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By Moshe Phillips
(JNS) A prominent Washington think tank analyst has added up various terrorism statistics to “prove” that a Palestinian Arab state might not be such a bad idea after all. The problem is that his math is all wrong.
Writing in Mosaic this week, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy implores Israel not to give up on the Palestinian statehood idea. Because, he says, the math shows that having the Palestinian Authority around has reduced terrorism.
Except that it hasn’t.
Satloff compares three periods. There were the 18 years from 1968 to 1985, when there was no Palestinian Authority and there were 542 Israeli deaths in terrorist attacks. Then there were the fifteen years between 1986 and 2000—leading up to the Second Intifada—when the number of terror fatalities dropped to 472. Then he skips the Second Intifada years, and looks at the eighteen years between 2005 and 2022—when that number dropped even further, to 334.
Satloff’s conclusion: Thanks to the creation of the P.A. in 1994, terrorism has decreased. Therefore, he argues, it’s good that there’s a P.A., and maybe Israel should even give it a sovereign state at some point.
Part of the problem with this math is that his conclusions are based on body counts, but body counts don’t tell the whole story as to whether or not terrorism overall is increasing or decreasing. The outcome of a terrorist attack is determined by numerous factors. Last week, for example, terrorists failed to correctly set the timers on their bus explosives, so nobody was killed. In Satloff’s calculation, that would count as a “zero.”
Yet the mere fact that such an attack was attempted illustrates that the terrorist threat is growing, regardless of the body count.
Even if a terrorist attack is botched or foiled and nobody is murdered, it doesn’t change the fact that the P.A.’s schools and media inspire their young people to plant bombs on buses. The intention must be considered in addition to the results. The intention is what the P.A. completely controls, while the results are often determined by factors out of its control.
The other major problem with Satloff’s creative math is that his omission of the Second Intifada and its fatalities is illogical, and skews all the data. The Second Intifada did not just erupt out of nowhere. It was orchestrated by the P.A. itself. Even Satloff’s own Washington Institute acknowledges that fact. An analysis of the Second Intifada, on the institute’s own website, states: “Violence and terrorism were part of the strategy of Palestinian leadership, especially of its leader at the time—Yasser Arafat.”
So, if you want to decide whether the creation of the P.A. has reduced terrorism, then you have to include the terror wave that the authority itself launched in September 2000 and all of the Israelis who were murdered then. Of course, doing that ruins Satloff’s thesis.
Since he is keen on using 18-year periods, let’s see how that works when you include the years of the Second Intifada. In the 18 years before the P.A. was created—1976 to 1993—397 Israelis were murdered. And in the 18 years after the P.A. was created—1994 to 2011—a total of 1,427 Israelis were murdered.
So, creating the P.A. led to a 259% increase in Israeli fatalities from Palestinian terrorist attacks.
Or, if you think that 18 years is too broad a sample, you can narrow the range. In the five years before the first Oslo agreement was signed, 173 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks; in the five years after Oslo, 207 were killed. Try the 10 years before Oslo—250 killed, as compared to the ten years following Oslo—730 killed.
Thus, Satloff should conclude that it was the Oslo Accords that have led to more terrorism. And he would be right. Because the Oslo Accords were what created the Palestinian Authority, and the P.A. turned out to be a terrorist group under a new name—perpetrating not only the Second Intifada but thousands of other shootings, bombings, stabbings and other attacks on innocent Israelis and their families.
A recent study by the Israeli think tank Regavim found that P.A. security forces themselves list 2,000 of their members as “martyrs”—meaning that they died while committing terrorism. In addition, 12% of all Palestinian Arab terrorists currently jailed in Israel are members of the P.A. security forces. That’s about 500 out of the 4,500 to 5,000 jailed terrorists.
Would it make sense to give the P.A. and its terrorists a sovereign state next door to Israel? That’s for Israeli voters to decide. But their decision should be based on the facts, not manipulative math that misleads the public about the P.A.’s record of bloodshed.
Moshe Phillips, a veteran pro-Israel activist and author, is the national chairman of Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI). A former board member of the American Zionist Movement, he previously served as national director of the U.S. division of Herut and worked with CAMERA in Philadelphia. He was also a delegate to the 2020 World Zionist Congress and served as editor of The Challenger, the publication of the Tagar Zionist Youth Movement. His op-eds and letters have been widely published in the United States and Israel.
