs. The people who lost World War II don’t seem to prove that theory.

Someone is going to say in the comments that I have blood on my fangs, but the point isn’t to cheerlead for the killing in Gaza. The point is to consider evidence about what comes next, and to ask what the comparable examples are. Is it factually true that youth, traumatized by war, become the violent next generation? We ran this experiment a lot in the twentieth century, and I think we have some strong hints at a consistent answer.

Hamas has infamously trained children for violence:

Unless Gaza breaks with the pattern of human history, my guess is that sustained air strikes, on a massive scale, make the next generation romanticize violent warfare against Israel a whole lot less. Death from the sky doesn’t seem to make people on the ground feel powerful and thirsty for a fight.

Unusually, a columnist at the newsletter for high-status idiots in the American green zone offers a sort-of nuanced version of the narrative-of-the-moment. David Ignatius:

Fighting Hamas is a just war, but it must be accompanied by a clear plan, framed by the United States and friendly Arab countries working with a new generation of Palestinian leaders, to rebuild Gaza and invest in the West Bank. Otherwise, the war will create nothing but more rage in a barren land.

A brutal war followed by a punitive peace could make the next generations embrace violence, as the rotten peace at the end of World War I did. But a prolonged and extraordinarily grim war in Gaza, followed by a magnanimous settlement — that example has precedents, and they seem to suggest the possibility of a real subsequent peace. That’s a dark thing to say, but we seem to keep learning from example that war without mercy, waged until it attains the goals of the warmakers, works to produce sustained calm and order. The thing that currently passes for a given, the inevitability of future generations of Hamas arising from the trauma of the current war, doesn’t strike me as a given.

I’m not telling you that this is the answer I like. I’m telling you that this is the answer that seems the most likely to be factually true. Talk me out of it, if you have the other argument.

“Tell me how this ends.”