Immediately after the bloody attack, Minister of Defense Ehud Barak promised to check to see whether the army could legally demolish the terrorist’s house. The implication was that, if the lawyers okayed it, that’s what Barak would do.

During the decades of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, this was standard procedure. The claim was that demolishing a terrorist’s house had a deterrent effect on potential terrorists. If they knew that their whole family would suffer, they’d think twice about killing Jews.

The same logic was used to justify a whole host of lesser collective punishments meted out to the Palestinians. When I served in the West Bank as a reservist during the first Intifada, we forced Palestinians to black out nationalist graffiti, to climb up electric poles to take down Palestinian flags, and to dismantle jerrybuilt roadblocks made of boulders. No one claimed that the Palestinians we force to do these things were the ones who had painted the graffiti, put up the flags, or built the roadblocks. We knew for a fact that they hadn’t. But the argument was that if they had to do these things, they would make sure that such things didn’t happen in their neighborhood any more.

I saw no evidence at that time that this policy worked. As far as I could tell, such policies were based not on evidence. Rather, they satisfied two non-rational, emotional urges: to get back at the Palestinians for daring to oppose us, and to give the high army command something to report to the political leadership. We’re not sitting on our hands, we’re actually doing something about the uprising!

In fact, almost unnoticed, the army stopped demolishing terrorists’ houses about three years ago. No official reasons was given, but an article that appeared in Ha’aretz’s Hebrew edition on February 17, 2005 tells us why. The chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon, received a report from a special committee that he had been set up to study the procedure. After examining the procedure empirically, it reached the conclusion (according to the news article—the report was never made public) that destroying the homes of terrorists causes more damage than benefit. In other words, it produces more terrorist attacks than it prevents.

Efrat Silber, a researcher whose PhD dissertation is an empirical study of home demolition and other procedures used by Israel to prevent terrorism, reached a similar conclusion. While she told me on the phone today that, as one might expect with such a complex subject, there is evidence that points both ways, the bottom line is that home demolitions don’t work. (I asked her for a copy of her dissertation and will write more about it in a future post.)

Now, if you read my previous post, “Getting the Treatment Right,” this will sound very familiar. Demolishing terrorists’ houses is the homeopathy of anti-terror strategy. Lots of people think it sounds great, and a lot of people believe it. But for years and years no one bothered to test it empirically to see if it really worked. And when someone did—first an army study commission and then an independent researcher—it turns out that, as intuitive as it might be, it’s quackery.

And that’s a shame. Quack medicine is a waste of money, and it can be dangerous if it keeps people from seeking and receiving effective conventional treatments. Quack anti-terror tactics waste resources and prevent the military and political leadership from seeking effective and evidence-based ways of fighting terrorism.

None of this will convince the fanatics who tried to march into Jabel Mukaber yesterday. They don’t want to fight terror effectively. They want revenge. I understand their anger, but they are deluded. They should get their heads checked by a qualified, and conventional, physician.