It has become commonplace for officials, analysts, and correspondents to warn about the dangers of the upcoming month of Ramadan and the Palestinian violence that will ensue. This has especially been the case after the May 2021 Hamas campaign against Israel, and even more so since the election of the "most right-wing" government Israel has ever had.

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Are these dire forebodings warranted? The data strongly suggests that the danger is grossly exaggerated, if not entirely false.

Let us take 2015, which arguably saw the most Palestinian violence of any in the past decade. Specifically, the period from October through December, in which the most significant and extreme wave of violence occurred in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and elsewhere.

The first thing to note about that wave of violence is that it broke out three months after Ramadan, and when it did, it flared with a vengeance. The Israel Security Agency registered 620 attacks in October alone, leaving 11 Israelis dead. By contrast, during July and August, the months that overlapped with Ramadan, there were 123 and 107 attacks, respectively, and two Israelis were killed. Those months overlapping Ramadan was also less violent than in the continuation of the wave in November and December, when 12 Israelis were murdered.

The same can be said, albeit less strikingly, about 2016, another peak year of violence. The wave of violence that began the previous year continued during the first four months of 2016–and none of those months included Ramadan, which fell between June 7 and July 5 (the Muslim calendar is lunar).

The contrasts between January, the peak of violence, and June (which overlapped with most of Ramadan) are far less stark than in 2015. Five Israelis were killed in 169 violent attacks in January, compared with five in June amid 103 attacks. It is important to note that four of the five Israelis killed in June were killed in a single incident.

But maybe the habitual violence in Ramadan is of a more recent vintage? An analysis of data for the last three years – 2020, 2021, and 2022 – suggests otherwise.

In 2020, Ramadan began on April 23 and ended on May 22. In April, there were 71 attacks and no fatalities. In May, which overlapped with most of Ramadan, there were 80 attacks and one fatality. At least two months of that year, August and December, were appreciably more violent: 120 attacks, one fatality in August, and 98 attacks and one Israeli fatality in December.

The 2021 data is especially significant. That was the Ramadan during which Hamas launched a massive missile campaign against Israel that began with attacks aimed at Jerusalem, after an ultimatum to Israel to remove all its police and military personnel "from the al-Haram al-Sharif mosque site and Sheikh Jarrah" neighborhood of Jerusalem went unanswered. Though the attack failed to change Israeli policy, Hamas did succeed in convincing the Israeli public regarding the relationship between Ramadan and Palestinian violence.

Oddly, while Israeli officialdom and the new media reinforced Hamas's claims of a linkage, Palestinian behavior in Jerusalem and Judea, and Samaria did not. The Hamas campaign, it should be noted, was launched on May 10, one day before the end of Ramadan. However, April and May were hardly the most violent months compared with November and December, which coincided with neither an Islamic nor Jewish holiday.

Within the span of about a week in May 2021, Arab rioters murdered three Jews, injured more than 600, and firebombed 10 synagogues and 112 Jewish residences in mixed-population cities. But all of this occurred after Ramadan, and Israeli Arab violence is hardly as consistent as Palestinian violence in Jerusalem and Judea, and Samaria. In fact, that wave of violence was exceeded only in the opening month of the Palestinian Authority's massive attack in October 2001, 20 years earlier.

Only in 2022 is there any evidence of a linkage between Ramadan and peak Palestinian violence, but the relationship is weak even then. Ramadan began on April 12, but the most violent month, at least in terms of Israeli fatalities, was March, with 11 Israelis killed in five lethal attacks. There were more attacks in April, 268 compared with 190, but they were less deadly – perhaps because of increased Israeli security mobilization to counter them – resulting in four fatalities. December and November, which did not coincide with any holiday, were also very violent: 401 attacks, three deaths, and 254 and two fatalities, respectively.

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For a century at least, security agencies and academia have tried to uncover the laws governing mass violence. The hypothesis that Ramadan is a month of violence in the Palestinian context is one such attempt. But like other attempts to explain Palestinian violence, the actual behavior of the terrorists proves far more complex, bewildering both the terrorists and the security officials who fight them.

I'm tempted to say that Israeli officials who wrongly assert such linkage and warn against its consequences are guilty of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Therefore, they should act, not talk. However, even that assertion is not necessarily true.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Earlier this month, Israel postponed a large housing project in Atarot, north of Jerusalem, where a Jewish settlement once stood.

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The project aimed to provide up to 9,000 homes for the Haredi community. The move came after a conversation about the project between Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The US pressure against the Atarot project, which is closer to Ramallah than Jerusalem, was likely meant to maintain the viability of a two-state solution. However, this possibility is an illusion. The Biden administration knows full well that the two-state solution ended in 2007 when Hamas took over the Gaza Strip. It was not Israel or the settler movement in Judea and Samaria that rendered it moribund.

If anything, the United States had a greater role in the two-state solution's demise than either Israeli officialdom or the settlers. The George W. Bush administration, smitten by the neo-con dream of democratizing the Middle East, pressured Israel and the Palestinian Authority to hold elections in 2006 to the Palestinian Legislative Council.

In Judea and Samaria and especially in Gaza, Palestinians fed up by fighting between PA security forces and members of the Fatah Tanzim militia gave their vote to the Change and Reform Party controlled by Hamas. The party cleverly downplayed the movement's fundamentalism and ran candidates with professional and public service credentials in contrast to the "muscle men" the two rival Fatah lists fielded.

Once in power, Hamas decided to form a militia, which PA leader Mahmoud Abbas annulled, initiating a series of rounds of fighting in Gaza between Hamas, PA security forces, and Fatah that ended in the total defeat of PA forces. The inner Palestinian partition became the most decisive and long-standing factor in Palestinian political life. The many rounds of failed "unity talks" between the PA and Hamas only reinforced the divide.

Few realize to what extent the Palestinians are divided into two rival Palestinian "statelets" (a term coined by a former Washington Post correspondent in Israel). Hamas and the PA each have their own leadership, legislature, security forces, and laws. Palestinian society is further divided by the tribal politics of the family and clan.

Gaza is dominated on the leadership level exclusively by Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar. On the administrative level, the Interior and National Security Ministry, whose minister is a Hamas stalwart, has great control. The ministry runs the internal security agency, the gendarmerie and the police. On numerous occasions, when the military arm – the Izzadin al-Qassam Brigades – announces the "martyrdom" of its fighters, they are simultaneously identified as members of the Interior and National Security Ministry.

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Much the same relationship prevails between Fatah and the PA security forces. The common denominator between Hamas-dominated Gaza and the PA is that they are both one-party militias that perceive the other as an existential threat that must be monitored, punished and subdued.

The regional and international dimensions that reinforce the Palestinian divide are cementing this Palestinian partition that buries prospects for a two-state solution. The PA owes its continued existence to Western monetary and political aid and support of the moderate Arab states, namely Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and last and not least to its security coordination with Israel. It is Israel that makes the majority of preventive arrests that keep Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad at bay in areas controlled by the PA For Hamas, its regional allies are different: Iran, Turkey and Qatar.

In sum, the two-state solution can hardly be threatened by building in Judea and Samaria or elsewhere – it died in 2007. It should be allowed to rest in peace.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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In conjunction with radical Arab MKs, leftist Israeli politicians focus on settler violence when the real issue is Palestinian violence, organized from the apex of the PA down to paid local instigators.

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A Knesset committee headed by Meretz MK Mossi Raz recently sounded the alarm – sirens, even – over a supposed rise in settler violence against innocent Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.

The figures provided by Yesh Din do seem alarming.

The organization has counted over 1,400 acts of violence since 2012 – 416 of them in the first half of this year. However, for every act of violence committed by a settler, there are many more acts of violence committed by Palestinians against Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria, against Israeli service providers and Israeli security personnel.

The staggering difference is not only quantitative but also and more importantly, qualitative; 70% of the settler attacks against Palestinians, according to Yesh Din, involve violence against property. By contrast, nearly all of the violence committed by the Palestinians against Israelis involves attempts to maim and kill, with firearms, knives, vehicles and of course, stones.

Palestinians firebombed 3,675 Israeli buses and cars since 2016 (up to and including 2020). In the same period – years of "relative quiet" – there have been 10,620 stone-throwing incidents and 353 shootings, stabbings and vehicular assaults. Occasionally, the victims are Palestinians, mistakenly identified as Israelis or caught in the crossfire.

Yet even these comparisons do not capture the full extent of Palestinian violence.

The major difference between settler and Palestinian violence is that the latter is orchestrated, financed and abetted by the Palestinian Authority, in cooperation with other factions of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and NGOs funded by the European Committee.

At the center of organized Palestinian violence stands the head of the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, with the rank of minister in the PA. He works closely with Fatah, whose salaried district heads are responsible for mobilizing party members and supporters in campaigns of violence against Israelis and Israeli settlements, and coordinating efforts with other factions and the media.

It is often a Fatah professional who leads these campaigns of violence at the local level, with the help of the local Popular Committee in Defense of the Land and the Coordinating Committee of (Palestinian) Factions. In addition to Fatah representatives, local leaders from other PLO factions, such as the Popular and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, also participate.

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According to the Palestinians, settlement efforts are a bid to isolate and drive them out. Yet it is the PA and its organs that aim to drive out Israelis, by harassment and threats. The campaign of violence against Israeli settlement in the area east of Nablus, to prevent the relocation and resettlement of Eviatar, is a good example.

At the epicenter of the campaign stand the considerable resources of the town of Beita, whose inhabitants exceed 20,000 and dwarf the nearby Israeli settlements of Itamar and Yitzhar, with a combined population of around 3,000. The local committees, taking their cue from the Hamas campaign of harassment of Israeli localities in the areas adjacent to Gaza, have organized weekly Friday campaigns of harassment against nearby settlements. This includes rock-throwing and arson against Israeli settlements. These campaigns are meticulously followed and glorified by the PA-financed media.

Most of the responses by the settlers are acts of exasperation in the face of endemic, PA-orchestrated Palestinian violence.

Palestinian violence is vastly more common than settler violence. Meretz MK Mossi Raz would have been more credible were he to address the PA's systemic efforts to promote violence against civilians, 30 years after the PLO committed itself to the peaceful resolution of the conflict.

Featured on JNS.org, this article was first published by the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies.

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All too often, the Palestinian Authority is dismissed as a failed entity. This is wishful thinking. To the contrary: the PA is winning one of the most important battles it has ever waged against Israel. It is the same battle the Zionist movement and later the State of Israel successfully waged: that of strategic settlement. This means the creation of rural and urban infrastructure to consolidate control over territory required to create a state.

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Israel's Homa u'Migdal (tower and stockade) movement, the War of Independence, the heroism and durability of the kibbutzim on the Syrian front before the 1967 Six-Day War, Kiryat Shmona and the kibbutzim in the Hula Valley in the 1980s, and Sderot and the kibbutzim around Gaza in the past two decades are a living testimony to the historic importance of "strategic settlement," a term first coined by the Zionist movement in 1942.

Alas, this Zionist strategy has now been successfully adopted by the PA, especially in the fight for control over the majority of land in the West Bank called Area C. According to the Oslo Accords, Area C was to remain under exclusive Israeli jurisdiction until the achievement of a final-status settlement.

According to a highly detailed report by Regavim, an organization that documents illegal encroachment on state land (as well as private property), the PA over the past decade has been winning the battle for control over Area C. In 2009, the majority of built-up space in Area C was populated by Jews (11,614 acres compared to 11,367 acres for the Palestinians). By 2019, after an unrelenting 10-year settlement push directed by the PA, most of the built-up space is Palestinian (19,521 acres compared to 14,085 acres inhabited by Jews). Such a feat rivals even the most successful settlement projects of the Jewish Agency during the Mandate. Indeed, it may even outshine them.

More important than the number of dwellings that were constructed are the qualitative dimensions of the building spree. The clusters were created as part of a strategic plan conceived in 2009 by then-PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a former senior economist at the World Bank, to create the State of Palestine from the ground up rather than leave it to diplomacy.

Sound familiar? It should. This was the rejoinder of David Ben-Gurion and his Mapai stalwarts to both Chaim Weizmann and Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who placed greater faith in diplomacy to create the Jewish state. Labor's strategy was popularly called "one more dunam [a quarter of an acre], one more goat." Thankfully, that strategy won the day in 1936 and lasted up to and beyond the creation of the Jewish state.

Behind the unrelenting Palestinian strategic settlement drive are a host of institutions within the PA, which commands a budget of $4.7 billion. Those institutions include the PA Interior Ministry, Planning and Administrative Development Ministry and Agriculture Ministry, a commission within the Interior Ministry responsible for the registration of land and water rights, the Local Government Ministry and the "Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission," which is run by an official with ministerial status. These ministries coordinate extensively on planning and implementation.

A 160-page report published in 2016 illustrates the PA's planning capacity. One hundred and ten local outline plans have been prepared for 119 Palestinian communities – most of them in Area C.

Behind the PA's successful strategic settlement drive stands an array of European Union and United Nations institutions that both finance the project and provide much of the planning know-how. They do this either directly or indirectly by offering capacity-building programs and venues.

The Palestinian goal of seizing control over Area C also involves organized protest and violence, which is directed both from the ground up and from the highest government echelons down.

The "Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission" is responsible for coordinating those efforts. It is headed by former Fatah Tanzim member and former security prisoner Walid Assaf. The commission creates and works with local "resistance" committees, often headed by Fatah members in tandem with the youth committees of the various PLO factions (mostly Fatah's Shabiba movement) and district-level Fatah organizations. They are tasked with organizing the Palestinian population in surrounding villages to confront Israel Defense Forces troops, intimidating the Israeli Civil Administration as it attempts to monitor the area, harassing settler outposts and settler grazing efforts, and taking over hilltops, springs and archaeological sites that connect Jews to their past. The aim therefore is not only to strategically settle the area but to drive away the Jewish settlers.

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The factor that best explains the Palestinians' success in this venture is that while the PA is mobilized, consistent and focused on achieving the goal, the Israeli government, civil administration and judicial branch largely turn a blind eye to the build-up.

There are many reasons why Israel has reached this sorry state of affairs in Area C. Above all, the near-total freeze on Jewish settlement over the past two decades created a vacuum that the PA rushed to fill. Neither Israel's Justice Ministry nor the Israeli courts do much to counter the Palestinian "lawfare" that enables them to illegally encroach upon and take control over the state lands that form the bulk of Area C. Even when the courts rule against such encroachment, as in the case of Khan al-Ahmar (an illegal Bedouin encampment near Maaleh Adumim), the authorities do not honor the ruling.

These developments are mostly determined by politics, and especially by the leadership. The saying attributed to Ben-Gurion that it is not what the Gentiles say but what the Jews do rings true in this context. Merav Michaeli's recent victory in the Labor Party reflects the extent to which Israeli politicians are divorced from the spirit of the party's founders, who championed Israeli strategic settlement.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not grow up in such an environment, but one hopes his strong strategic sense will lead him to acknowledge that however important the fruits of diplomacy, such as normalization with moderate Arab Sunni states, their importance pales in comparison to the need to win battles like that against strategic Palestinian settlement in Area C.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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One would like to believe that educated and decent citizens of the world would reject the authenticity of lies that contradict one another. But do they? The claims made by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and the many media sites they support and spawn, mostly with the help of the European Union (which should know better), put these decent citizens to the test.

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Officials in the Palestinian Authority and members of the BDS movement frequently accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing. At the same time, in Arabic, they boast of the power of the Palestinian womb to overcome Israel in the long term. The second statement irrefutably contradicts the first.

In reality, neither is correct. True, the Palestinians have a high population growth rate that exposes the lie of the claim of ethnic cleansing, but their fertility – as is true elsewhere in the Arab world – is rapidly falling, especially in Judea and Samaria.

Depopulation (rather than ethnic cleansing) is taking place in the Balkans, including Muslim Bosnia and Kosovo, thanks in part to the European Union's policy of encouraging the young to emigrate to Germany and the Scandinavian countries. There, they are eagerly absorbed by the local labor markets, leaving much of the Balkans and eastern Europe geriatric disaster areas.

The Palestinians' pattern of lying in opposite directions is illustrated by the invocation of the most ubiquitous term used to describe Israel's relationship to its historic homeland: "occupation." The mere mention of the Gaza Strip will almost immediately prompt a reference to Israel's "occupation," despite the incontrovertible fact that Israel relinquished control of the Strip's Palestinian population in Gaza and withdrew from it, down to the last Jewish man, woman and child, in 2005.

Yet even as Israel is mysteriously continuing its virtual "occupation" of Gaza, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their respective military wings hold an annual celebration at this time of year to commemorate the liberation of Gaza from Israel, which they classify as a first step toward the complete "liberation" of Palestine "from the river to the sea" – that is, the destruction of Israel. Gaza is thus simultaneously occupied and liberated. A remarkable feat.

As they vilify Israel for its supposed treatment of Muslims regarding the Temple Mount, they stress that hundreds of thousands of Muslim worshippers have come to protect the site in past years – a fact documented by Palestinian-supported media sites. But if Israel is so intolerant and harsh toward Muslim worship, how are these hundreds of thousands managing to assemble in the area?

And as they vilify Israel for religious intolerance, the P.A., Hamas and most of the other factions cannot stand the sight of religious Jews visiting the Temple Mount or praying and sharing the space with Muslim worshippers. At the graves of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the Palestinians often describe visits by Jews to the site as "pollution" (tadnis) by "herds of settlers." Simultaneously, the P.A. and Hamas take pride in the innate tolerance of Islam, Islamic society and the many and varied Islamic entities of the past.

Israel is accused of laying siege to Gaza to destroy its economic and demographic foundations. At the same time, Hamas threatens Israel with rockets if it does not extend more power lines to the Strip to meet its growing energy demands. If Israel is attempting to impoverish Gaza, how is it that there is so much demand for energy? And if Hamas has liberated Gaza from the Israeli yoke, why does it want to increase its dependence on a state (to control coronavirus, to get hospital treatment for family members of Hamas officials, and so on) whose destruction it seeks to the point of threatening terrorism if it refuses such dependence?

The Palestinians have long gotten away with spreading contradictory lies among a public that should know better: liberals and progressives. But they are not the only people listening, and there are signs in other quarters that patience is starting to wear thin.

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The peace agreements Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain at the White House last week have mostly to do with the typical factors that dictate the strategic behavior of states – a common threat (Iran), a common powerful ally (the United States), the promise of economic and technological benefits from making peace – but one cannot underestimate the importance of the Arab states' growing distaste for a Palestinian movement that has lied for far too long.

The P.A. came into being in 1994 as a result of a negotiation process between the PLO and Israel (the "Oslo process"). So how can it deny the right of Arab states to negotiate with the same State of Israel? Hamas wants the Arab states to be in a state of perpetual war with Israel, while at the same time it periodically negotiates with Israel to fill its coffers and bring benefits to placate a growing and hostile Gaza population.

The Palestinians should learn from the master of this technique. Goebbels' evil, triumphant as it seemed in the 1930s and early 1940s, was nevertheless short-lived. Somehow, truth prevails in the end.

his article appeared on JNS.org. and was first published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

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A study released on Feb. 24 by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota inadvertently revealed how salient Iran's religious ties to Shiite communities in Arab states have been and continue to be in the spread of the epidemic.

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The five Middle Eastern countries that first reported COVID-19 cases – Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq and Oman – all have substantial Shiite populations, and all the cases cited are clearly linked to Iran. The first confirmed case in Afghanistan was flagged in Herat province, which is in the country's west on the Iranian border. Another sufferer had recently returned from the city of Qom, Iran's Shiite religious center and, tellingly, the epicenter of the disease in Iran. The first Bahraini to be confirmed as having succumbed to COVID-19 had also just been in Iran, as had all three cases first reported in Kuwait, Iraq and Oman.

The link between Shiite pilgrimage and the spread of the virus is to be found at its source in the region: Iran, specifically the religious city of Qom.

As the University of Minnesota report notes, eight of 18 new cases in Iran were in Qom compared to three in the metropolis of Tehran, which has a population seven times greater. Qom has been the site of 40 percent of the cases identified so far in Iran though it comprises less than three percent of the population.

Iraq and other Arab states with substantial Shiite populations have grown understandably apprehensive about the pilgrimage to Qom. Flights between Qom and Najaf, the holy city in Iraq, which neighbors a third holy city, Karbalah, usually outnumber flights between the capital cities of Tehran and Baghdad, indicating that most movement between the countries has to do with religious observance and pilgrimage rather than business and commerce. But the Iraqi authorities have banned entry into the country by Iranian nationals and prohibited travel by Iraqi nationals to Iran, and have ceased flights between Tehran's Khomeini airport (which services Qom, a three-hour drive away) and Najaf.

Such moves might be too late. The day after the halt on Iraqi-Iranian travel, Iraq announced its first case of COVID-19.

Data for China indicate that one of around 30 cases of the virus results in death (2,873 deaths out of 79,968 cases as of March 1). The percentage outside China is slightly lower because most of the states in which there have been confirmed cases are more advanced and have benefited from the opportunity to learn from the steps China has taken to control the spread of the virus.

Iran recently announced 43 deaths out of 593 confirmed cases compared with 29 fatalities out of just over 1,128 cases in Italy – the most afflicted European state so far. The ratio in Italy – one death per 39 cases – roughly conforms to the ratio of fatalities to confirmed cases in China and elsewhere. In the case of Iran, however, the ratio is strikingly worse: it appears to be one death per 14 people infected.

This is a deeply worrying statistic, particularly as there are concerns that Iran is failing to identify many COVID-19 cases. If true, this means some infected sufferers are not being put into quarantine, which increases the likelihood that the virus will spread.

There is a strong suspicion based on the quality of the data provided by Iran's Health Ministry that the COVID-19 epidemic inside the country might be far more widespread than the regime says it is, and doubts about Iran's reporting and ability to act efficiently to contain the virus are swirling both within and without the country. A recent report filed by London's Times correspondent from Tehran quotes Iranians as saying they believe the real number of fatalities is four times the figure being given by regime authorities.

The ramifications of Iran's becoming a source of disease are more than medical. The Islamic Republic has seen wide-scale protests in Iraq and Lebanon against regimes it warmly supports. In Iraq in particular, Iranian consulates have become targets of protester anger.

Iran's failure to control its COVID-19 problem will hardly endear it to protesters in Iraq and Lebanon, many of whom feel their states are being damaged by Iran's involvement in their domestic affairs.

The recent failure of the newly designated Iraqi Prime Minister Tawfiq Allawi to set up a government is the most recent indication of Iran's declining stature in the region. Allawi's appointment, which was presumably intended to mollify the mostly Shiite protesters in the streets of Baghdad, Najaf and Basra, was strongly backed by the two most powerful pro-Iranian political forces in Iraq: the Fath coalition, which is basically the pro-Iranian militias' political wing; and the Sairoon coalition headed by Muqtada Sadr. It was Sadr's al-Mahdi army that fought U.S. forces in the early years of the post-Saddam era.

Despite that support, Allawi failed, because Sunni and Kurdish political opposition figures within the Iraqi parliament and protestors outside it vehemently opposed him.

No doubt, most of Iran's declining fortunes in Iraq can be attributed to the targeting of Iranian Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani by the United States in January. Iran's COVID-19 problem is having a reinforcing effect.

For years, the (Arab) Shiite majority in Iraq and Bahrain and the significant Shiite minorities in the neighboring Arab states were regarded as the pillars of Iran's imperial designs over those states.

The Shiite protests in Iraq and Lebanon against Iranian involvement suggest that this may no longer be true.

That imperialism comes at a price could have been predicted. Not so COVID-19 and its ramifications, and least of all its effect on the Iranian Shiite crescent – a crescent that, true to form, is fast turning into a boomerang headed back into the heart of the Islamic Republic.

This article was first published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

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With the aid of Google Trends, one can assess that the organization's popularity, in the United States and elsewhere, by exploring whether Google searches for the BDS movement have increased over time.

Data since 2004 clearly indicates that the movement's popularity has risen both in the United States and globally.

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In both cases, the rise of Google searches is moderate from 2008 to 2014 and then is significantly higher from 2014 to the present. The peaks are relatively aligned, an indication of the validity of the data.

The division into two distinct periods reflects that the common perception of the movement's growing popularity is correct. Since 2016, growth appears to have slowed considerably but has hardly reversed itself. After all, the high point – the score of 100 – occurred in 2018.

Though Google Trends does not provide the absolute number of searches for the BDS movement, the fact that Israel is the country with the highest number of searches – with a score of 100 – would indicate a relatively small search count. After all, Israel has a small population relative to most countries, and that population searches in Hebrew for the most part.

Still, 35 cases, overwhelming states, registered a significant amount of data (expressed by the degree of shading) for this term in English. This suggests that while BDS might not rate many searches, those interested in the movement are spread across the globe. The countries can be seen in the following map generated by Google Trends when searching for "the BDS movement":

Generally speaking, the searches reflect a positive interest in the term being searched. Citizens in Arab states are more likely to search for Arafat than Rabin, let alone Begin. Internet users in Scandinavian states will tend to search for both. African states with large evangelical populations, like Uganda and Ghana, will show high scores for searches for Begin, significantly lower scores for Rabin, and almost no searches for Arafat.

To develop a strategy with which to fight the BDS movement, it can be useful to note where it is popular, less popular and insignificant.

Two considerations are critical in measuring the popularity of the movement. Most important is to pay attention to the major English-speaking states. One must take into consideration not only the absolute scores in these countries but the interest in the movement relative to population size. As the following table shows, searches in New Zealand equaled those in the United States, though the latter's population is 70 times that of New Zealand. The multiple of interest for New Zealand is therefore 70 times that of the United States.

Searches for "BDS movement":

One can clearly see that relatively speaking, interest in the BDS movement on a comparative basis is lowest for the most important two countries, the United States and the United Kingdom, significantly higher in Australia and Canada, and extremely high in New Zealand and Ireland, which are small and relatively unimportant countries known for their anti-Israel bias.

A search for the phrase "boycott Israel" generates almost the same order of relative interest as for the BDS movement, as one can see from the table below. This corroborates the relationship between anti-Israel bias and relative interest in the BDS movement. Ireland, New Zealand and Norway top the list and Australia and Canada are in the middle. On the bottom are the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa.

Degree of interest in the phrase "boycott Israel":

To see how pro-Israel sentiment compares, we typed in the phrase "Love Israel." The contrast was glaring. To begin with, only 13 countries generated sufficient data for this term compared to 35 countries for "boycott Israel." The most important for this survey are the states that didn't generate sufficient searches for "Love Israel," but were in the forefront of searches for the BDS movement and "boycott Israel."

Missing from the "Love Israel" list are New Zealand, Ireland, the three Scandinavian states and Holland. By contrast, the proportionate searches in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom are very similar to the search multiples for "boycott Israel," suggesting a highly bifurcated public in these countries when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the BDS movement. Note also that heading the list for "Love Israel" are the African states Kenya and Nigeria, states with sizeable evangelical populations.

Searches for "Love Israel":

Finally, since the United States is clearly the most important case, it is worthwhile to see how interest (and indirect support) for the BDS movement is distributed there.

The highest absolute and relative score is generated in the District of Columbia. This suggests that the BDS movement is closely followed by the Department of State, other national agencies, the major universities, and think tanks in the area. Other higher scorers relative to their population are Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Oregon, Michigan and Minnesota, traditionally liberal democratic states. The latter two also have sizeable Muslim populations.

The rise of the BDS movement seems to have abated somewhat both in the world at large and in large English-speaking countries. Campaigns to counter its popularity should focus on those large English-speaking countries. In the US, campaigns should aim to prevent an expansion of its popularity; in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, they should aim to blunt its already considerable appeal.

Hillel Frisch is a professor of political studies and Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University and a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Originally published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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After three-and-a-half years of quiet, Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched four massive missile strikes in the wake of Israel's erroneous decision to tolerate the "Campaign of Return" that began at the end of March 2018. To make matters worse, Israel has allowed itself to succumb to an extortion racket.

Any good strategy is based on maximizing your side's relative advantage. Israel's advantage over Hamas and its allies is clear: It possesses devastating, precise firepower, and – compared to Gaza, at least – strategic depth.

However accurate Hamas's missiles may be, they cannot compete with the accuracy of the Israel Air Force. Hamas is increasingly succeeding at overwhelming the Iron Dome missile defense system with multiple launches, but even at their most effective these missiles can only cause partial damage to buildings. Citizens who take refuge in shelters usually come out physically unharmed.

By contrast, Israel's guided missiles can hit bad guys on motorcycles and, when necessary, pulverize buildings completely.

The punishment the IAF metes out takes place in a space of 140 square miles. Hamas and its allies strike, with lesser precision, at an area twice to eight times that size.

In the three rounds of heavy fighting, the number of IAF sorties equaled the number of missile strikes from Gaza. The difference lies in the accuracy – almost 100% for Israel, less than 1% for Hamas – and in the fact that Israeli munitions can use much higher payloads.

Factoring in Gaza's small area, the difference in payload accuracy and the difference in payload size, in any conflict between Gaza and Israel, the damage done in Gaza is thousands of times greater.

In the most recent (minor) round of fighting, Hamas boasted of Israelis' psychological suffering. The truth is that the psychological suffering of the Gaza population is far greater.

These differences explain why Hamas and Islamic Jihad launch fewer missiles after each massive round, and why after the third and most punishing of all, Israel achieved three-and-a-half years of quiet. The grandchildren of Hamas leaders, like Israeli children, suffer tremendously from these rounds of fighting; it can hardly be otherwise considering what they have grown up with.

However, temporarily at least, Israel's strategy is to play to the other side's advantage. This is not new. The early Zionist pioneers were succumbing to extortion long before their presence was perceived by the local Arab elite as a threat.

To add insult to injury, the Israeli military establishment (and increasingly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Likud leaders) justifies this extortion model on the basis of averting a "humanitarian" crisis.

To be sure, there is no way of extending humanitarian aid to the Gaza population behind Hamas's back. Yet no Orwellian claims can negate the simple fact that any concession on importing dual-usage materials into Gaza increases the capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and therefore increases the pain they can inflict on Israel. The last bout clearly demonstrated this fact.

Allowing aid into Gaza means increased revenues for Hamas, and imports of dual-usage materials increase Hamas's firepower. In 2014, it took 300 missiles to kill one Israeli. In the recent bout, it took 180.

The moment Qatari dollars reach Gaza, Hamas can more easily pay for its regular assaults against the fence and punish the Israeli population living alongside it.

So where is the glimmer of light?

Hamas's "return" riots at the border fence have completely failed to galvanize West Bank Palestinians to strike either Israel or the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas hoped the riots would erase the effects of its takeover of Gaza in 2007, which divided a previously united Palestinian population.

The failure of the recent riots commemorating the nakba (the "catastrophe" of the creation of the State of Israel) to do either – West Bank Palestinians did not demonstrate against either Israel or the PA – suggests that Hamas remains tarnished by the sin of having divided the Palestinian people and weakened the cause.

Furthermore, extorting Israel also carries a cost for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The aim of both movements is to "liberate" Palestine. Trading truces for money and increasingly substituting defensive language – "if Israel strikes, we will hit harder" – for the rhetoric of "liberating Palestine from the river to the sea" gives the sense that Hamas is taking the path of Fatah, the movement it denigrates and claims to have succeeded.

There's always hope that Netanyahu will go back to the right strategy of hitting hard and massively to bring Hamas to end the option of violence, as the Arab states and Fatah did before it.

This article is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post Finally, a ray of light from Gaza appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Palestinians like to claim that their problem lies at the heart of Arab concerns, notwithstanding the multiplicity of crisis areas in the Middle East such as Syria, Yemen and Libya.

A look at Google search trends on the Palestinian problem in the Arab world casts this claim into serious doubt.

The Palestinian problem, like most other political issues, is a function of personal involvement and geographical proximity to the crisis area. This means that it is the Palestinians themselves who search the conflict most frequently, followed by nearby countries.

So if one plots searches for "Palestinian resistance" (in Arabic, "al-muqawama al-Filastiniyya"), searches relative to the size of population in "Palestine" are more than four times more numerous than among Arabs in Israel, 10 times more than in nearby Jordan, 40 times more than in Syria and nearly 400 times more than in distant Morocco.

The term "Zionism," which for most Arab readers evokes a hostility similar to that evoked in the West by terms such as "Stalinism" and even "Nazism," demonstrates a similar search pattern. It is searched mostly by Palestinians and hardly at all by Moroccans.

That's not surprising. A search for Charles de Gaulle, say, would show a similar pattern. Most searchers would be in France, and the Francophone stays within the French orbit. The more distant the searchers are from France, the less interest one would find in de Gaulle.

Yet when one plots "Al-Aqsa mosque" (masjid al-aqsa), one gets a very different picture. Here, the laws of self-involvement and proximity still apply, but their effect is attenuated.

Religious rather than nationalist or pan-Arab sentiment means that in relative terms, the Al-Aqsa mosque is more important to the Arabs than Palestinian resistance.

To begin with, there is little difference between the number of searches related to the mosque conducted by Palestinians in the Palestinian Authority and Gaza, the Arab citizens of Israel and searchers from Jordan (where Palestinians might still be the majority) versus searches concerning the Palestinian resistance.

Whereas searches for the latter among Palestinians were four times more frequent than among Arabs in Israel and ten times more frequent than in nearby Jordan, searches for the mosque were less than two times more than for Israeli Arabs and only one-third less than in Jordan.

A comparison of searches for these terms between two more distant states, Syria and Morocco, reveals the same pattern. Relative to their population, Syrians searched "Palestinian resistance" only one-fortieth as often as did Palestinians. For the Al-Aqsa mosque, the difference is one-twentieth. While Palestinians searched "Palestinian resistance" 400 times more than Moroccans, the multiple for Al-Aqsa was much lower, at 50.

This was true of most of the Arab states, including Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. Interest in the Al-Aqsa mosque was far more evenly spread than interest in purely political and nationalist terms, such as "Palestinian resistance" and "Zionism."

It's important to note that the total number of respective webpages for "Palestinian resistance" and "Al-Aqsa mosque" in Arabic is nearly equal: 11.5 million for the former and 12.5 million for the latter. The more even spread of the number of webpages for the mosque as against the more nationalist term, "Palestinian resistance," is meaningful.

This underscores the importance of the religious dimension in the Arabic-speaking world both within and without the Palestinian arena in the Arab-Palestinian conflict.

This is hardly new. Islam was a major, if not dominant, theme in the most tumultuous periods of strife between Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land.

In April 1920, attacks against Jews began during the religious Nabi Musa pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The 1921 riots began in Jaffa to protest the participation of immodestly clad Jewish women in the May Day demonstrations in Jaffa.

Seven years later, in 1928, Hajj Amin al-Husseini coined the phrase "Al-Aqsa in danger" in a pan-Islamic campaign against the Zionist movement that led up to the most murderous onslaught against Jews to date in August 1929. This term has since been adopted by both Hamas and the northern branch of the Islamic Movement (banned in 2015).

During the Second Intifada, the Palestinian Authority and Fatah tried in vain to name the conflict the "Independence Intifada" in its struggle against a rising Hamas, which wanted to color the conflict with Israel in religious terms. Today, it is universally referred to in Arabic as the "Al-Aqsa intifada," even in Fatah and PA discourse.

The same religious zeal regarding the Palestinian cause can be found in the Arab world.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood sent by far the largest number of volunteers during the War of Independence, and they played a major role in the blockade of Jerusalem.

In 1973, the secular, nationalist and socialist Egyptian state motivated its soldiers to cross the canal to wage religious war against the Israeli infidels. Israel's Arab citizens rallied to the Palestinian cause in mass riots for the first time during the initial 10 days of the 2000 outbreak of violence chanting "Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud, jaish Muhammad sa yahud" ("Recall Khaybar, oh Jews, Muhammad's army will return"), a reference to the total defeat of Jewish tribes in the Khaybar oasis at the Prophet Muhammad's hands in the early years of Islam.

Why emphasize the religious nature of the conflict?

The answer lies among English-language readers, many of whom are secular and who believe others are motivated by secular concepts. A search for the term "Palestinian resistance" in English compared to "Al-Aqsa mosque" produces more than three times more web pages for the former than for the latter. In Arabic, more web pages are generated for the mosque.

To understand the Middle East, you have to think in Arabic and take religion much more seriously than it is taken in the West.

This article is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post Arab support for Al-Aqsa and the Palestinians appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.