Much like the perpetrators of school shootings in America, writes Evelyn Gordon, Palestinians who carry out suicide bombings, stabbings, and so forth are often motivated by a desire for fame (or notoriety) and recognition. So long as the Palestinian Authority (PA)—not to mention Hamas—continues to glorify these “martyrs,” the motive for such attacks will not go away:
During the height of the second intifada (2000-05), Anat Berko interviewed numerous failed suicide bombers—people who were caught before they could blow themselves up. . . . As she put it in a 2014 interview, “The suicide bomber does not act out of suffering or inferior economic status, but rather out of a desire to win social recognition.” . . .
[Last week], the PA announced that it had named a plaza after Maher Younes, an Israeli Arab who kidnapped and murdered an IDF soldier in 1980. And four days before that, it issued a press release about a new game show on official PA television whose host opened it by praising “our heroic martyrs who water the land of Palestine with their blood every day.”. . .
This ongoing glorification of terrorists hasn’t made much of a dent in the Western dogma that Palestinian terror is actually driven by “legitimate grievances” and/or “poverty and distress.” Hence, many Westerners still deem PA incitement a trivial issue undeserving of attention, and Western countries still lavish aid on the PA without insisting on an end to such incitement.
This is clearly counterproductive for the West’s oft-proclaimed desire that Israel withdraw from the West Bank. So long as the PA continues urging its people to slaughter Israelis on a daily basis, such a withdrawal would be completely untenable. Were Israel to remove its soldiers, it would instantly be back in the situation of the second intifada—in which Palestinians had not just motive but also means and opportunity, and used it to slaughter over 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians.
Read more on Evelyn Gordon: http://evelyncgordon.com/what-school-shootings-and-palestinian-terror-have-in-common/