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Source: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-rejectionism-is-the-harder-problem/
Palestinian Rejectionism Is the Harder Problem
(Times of Israel) Saurav Dutt - We have been told that poverty and humiliation provide fertile ground for extremism, that if we improve Palestinian living standards, violence will diminish. Give people jobs, better infrastructure, greater freedom of movement and a stake in economic prosperity, and they will have more to lose from conflict. But this does not explain a conflict in which rejection of Israel has repeatedly survived periods of diplomatic opportunity, economic assistance and improved living conditions. For more than a century, Palestinian and Arab leaders have rejected a succession of proposals that envisaged some form of territorial partition or coexistence between Jewish and Arab states. The agreements of the 1990s created the Palestinian Authority, transferred significant governing responsibilities to Palestinians, and generated new possibilities for economic cooperation. Yet the decade also witnessed a wave of suicide bombings and other attacks, culminating in the Second Intifada in which more than 1,000 Israelis were killed. The uprising demonstrated that greater Palestinian autonomy and economic cooperation were not sufficient to prevent a return to mass violence. A movement like Hamas that is motivated in part by the belief that Israel itself is illegitimate will not necessarily abandon violence simply because its supporters become more prosperous. A durable peace requires more than the absence of poverty. It requires political acceptance of the other side's legitimacy. Where children are taught that national liberation requires the elimination of the other side, economic development alone is unlikely to resolve the underlying dispute. That is why the debate over Palestinian living standards can become a distraction when presented as the central explanation for the conflict. If poverty were the decisive cause of Palestinian violence, decades of aid, economic initiatives, employment inside Israel, and diplomatic engagement should have produced a consistent decline in hostility. They have not.