The Bulletin’s Feb. 1 editorial argued: “Had the Jewish Community Federation and other American Jewish groups aided Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza over the years, there’s a good chance Hamas would never have gained a foothold…It’s not too late for Israel and American Jews to offer aid or even adopt individual Palestinian villlages and possibly sway them away from the militants.”
The idea that poverty is a prime factor in motivating Palestinians to become terrorists — that material deprivation drives young Arabs to desperation and then terrorism — is also the reasoning behind the nearly $1 billion the United States has given to the Palestinians since 1994, and the even larger amounts that the European Union has given them. These governments claim that if young Arabs have jobs, they would have something to lose by becoming terrorists, so they would have a strong incentive to maintain normal, peaceful lives.
In fact, however, many of the leading Palestinian terrorists, including some suicide bombers, are university graduates, are married and have good jobs. Consider one example from many: Muhammad Abu Jamous, who was part of a terror squad that killed four Israeli soldiers in Gaza on Jan. 9. According to the New York Times, Abu Jamous was “a member of the Palestinian Navy [and] something of a minor celebrity. He had been a runner on the Palestinian national team, competing in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He married just three months ago, and his wife is two months pregnant.”
In other words, he had everything to lose. He had a good job. He was a newlywed and his wife is already expecting a child. He had every logical reason to live peacefully and quietly. Yet he picked up a gun and went out to kill innocent Israelis.
The Palestinian Arabs know that if they make peace with Israel, their economy would improve dramatically, as would their material lives. Yet they continue to wage war against Israel — because the problem is not the economy. The problem is their ideology of hatred for Jews and refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst.
An editorial in the Jerusalem Post once pointed out that “there is no reason to believe that money would…persuade Palestinians to coexist with Israel…not all problems can be solved with money…Americans are particularly aware of the limitations of financial aid in resolving social and political problems. Throwing staggering amounts of government and private funds at inner-city slums, the drug problem and affirmative action for minorities had done little to ameliorate intractable problems. It is even less likely that the Arab-Israeli conflict can be reduced to materialist terms. The intolerance in the Arab world for Israel’s existence does not stem from economic hardship. It is mostly religiously and nationalistically inspired.”
Khalid M. Amayreh, a Palestinian journalist, has written: “Several studies have shown that a substantial majority of Islamists [Muslim fundamentalists] and their supporters come from the middle and upper socioeconomic strata…The claim that ‘Islamic terrorism in Israel, as elsewhere, is the product of poverty, backwardness and ignorance’ is simply nonsense.”
The historical record clearly demonstrates that Arab extremist ideology, rather than poverty, is at the core of the Arab-Jewish conflict. During the 1920s and 1930s, for example, Jewish immigration to Palestine brought the country a variety of economic improvements, including new jobs for many Arabs. Yet there was mass Palestinian Arab violence against Jews in 1920, 1921, 1929 and throughout 1936 to 1939.
Nor were the Arab wars against Israel (1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973) fought for economic reasons. Nor was the constant Palestinian Arab terrorism against Israel during the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s motivated by economic troubles.
Whether in good economic times or bad, the Arabs remained committed to murdering Jews and seeking Israel’s destruction.
The ranks of the current Palestinian terrorist groups have been filled by a generation of radical young Arab nationalists, many of them university-educated. (Israel built six universities and 16 other institutions of higher education in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.) These recruits are relatively well-to-do, organizing mass violence for ideological, not economic, reasons.
As the late Professor Amost Perlmutter once pointed out, the leadership of the Hamas terrorist movement — which supplies most of the suicide bombers — “is made up of modern, middle- and upper-middle-class professionals — of journalists, lawyers, engineers and doctors.” Indeed, news accounts of the 400 Hamas leaders who were temporarily deported to Lebanon in 1992 and 1993 described the deportees as well-educated professionals.
Building factories or hospitals will not put an end to hatred of Israel. Devoted to ideologies of extreme Arab nationalism or extremist Islam, the Palestinians reject the concept of a sovereign non-Muslim state in the Muslim Middle East.
Giving them American taxpayers’ dollars won’t change that.