Poverty doesn’t cause Arab terrorism

 The main cause of terrorism is ideology. That’s hard for Americans to comprehend because it’s so different from our own experience.

My column on jns.org.

Is poverty the root cause of Palestinian Arab terrorism?

That’s what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken seems to think. At a press conference during his recent visit to the Middle East, Blinken argued that the forthcoming U.S. aid package to Gaza will defeat the terrorists.

“Reconstruction and relief for the people of Gaza” will “undermine Hamas,” he claimed. “I say that because Hamas thrives, unfortunately, on despair, misery, desperation, on a lack of opportunity.” If the United States provides “genuine prospect for opportunity, progress and material improvement in people’s lives,” then “Hamas’s foothold in Gaza will slip. We know that, and I think Hamas knows that.”

We know that? How, exactly? Usually, the way we know things is from past experience. We know something happened in the past, so we conclude that if we duplicate those conditions, that thing will happen again. If the billions of dollars in aid that the United States sent to the Palestinian Arabs in the past had led to a decrease in terrorism and the undermining of Hamas then, yes, it would be reasonable to conclude that we should do more of that. But in reality, the exact opposite happened.

With the signing of the Oslo Accords, America began sending $500 million annually to the Palestinian Arabs, including to Gaza, then ruled by the Palestinian Authority. That’s a total of $10 billion-plus from 1994 to 2006.

If anything would have “undermined” Hamas, that largesse should have done it. Yet somehow, all the “opportunity, progress and material improvement” that money brought didn’t convince the people of Gaza to reject terrorism. On the contrary, in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 2006, the voters democratically gave Hamas a majority of the seats.

In June 2007, Hamas became the ruling regime in Gaza. Every few years since then, Hamas has attacked Israel, the Israelis have bombed Gaza, and the United States and the international community have rushed in with hundreds of millions of dollars in “humanitarian aid.” Yet that aid has never undermined Hamas. Fourteen years later, Hamas is still in power.

Certainly, it’s true that in the United States, poverty contributes to crime. The mistake that Blinken is making is to assume that the Mideast is similar to the American Midwest and that terrorism is just another form of crime. Neither of those assumptions is valid.

Viennese terrorist Kujtim Fejzulai

The main cause of terrorism is ideology, not poverty. That’s hard for some Americans to comprehend because it’s so different from our own experience. Most Americans are not ideological. American culture doesn’t accept political violence. The American government does not promote the use of violence. The religions that most Americans embrace do not espouse violence.

Contrast that with the Middle East, where Muslim fundamentalism actively encourages violence, and governing regimes such as the Palestinian Authority actively promote terrorism and glorify terrorists as heroes and martyrs. The Palestinian Arab public is inculcated daily through the regime-controlled media, with pro-violence messages. Children in P.A. schools absorb those messages daily in their classrooms. Summer camps in Gaza teach children to crawl under barbed wire with weapons, albeit fake ones, in their hands.

The stereotype that Palestinian terrorists are all single, unemployed young men who are lashing out because of their poverty is nonsense. Studies of suicide bombers, for example, have found that many were well-educated, employed, and family men and even women.

Remember the 415 Hamas terrorists whom then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin deported to Lebanon in 1992, in response to a wave of terrorist attacks against Israelis. The Chicago Tribune reported at the time that “many” of the deported terrorists were “businessmen, academics, lawyers [and] doctors.”

Likewise, the co-founder and longtime leader of Hamas, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was a practicing pediatrician. By day, he treated Palestinian children; by night, he organized the murder of Israeli children. Rantisi, of course, is just one example of a successful, educated Palestinian Arab professional who chose to become a mass murderer.

There are countless others.

This applies to other Mideast terrorist groups as well. In 2016, the World Bank undertook a study of 4,000 foreigners who joined ISIS. Here were the report’s key findings:

• “These individuals are far from being uneducated or illiterate … 69 percent of recruits report at least a secondary education … a large fraction have gone on to study at university. Only 15 percent left school before high school and less than 2 percent are illiterate.”

• “Foreign recruits from the Middle East, North Africa and South and East Asia are significantly more educated than what is typical in their region.”

• “The vast majority … of [ISIS] recruits from Africa, South and East Asia and the Middle East … declared having an occupation before joining the organization.”

The authors of the study wrote that, as a result, their conclusion “is consistent with a number of other studies that come to a similar conclusion: poverty is not a driver of radicalization into violent extremism.”

Blinken is wrong. The Biden administration’s plan to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza will not undermine Hamas. It won’t promote moderation. It won’t increase the chances for peace. It will just be throwing good money after bad.

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terrorism.”

 

The ‘pressure-Israel’ machine kicks into high gear

By Stephen M. Flatow

For several weeks now, various editors, journalists and pundits have been busily manufacturing a mini-crisis, presumably in order to provoke tension between the American and Israeli governments.

The critics of Israel are so predictable, it’s almost funny.

Over the past two weeks, as if on cue, The New York Times published an op-ed urging steps to facilitate the creation of a Palestinian state; the RAND Corporation released a new study pushing for the creation of a Palestinian state; and the news media manufactured a mini-crisis between President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in order to put more pressure on Israel to—you guessed it—agree to the creation of a Palestinian state.

I say “as if on cue” and not “on cue” because there’s no evidence that any of this is the product of some kind of coordination or conspiracy. Rather, it’s just the same old alignment of pundits, partisans and self-appointed experts who champion Palestinian statehood and see the Biden administration as a vehicle to accomplish that goal.

This latest wave of pro-Palestinian pressure began on Feb. 10 with the RAND Corporation’s release of a new study, “Alternatives in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”

RAND held meetings with 33 “focus groups,” consisting of a grand total of 270 Arabs and Jews in Israel and abroad, and then concluded from those discussions that creating a Palestinian state is “the most politically viable alternative” of the possible “solutions” to the Arab-Israeli conflict. 

Obviously, a bunch of “focus groups” don’t have any magical insight for solving a conflict that has raged for more than a century. But when you wrap a “study” in the prestigious name of a prominent and well-heeled institution such as the RAND Corporation, you get media attention, which in turn influences public opinion and maybe even political leaders. 

Two days after RAND’s announcement, the Times devoted a large portion of its op-ed page to an essay by Bernard Avishai and Sam Bahour calling on Israel to facilitate various economic steps that would lay the groundwork for the creation of a Palestinian state. Their plan includes “dividing sovereignty in Jerusalem,” by the way. 

Bahour is an American-Palestinian Arab businessman who lives in Ramallah, so it’s almost comical when he and his co-author complain about Palestinians wanting to be “free from military occupation,” as they put it. Bahour should look out his window. He won’t see any Israeli soldiers or Israeli military governor; they left in 1995. Bahour has been living under Palestinian military occupation—the Palestinian Authority, not Israeli military occupation—for the past 26 years. 

His co-author, Bernard Avishai, has penned The Tragedy of Zionism. According to CAMERA, Avishai’s writings about Israel are “hate-filled,” “full of malice” and “drip with loathing of Israel.” Of course, his identification line in the Times op-ed did not mention anything about him viewing Israel as a tragedy; Avishai is just “an American-Israeli professor and writer.” 

The same day that the Bahour-Avishai op-ed appeared, the White House, responding to media inquiries, publicly denied that Biden was “snubbing” Netanyahu by not including him among the first phone calls that the newly elected president made during his first month in office. But evidently, that denial meant nothing to The Los Angeles Times, which five days later ran this headline: “Biden’s Snub of Netanyahu Sets the Tone for More Evenhanded U.S.-Israel Relationship.” 

For several weeks now, various editors, journalists and pundits have been busily manufacturing a mini-crisis over the non-snub, presumably in order to provoke tension between the American and Israeli governments. The critics don’t want the new U.S. administration getting too friendly with the Israelis. They want Biden to be pressuring Israel for that Palestinian state. 

One of those quoted in the various news articles about the non-snub was Aaron Miller, a longtime State Department Arabist who worked hard to get several previous administrations to support Palestinian demands. He seems anxious to push Biden down a similar path. 

In an op-ed on CNN.com last week, Miller trotted out an 11-year-old incident to remind everyone of a previous time Biden got mad at Israel—from which Miller no doubt derives encouragement that maybe Biden can be turned against the Israelis again. 

According to Miller, Biden “was deeply embarrassed by Israel’s 2010 announcement of major expansion of housing units in East Jerusalem.” Almost everything in that sentence is inaccurate. It wasn’t “Israel’s announcement”; it was a routine publication, by the office of Jerusalem’s mayor, of an administrative step. It wasn’t a “major expansion of housing units”; it was a routine approval in the bureaucratic process leading to the eventual construction of housing units. And it wasn’t in “East Jerusalem.” It was in the neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo in northern Jerusalem. 

I’ll give Miller the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is simply ignorant of the geography—which, I admit, is pretty surprising for somebody who was one of the U.S. State Department’s Arab-Israeli “experts” for more than two decades. 

But the alternative would be worse. The alternative explanation would be that Miller knows full well it’s not in “East Jerusalem,” yet he deliberately used that term in order to make it seem as if the apartments were built in Arab territory. 

Whether the result of ignorance, self-interest or old-fashioned bias, the self-proclaimed experts are cranking up their pressure-Israel propaganda machine into high gear. Friends of Israel need to respond—and quickly.

 Stephen M. Flatow is a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, an attorney in New Jersey and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”

This column and others by the author may be read at jns.org.