Chris Dillow links to a fascinating piece of regression analysis: The Shape of Things to Come? Assessing the Effectiveness of Suicide Attacks and Targeted Killings by David Jaeger and M. Daniele Paserman, which he interprets as proving that 'suicide bombing doesn't work' in that each attack predictably produces an Israeli armed response which kills on average seven Palestinians for each Jew killed in the original attack.
However Jaeger and Paserman are by no means as emphatic in their conclusions as Chris suggests they are.
Rather they argue that yes indeed suicide bombings appear counter-productive in the short term - if the main measurement one uses is a simple ratio of Israeli to Palestinian deaths - but nevertheless finally conclude that it may well have contributed significantly to the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and that as their title suggests suicide bombing is likely to be a feature of similarly asymmetric conflicts in the future.
The true logic of at least Palestinian suicide bombing is to my mind rather different in that it represents not just a desperate tactic in an asymmetrical conflict but a complete and radical inversion of normal military rationality.
While for regular soldiers the fundamental aim is to minimise ones own casualties while maximising those of the enemy, the tactics of Hamas and other radical Palestinian groups are deliberately designed to provoke an Israeli response which maximises the casualties on their own side - as it is these casualties that legitimate and strengthen their struggle, while de-legitimising the occupation (and in the long run the existence of the zionist entity) to the rest of the world.
In a sense they are practising a form of perverted Gandhianism - the justification of their actions is the level of violence that they are able to provoke.
So what Dillow identifies as an indicator of failure is in fact to Hamas and its competitors the clearest indicator of success - a massively negative kill ratio in Israel's favour.
This is shown even more clearly by the data in the new Human Rights Watch report into the Palestinians rocket attacks into Israel and the retaliatory IDF shelling of Gaza.
Between the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and May 2007, Palestinian 'gunmen' (as HRW coyly calls them) fired no fewer than 2,700 home-made rockets in the general direction of Israel which killed a grand total of 4 Israelis and 2 Gazans (the missiles being so inaccurate that many fell short).
Up until November 2006 Israel fired back 14,617 155mm artillery shells into Gaza in retaliatory strikes which killed 59 Palestinians (a remarkably low figure given the huge destructive power of each shell) - but stopped doing so after a single shell killed 23 civilians on 8 November.
Within two weeks of the Israelis declaring that they would no longer respond with artillery strikes the Qassam offensive ended and no further significant attacks were made for 6 months.
Coincidence?
Update:
The current (6 July) fighting in Gaza seems to illustrate the change of IDF tactics from 'indiscriminate fire' (although if 14,617 155mm shells had really been fired indiscriminately into one of the most densely built up areas of the planet, most of Gaza would be in ruins) that was the standard response to Qassam attacks up to November 2006, back to the targeted combined arms operations that were used to retaliate against suicide bombers in 2000-2005.
In a sense this too represents an inversion of normal military logic with Israel effectively accepting the risk of greater military casualties on their side to minimise the (civilian) casualties on the enemy's.
Jaeger and Paserman actually do present some data about the effectiveness of such attacks and cite studies indicating that in 80% of cases the attacks hit the targets they were intended to hit (which raises the question of what is a morally acceptable margin of error).
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