Anonymous Soldiers

Preface
Does terrorism work? Its targets and victims steadfastly maintain that it does not, while its practitioners and apologists claim that it does. Schol­ars and analysts are divided. Given the untold death and destruction wrought by terrorists throughout history, the question has an undeniable relevance that has only intensified since the September 11, 2001, attacks. Yet a definitive answer unaccountably remains as elusive as a universally accepted definition of the phenomenon itself.
 
Terrorists can never win outright, Prime Minister Ian Smith of Rhodesia confidently declared in 1977. Following the 1983 suicide truck bombing that killed 241 U.S. military service personnel in Lebanon, President Ronald Reagan defiantly proclaimed that the main thing is to show that terrorism doesn t work . . . [and] to prove that terrorist acts are not going to drive us away. Margaret Thatcher described the attempt by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) to kill her at the 1984 Conservative Party Conference as illustrative not only of a failed attack but of a fundamentally futile strategy. And in July 2006, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel promised that his government will not give in to blackmail and will not negotiate with terrorists when it comes to the lives of Israel Defence Force soldiers.
 
Scholars have made similarly sweeping claims. The Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling observed in 1991 that despite considerable exertion, terrorists mostly have little to show for their efforts except for fleeting attention and evanescent publicity. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the historical novelist cum military historian Caleb Carr consolingly averred, The strategy of terror is a spectacularly failed one. And in a 2006 article unambiguously titled Why Terrorism Does Not Work, the political scientist Max Abrahms argued that terrorism was also tactically ineffective. The notion that terrorism is an effective coercive instrument, he

Bruce Hoffman is the director of the Center for Security Studies and director of the Security Stud­ies Program at Georgetown University s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is also a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy s Combating Terrorism Center. His previous books include Inside Terrorism, The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama Bin Laden s Death, and The Failure of British Military Strategy Within Palestine, 1939 1947.

Riveting. . . . [A] thought-provoking book. The New York Times Book Review

Gripping. . . . Pathbreaking. The Wall Street Journal

Remarkable. . . . A magisterial history that is indispensable to anyone wishing to understand how and why the State of Israel came into existence. Foreign Affairs

Anonymous Soldiers does a wonderful job of elucidating this enormously complex and important period in Jewish history. Tablet

Indispensable. . . . A first-rate portrait. . . . [A] carefully researched and balanced treatment of the Jewish underground. . . . [Anonymous Soldiers] add[s] substantially to the contemporary debate about the aspirations, motivations and tactics of resistance movements, and the challenges inherent in addressing them. The Washington Post

One to read. . . . Those interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict will want this book in their library. . . . It s straightforward scholarship, written in an interesting style, and richly footnoted. St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A detailed chronicle. . . . What makes Anonymous Soldiers a valuable contribution to the historiography of the revolt is that Hoffman is the first scholar of the subject to fully utilize the many thousands of British intelligence documents from the 1940s that have been declassified in recent years. Haaretz

This book will become a classic on the shelf of those who seek to un­derstand and fight against non-state actors, who were themselves inspired by the Israeli example. Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower and Thirteen Days in September

Gripping. . . . An even-handed work of history that is, at the same time, a morally illuminating and challenging work about the role of violence in politics. [Hoffman] also confronts us with the unsettling truth that sometimes, and especially when the adversary is a democracy that has lost its will to fight, terrorism will succeed. Jewish Journal

This is the most important book for years on the prehistory of the state of Israel.