Poverty Isn’t What Causes Gaza’s Endemic Violence. It’s the Other Way Around

Reports and analyses of the violence emanating from Gaza—which has now resulted in the destruction of thousands of acres of Israeli farmland—inevitably connect it to the Strip’s immiseration. Across the political spectrum, commentators and policymakers are urging Jerusalem to take steps to improve the economic situation there once calm returns, arguing that doing otherwise will increase the likelihood of further escalation. To Efraim Karsh, this approach has things exactly backward:

In the modern world it is not the poor and oppressed who have carried out the worst acts of terrorism and violence, but rather the militant vanguards from among the better educated and more moneyed circles of society—be they homegrown terrorist groups in the West or their Middle Eastern counterparts.

Yasir Arafat, for instance, was an engineer, and his fellow arch-terrorist George Habash—the pioneer of aircraft hijacking—was a physician. . . . Nor has Hamas been an exception to this rule. Not only has its leadership been highly educated, but it has gone to great lengths to educate its followers, notably through the takeover of the Islamic University in Gaza and its transformation into a hothouse for indoctrinating generations of militants and terrorists. . . .

By contrast, successive public opinion polls among the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the 1990s revealed far stronger support for the nascent peace process with Israel, and opposition to terrorism, among the poorer and less educated parts of society—representing the vast majority of the population. . . .

At the time of the September 1993 signing of the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles, conditions in the territories were far better than in most Arab states—despite the steep economic decline caused by the intifada of 1987-93. But within six months of Arafat’s arrival in Gaza in July 1994, the standard of living in the Strip fell by 25 percent. . . . By the time of Arafat’s death in November 2004, his terror war had slashed . . . income to a fraction of its earlier levels, with real GDP per capita some 35 percent below the pre-September 2000 level. . . .

[S]o long as Gaza continues to be governed by Hamas’s rule of the jungle, no Palestinian civil society, let alone a viable state, can develop. . . . [I]t will only be when the population sweeps its oppressive rulers from power, eradicates endemic violence from political and social life, and teaches the virtues of coexistence with Israel that the Strip can look forward to a better future.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza Strip, Hamas, Israel & Zionism, Palestinian terror, Yasir Arafat

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

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More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF