A new article in The Journal of Politics (gated) — ”Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism” (draft 2009, ungated) by Benmelecha, Berrebia, and Klora — examines one of the connections between poverty and terrorism:

This article analyzes the link between economic conditions and the quality of suicide terrorism. While the existing empirical literature shows that poverty and economic conditions are not correlated with the quantity of terror, theory predicts that poverty and poor economic conditions may affect the quality of terror. Poor economic conditions may lead more able and better-educated individuals to participate in terror attacks, allowing terror organizations to send better-qualified terrorists to more complex, higher-impact terror missions. Using the universe of Palestinian suicide terrorists who acted against Israeli targets in 2000–06, we provide evidence of the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics of suicide terrorists, and the targets they attack. High levels of unemployment enable terror organizations to recruit better educated, more mature, and more experienced suicide terrorists, who in turn attack more important Israeli targets.

There’s also this piece, posted yesterday by Brad Parks at the Monkey Cage, which looks at another one of the connections between poverty and terrorism:

Since 9/11, the USG has promoted foreign assistance as a useful tool for combating global terrorism. Indeed, the case for foreign aid is often made on the basis of its presumed efficacy inpreventing terrorism. But, until recently, the evidence supporting these claims was rather flimsy.

Formal models of the aid-terrorism relationship suggest that aid may prevent terrorism when it is targeted in ways that promote human capital through education (Azam and Thelen 2008; Buenode Mesquita 2005). However, many of these theoretical arguments have not been subjected to careful empirical scrutiny because of insufficiently granular data.

A recent article by Joseph Young and Michael Findley seeks to correct these weaknesses.  AidData’s detailed activity coding methodology allows the authors to disaggregate aid figures by project purpose. In their analysis, Young and Findley include separate measures of education aid to test the specific argument that aid targeted to education may prevent terrorism. They are also able to examine the potentially substitutable effects of general budget aid, health aid, and aid tied to counterterrorism.

Here is a brief summary of their findings:

Does foreign aid reduce terrorism? We examine whether foreign aid decreases terrorism by analyzing whether aid targeted toward certain sectors is more effective than others. We use the most comprehensive databases on foreign aid and transnational terrorism—AidData andITERATE—to provide a series of statistical tests. Our results show that foreign aid decreases terrorism especially when targeted toward sectors, such as education, health, civil society, and conflict prevention. These sector-level results indicate that foreign aid can be an effective instrument in fighting terrorism if allocated in appropriate ways.

HT: Michael Tofias.

The Jerusalem Post published as an op-ed today a piece by Erika Dreifus — whose work I must admit I’ve never read — that describes a serious problem she faces. She’s an American author who has to keep unsubscribing from email lists, unfollowing other authors on Twitter, and declining to join petition campaigns because they all become “a reliable source of condemnation for Operation Cast Lead,” “condemning Israel for enforcing the Gaza blockade,” or some other such thing.

She writes, “In defending Israel, you risk alienating friends, editors and critics. As open-minded as these ‘liberal or leftist’ circles claim to be, they are as quick as their analogues at the other end of the spectrum to judge and scorn. There is no place for centrists.”

I had a difficult time with this op-ed, for a whole host of reasons. The most obvious problem is that the author just doesn’t seem like a centrist to me. She says, toward the end of the piece, that she’d like to gain “the ability to acknowledge [Israel’s] flaws publicly,” but nowhere does she explain why she feels she can’t do this now. What she really seems to be saying is that it deeply offends her whenever anyone else — Jewish, non-Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, or American — brings up a single flaw with Israel.

What’s more, all of the examples she gives of things that have forced her to resign, unfollow, and unsubscribe seem like relatively reasonable complaints, ones that a centrist would understand and be able to discuss in a reasonable manner. Indeed, I consider myself a centrist and I often have public conversations about Israel, the Palestinians, and precisely the criticisms that Dreifus felt were so over-the-top that she needed to resign in protest and horror. Indeed, if you look back through the past two years of my blogging here, you’ll find plenty of places where I’m able both to defend and to criticize Israeli policy. The same is true of the way that I write about American policy.

Indeed, it’s possible to care about a country, to hope for the best for its citizens, and also to continually hold its leadership to standards of respect for human rights and international law. The opposite position to that one isn’t centrism; it’s the nationalist “My country right or wrong” sort of thinking that forces someone to cover her eyes and ears whenever there’s challenges to her view of that country as perfectly virtuous and good.

If Dreifus really cares about the way that Israel is perceived, it’s important for her to enagage in dialogue with people who have a different perception of the country. But it’s also desperately important for her to take a good look at the country she loves because it’s often the case that caring so much blinds us to problems that have arisen. Think, for example, of people who care deeply about — and therefore end up enabling — a drug addicted friend or loved one.

Indeed, if a person cannot recognize problems with Operation Cast Lead, if she cannot stand to hear — even from those who support Israel — that the Gaza blockade is bad policy, then it seems clear to me that she’s either not the centrist she believes herself to be or else she simply doesn’t know enough about the country she loves. Perhaps she knows more than she lets on in the op-ed, of course. But, as it’s written, it’s nothing more than a sad lament from someone who claims she wants to find “a place where I can be an American writer and a Zionist” but whose Zionism seems to preclude finding that place.

Just in time for the beginning of my annual “Israel and the Middle East” course this week:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement said on Sunday it would have to re-evaluate its reconciliation pact with the Islamist Hamas group following the rejection of a Fatah visit to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip last week.

In a statement, Fatah’s Central Committee said Hamas’ behavior showed it was not interested in the implementation of the reconciliation agreement signed in Cairo last year, which included the formation of a unity government and the holding of a parliamentary election on May 4.

…

Hamas in turn accused Fatah of reneging on the Egyptian-brokered deal to end four years of bitter rivalry that has split the Palestinian national movement.

It said Abbas was putting peace talks with Israel, taking place in Jordan, ahead of Palestinian unity. Negotiators are searching for a way to revive direct negotiations that have been suspended for over a year.

The fragile reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah always seems to be on the verge of collapse … but that hasn’t seemed to matter very much since reconciliation hasn’t really yield a whole lot of practical outcomes for anyone. To be sure, it’s better than outright fighting between the two groups. But it’s not as though they’ve seemed to get any closer to collaborative governing or negotiating. Nor is it entirely clear what a collapse of the reconciliation agreement would mean … apart from a move to return to the table to discuss renewing or restarting the reconciliation process. At times, the intra-Palestinian negotiations really feels a whole lot like the Israeli/Palestinian negotiations.

For the first time in more than a year, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are set to meet, this time in Jordan. Neither side is particularly optimistic going into the meeting, especially since the Palestinians continue to insist on a freeze on Israeli settlement construction and the Netanyahu government has made no such concession.

So … who’s driving this bus? Well, the minority ruling family of Jordan certainly has an interest in seeing things get moving again:

King Abdullah is also eager to send a message to Hamas, the militant Islamist movement that rules Gaza, that despite the rise of Islamism in the region over the past year, the Palestinian Authority remains, in his view, the leader of the Palestinians. Mr. Abbas has started unity talks with Hamas although they are proceeding slowly.

The king also has a very specific interest in a moderate Palestinian state being established in the West Bank and Gaza — he has tensions with his own Islamists and he does not want to encourage any thoughts of a Palestinian state being established in Jordan instead, as some on the Israeli right advocate. More than half of the inhabitants of Jordan are Palestinian.

Jordan and Israel share a common interest in focusing Palestinian nationalism on the West Bank and Gaza to prevent its being focused on either of their states. Mr. Netanyahu and his aides say they also worry that that any Palestinian state in the West Bank would ultimately be overrun by Islamists, who could threaten the Israeli heartland.

Are we likely to see any progress? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

My friend Rabbi Jason Miller points out that it took just a few days of concentrated outrage from American Jews to roll back the controversial Israeli ad campaign I wrote about here on November 30:

In the end it turns out that Prime Minister Netanyahu decided this PR campaign was, well, bad PR for Israel so he had the Ministry of Immigration Absorption scrap it. Here is the statement coming out of Israel:

“The Ministry of Immigrant Absorption’s campaign clearly did not take into account American Jewish sensibilities, and we regret any offense it caused. The campaign, which aimed to encourage Israelis living abroad to return home, was a laudable one, and it was not meant to cause insult. The campaign was conducted without the knowledge or approval of the prime minister’s office or of the Israeli embassy in Washington. Prime Minister Netanyahu, once made aware of the campaign, ordered the videos immediately removed from YouTube, and he ordered that the billboards be removed as well. The prime minister deeply values the American Jewish community and is committed to deepening ties between it and the State of Israel.”

Miller very astutely juxtaposes this public relations decision with another decision in Israel that’s likely to result in bad PR.

Writing on the Daily Rabbi blog, Rabbi Reuven Hammer of Jerusalem explains that “Two different groups have recently begun to gather lists of stores and employers in Jerusalem who declare that they do not and will not hire Arabs. Their plan is to post and distribute these lists so that people will know which stores to patronize and which to avoid.”

This is clearly a form of racism and it cannot and should not be tolerated in Israel (or anywhere). I hope that Jewish groups like the JFNA work just as hard (or harder) to ensure that these groups cease and desist with their plan. Rabbi Hammer correctly points to a text from the Torah in Exodus that states, “message of the Torah is that “You shall not wrong a stranger [ger] or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

It seems clear that Netanyahu recognizes that American Jews are, in no small way, a part of his constituency … though, like Israeli progressives, not one whose opinion he’s always anxious to hear. The question is whether or not American Jews will ever be as outraged by some Israelis’ racism against Arabs as they clearly are when some Israelis suggest that they’re not Jewish enough. Or, to put this another way, when will American Jews recognize the role that concerted effort on their part could play in resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict?

To answer my own question, it’s undeniable that American Jews already do. But this lack of such a concerted effort is easy enough to explain: American Jews can swiftly complain in unison to the Israeli government when they are insulted in unison. But, when it comes to Israel’s dealings with Palestinian Arabs, the American Jewish voice is incredibly fragmented and, thus, unable to push the Netanyahu government to do the right thing in the same way that it was so quickly able to do so in the case of this foolish ad campaign. In other words, the problem is that they can’t agree about the fundamental issue, namely what a successful resolution to the conflict would look like.

So perhaps a better question is the following: What will it take for the American Jewish community to get together on the question of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict so that they can begin to influence the Israeli government to make real strides toward a just and lasting peace?

If you’re at all interested in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, you should be sure to visit The Atlantic to read the four-part special report they’ve produced with the Abraham Center for Middle East Peace:

“Is Peace Possible?” is the result of our efforts to take an innovative approach to examining the opportunities and challenges of reaching a comprehensive peace deal between Israel and a future state of Palestine. We’re building this report around four main chapters, one on each the four core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Borders, Security, Refugees, and Jerusalem.

I’ve often said — and I’ve probably written it more often — that the Netanyahu government is openly and unabashedly working against any possible peace process with the Palestinians and that the policies that this government tends to favor are not in the best interest of the Israeli people, especially in the long run. Here’s the latest in a long line of such policies:

On Tuesday, Netanyahu and his forum of eight senior ministers decided to initiate a new wave of settlement construction in the West Bank, as part of a wider set of sanctions Israel decided to impose on the Palestinian Authority after it was accepted to UNESCO as a member on Monday.

Netanyahu’s office said Tuesday that the construction of 2,000 housing units planned in East Jerusalem, Gush Etzion, and Ma’aleh Adumim should be expedited.

At some point, perhaps at some distance removed from where we are today, people will look back and note that it was this government, more than any other, that officially turned its back on both peace and a two-state solution as a matter of policy. It’s impossible for the Netanyahu government to continue to say, as it has long said, that it desires a real partner for peace and that it is simply unable to find such a partner on the Palestinian side. Or, at least, it is impossible for anyone to take seriously such a claim when that same government pursues policies such as this one.

If a two-state solution is the only acceptable solution for Israel, then make two states and be done with it.