The trajectory of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka—widely known as the Tamil Tigers—is often cited by proponents of Israel’s stated war aim of entirely eliminating Hamas from Gaza. The Tamil Tigers were one of the most effective and brutal terrorist formations in the world, responsible for the murder of a sitting Sri Lankan president, a former Indian prime minister on Indian soil, and an unending array of prominent Sri Lankans. Eventually, a decimating war waged by the Sri Lankan state between 2006 and 2009—known as the Eelam IV war—resulted in the LTTE’s comprehensive defeat.
But the Tamil precedent is much more ambivalent than the most common references suggest. The precedent indicates that the survival of Hamas will largely be determined by two factors that are themselves still undetermined, and which may operate in tension with one another.
The trajectory of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka—widely known as the Tamil Tigers—is often cited by proponents of Israel’s stated war aim of entirely eliminating Hamas from Gaza. The Tamil Tigers were one of the most effective and brutal terrorist formations in the world, responsible for the murder of a sitting Sri Lankan president, a former Indian prime minister on Indian soil, and an unending array of prominent Sri Lankans. Eventually, a decimating war waged by the Sri Lankan state between 2006 and 2009—known as the Eelam IV war—resulted in the LTTE’s comprehensive defeat.
But the Tamil precedent is much more ambivalent than the most common references suggest. The precedent indicates that the survival of Hamas will largely be determined by two factors that are themselves still undetermined, and which may operate in tension with one another.
The first factor is whether Hamas, as an organization, has been designed to survive a widespread loss of leadership. In the wake of the killing of Yahya Sinwar as well as the earlier assassination of a string of other Hamas leaders, including Ismael Haniyeh (as well as several prominent leaders of the Iran-backed Hezbollah, including its chief, Hassan Nasrallah), many commentators have argued that so-called decapitation is not sufficient to result in the collapse of an insurgent group. The Tamil precedent suggests this analysis is too simplistic.
In the Sri Lankan case, the LTTE leadership was almost completely wiped out. The fatalities included Velupillai Prabhakaran—the group’s founding leader—and any imagined successor. The only exceptions were those in the diaspora, including designated successor Kumaran Pathmanathan, who coordinated fundraising, weapon acquisitions, and smuggling operations from Malaysia and Thailand.
There were also a handful of others, such as a militant known as Colonel Karuna Amman, who switched sides and turned against the LTTE in 2004, and Daya Master, the group’s most prominent spokesman, who surrendered just days before its comprehensive defeat. But all these individuals lacked the support and commitment to revive the movement.
Accordingly, since 2010, Sri Lanka has recorded just two LTTE-linked incidents of killing: a shootout in April 2014, in which three members of an LTTE cadre and one security force trooper were killed, and the death in July 2020 of an LTTE “intelligence agent” as the result of burns sustained in an accidental explosion during a botched attempt to assemble a bomb.
The decapitation of a terrorist group is effective when the pace of the leadership’s elimination outstrips its natural replacement rate. Top leaders of any militant movement are not easily replaced; ideological coherence, strategic and tactical competence, and an element of charisma take years, if not decades, to develop. If leaders are replaced at a rate that outstrips the development of these attributes, command passes into the hands of inexperienced, inept, or ineffectual leaders who steer the group into error and failure.
The two most significant attributes of a militant group’s leadership that need to be preserved—or, from the state’s perspective, targeted—are the top ideological and military leaderships of the group, with military leaders in the theater of conflict the most critical. Ideologues and strategists may survive in the diaspora, but if the field leadership collapses, then so does the movement.
The received wisdom, of course, is that an idea can never be defeated by violence; that unless root causes are addressed, no conflict can be resolved. These have become, for some thinkers, articles of faith. But history shows that protracted wars are not sustained by any set of “root causes,” but rather by a leadership that effectively weaves specific grievances—real and imagined—into a violent ideology.
Far from being the case that an ideology cannot be defeated without addressing root causes, the reality is that an armed ideology grows with violent successes and is delegitimized by defeat. The outcome in the Gaza Strip will depend on the thoroughness with which the Hamas leadership is decimated and the completeness of the military defeat inflicted on the group.
The second factor that will determine the survival of Hamas is whether the widespread civilian casualties committed by Israel in Gaza end up undermining its legitimacy, thus strengthening the legitimacy of Hamas in turn.
This seems likely to have been the exact strategy that Hamas was pursuing with its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The purpose of the carnage was not simply to kill Israelis; the essence of such extremism is that the victim is not the target. The target was the state of Israel, and the objective was to provoke precisely the overreaction that has, in fact, followed. The use of human shields, compounded by aggressive propaganda and information campaigns, has been deployed to counter the military and technological advantages of the dominant power.
In the Tamil case, widespread civilian casualties inflicted by the Sri Lankan government undoubtedly served to strengthen LTTE’s hand. Through the final stages of Eelam IV, civilian casualties became a major issue, with Scandinavian interlocutors—led by Norway, which had brokered the lopsided cease-fire agreement of 2002-08—mounting a strident international campaign against Sri Lanka Armed Forces (SLF) and their alleged human rights violations, even as the LTTE’s excesses were substantially underplayed or ignored.
Those excesses included the herding of roughly 300,000 civilians into shrinking areas of the LTTE’s territorial control as well as the placement of the group’s military assets, including artillery, in these civilian concentrations. Shifting and diminishing “no-fire zones” declared by the SLF were similarly infiltrated by LTTE fighters and firepower, leaving the former the choice to sue for peace or to continue to target the rebels—with the moral burden of collateral civilian casualties.
Thousands escaped the LTTE’s enclosures, but hundreds were demonstratively tortured and executed after failed attempts to escape, even as the international campaign by the so-called peacemakers to halt the advances of the SLF escalated.
Some humanitarian groups accused Sri Lankan political and military leadership during the war of genocide and warned that they would be hauled up before the war crimes tribunal at the International Criminal Court—a threat that is reiterated periodically by Western leaders even now. These threats, as well as a strong domestic argument based on the costs of the war and Sri Lanka’s weakening economy, exerted potentially crippling pressure on the country’s leadership.
The eventual response, however, also demonstrated the central role of political will in the outcome of war, as Sri Lanka’s leadership refused doggedly to succumb to these pressures or restore a negotiation process with the LTTE unless it laid down arms.
In the current case of Hamas, the international media has spent months projecting harrowing images of the estimated 42,000 fatalities in Gaza, particularly those of women and children. The reporting rarely acknowledges that in most Israeli attacks, though not all, Hamas fighters and weapons caches are also successfully targeted. With few exceptions, the civilian casualties predominate in media attention over Israeli successes.
None of this is intended to assert that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been innocent of all excess. But civilian fatalities were largely unavoidable given the subterranean networks constructed by Hamas that lie beneath Gaza’s civilian population. Hamas continues to locate its operational networks and hideouts—such as locations where hostages are held—in dense civilian population centers, including schools and hospitals. Hamas forces and leadership have also moved with the civilian populations into the changing so-called “safe zones” announced by the IDF.
And yet, much of the popular imagery seeks to shift the entire moral burden to the IDF, while the burden of culpability on Hamas is underplayed, even as Israel is pressured to practice restraint. Indeed, the higher the civilian toll, the more that the Hamas strategy would be seen as succeeding in underlining what the group argues is the illegitimacy of Israel’s very existence.
History is the construction of narratives, and it remains to be seen which narrative will prevail at the end of the present conflict, whatever its outcome. Even in the event of a thorough Hamas defeat, there may be attempts to yoke the group’s so-called sacrifices and martyrdom to efforts for revival by survivors within Hamas, or by successor groups—and this is the outcome that the Hamas leadership would hope for.
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