No cliché has dominated the discourse on the Gaza
situation more than the perception of Palestinian violence as a corollary of
the Strip’s dire economic condition. No sooner had Hamas and Israel been locked
in yet another armed confrontation over the past weeks than the media, foreign
policy experts and politicians throughout the world urged the immediate
rehabilitation of Gaza as panacea to its endemic propensity for violence. Even
senior members of the Israel Defense Forces opined that a “nonmilitary process”
of humanitarian aid could produce a major change in the Gaza situation.
It is not Gaza’s economic malaise that has precipitated
Palestinian violence; rather, it is the endemic violence that has caused the
Strip’s humanitarian crisis.
Yasser Arafat, was an engineer, and his fellow arch
terrorist George Habash – the pioneer of aircraft hijacking – a physician.
Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a schoolteacher, while
his erstwhile successor, Sayyid Qutb, whose zealous brand of Islam fired
generations of terrorists, including the group behind the assassination of
Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, was a literary critic and essayist.
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.
Hamas founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, studied at the
al-Azhar University in Cairo, probably the Islamic world’s most prestigious
institution of higher religious learning, while his successor, Abdel Aziz
Rantisi, was a physician, as is Hamas cofounder Mahmoud Zahar. The group’s
current leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and Muhammad Def, head of Hamas’s military
wing, are graduates of the Islamic University of Gaza, while Khaled Mashaal
studied physics in Kuwait, where he resided until 1990. Hardly the products of
deprivation and despair.
This propensity for violence among the educated and
moneyed classes of Palestinian society was starkly reflected in the identity of
the 156 men and eight women who detonated themselves in Israel’s towns and
cities during the first five years of the “al-Aqsa Intifada,” murdering 525
people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. A mere 9% of the
perpetrators had basic education, while 22% were university graduates and 34%
were high school graduates.
Likewise, a comprehensive study of Hamas and
Islamic Jihad suicide terrorists from the late 1980s to 2003 found that only
13% came from a poor background, compared with 32% of the Palestinian
population in general. More than half of suicide bombers had entered further
education, compared with just 15% of the general population.
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.
In short, it is not socioeconomic despair but the total
rejection of Israel’s right to exist, inculcated by the PLO and Hamas in their
hapless West Bank and Gaza subjects over the past 25 years, which underlies the
relentless anti-Israel violence emanating from these territories and its
attendant economic stagnation and decline.
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%, and more than half
of the area’s residents claimed to have been happier under Israel. Even so, at
the time Arafat launched his war of terrorism in September 2000, Palestinian
income per capita was nearly double Syria’s, more than four times Yemen’s, and
10% higher than Jordan’s – one of the better-off Arab states. Only the oilrich
Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.
By the time of Arafat’s death, in November 2004, his
terrorism war had slashed this income to a fraction of its earlier levels, with
real GDP per capita some 35% below the pre-September 2000 level, unemployment
more than doubling, and numerous Palestinians reduced to poverty and
despondency.
This means that so 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. Just as the creation of free and democratic societies in
Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive
sociopolitical and educational transformation, so, too, it is only when the local
population sweeps its oppressive rulers from power, eradicates the endemic
violence from political and social life, and teaches the virtues of coexistence
with Israel that Gaza can look forward to a better future.
