On October 22, Abdel Rahman al-Shaloudy plowed his car into a Jerusalem bus stop, killing a baby and young woman. A week later, a second driver mowed down another crowd, killing two and injuring a dozen more. A spate of knife attacks followed, in supermarkets, street corners and on roadsides, outdone only by a ghastly attack—carried out with meat cleavers, among other weapons—on worshippers in a Jerusalem synagogue. The day after the synagogue attack, the Israeli military demolished the al-Shaloudy’s family home, officially resuming a highly controversial deterrence policy that takes aim not just at terrorists, but their loved ones.

The demolition policy was last officially in effect over a decade ago, during the bloody years of the Second Intifada, when Israel struggled to counteract a wave of suicide bombings that killed over a thousand of its citizens. But in 2005, as the violence began to recede and after years of complaints about the demolitions’ efficacy and legitimacy, the Israeli defense minister abruptly ended the policy. Now that the demolitions have returned, so have the challenges, and last week the Israeli Supreme Court heard arguments demanding an end to the demolitions. Its ruling is expected soon.

To many, the 2005 Israeli decision was confirmation of its ineffectiveness. At the time, the New York Times reported that the military committee recommending termination “had challenged the existing military position that demolitions were an effective deterrent.” Today, it's treated almost as fact. When Israel announced the policy’s renewal six weeks ago, the Times reported that a 2005 military commission had “found” that the demolitions “rarely worked as a deterrent,” and the Wall Street Journal reported that a military “study” recommended ending the practice “after finding demolitions didn’t deter potential attackers.” Even the U.S. State Department followed suit, as spokesman Jeff Rathke chastised Israel for its apparent irrationality: “This is a practice, I would remind, that the Israeli government itself discontinued in the past, recognizing its effect.”

With the effectiveness question supposedly settled, commentators have lambasted the recent resumption not simply as a strategic or moral mistake, but as vindictiveness and political demagoguery. However, an investigation of the program’s termination in 2005 and a rigorous new study of that era’s demolitions in the January issue of Journal of Politics contradicts the widely held belief that demolitions don't work. In doing so, they serve as a powerful reminder that value judgments—political, legal, and moral—must be separated from a clear-eyed understanding of the policy’s results.

Israel’s house demolitions policy has its origins in the time of the British mandate, the era after the First World War and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, when Great Britain was made responsible for much of the Middle East. Amid growing unrest from local Arab and Jewish populations, the British authorities adopted harsh tactics as they tried to maintain control and order. Britain gave wide authority for local military commanders to confiscate and destroy “any house, structure or land... the inhabitants of which he is satisfied have committed… any offence against these Regulations involving violence.” In the decades following Israel’s 1967 seizure of the West Bank from Jordan, Israeli use of the tactic has been sporadic, spiking in periods of particular unrest.