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 on BESA Center: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/its-not-the-economy-stupid/