Global Guerrillas

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Global Guerrillas
The Anti-Israel Swarm

The Anti-Israel Swarm

We've explored some of the tribal dynamics animating the anti-Israel network swarm, now let's dig into the mechanics of how it works to figure out where it is headed.

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John Robb
Nov 14, 2023
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Global Guerrillas
The Anti-Israel Swarm
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Over the past several weeks, the networked swarm ignited by the Israel/Hamas war has iterated through many different narratives until they found the right one.

  • Pro-Hamas or Pro-Palestine

  • Anti-Semitic or Anti-Israeli

  • Anti-Israel: this works.

To understand why anti-Israel was chosen and why it is effective, let’s dig into how networked swarms work.

NOTE: if you want to generate a better image, send it to me.

Organization

Networked swarms aren’t just amorphous, decentralized mobs. They use an open-source organizational structure. This type of organization doesn’t have a hierarchy or a static leadership group. It’s a network of many groups and individuals operating together loosely to achieve a common goal.

We’ve seen open-source organizations used for warfare in the past, from insurgencies to protests to politics and (now) global warfare (against states). For example;

The insurgency fighting US forces in Iraq twenty years ago, used a decentralized open source organizational structure (out of necessity). It allowed them to cobble together seventy different guerrilla groups into a insurgency capable of fighting US forces and the Iraqi government. Each group had their own motivation for joining the insurgency, ranging from pro-Saddam Baathists to anti-Saddam Baathists to tribal to criminal to (different flavors of) Jihadi. Many of these groups would have killed each other if locked in the same room together. This decentralized organizational structure made it extremely hard to defeat — months spent identifying, compromising, and then rolling up one group, left 69 more to contend with.

Cohesion

Every participant in an open-source organization has their own motivations for participating. This diverse group can only agree on the promise of the common goal (also known as the plausible promise), and each group has a unique interpretation of what achieving it means. Here’s some more detail on how plausible promises/goals work and how these requirements impacted the anti-Israel swarm’s decision-making:

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