Manipulating math to rescue ‘Palestine’ By Moshe Phillips

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas arrives to the Samaria city of Ramallah after his return from Berlin, Aug. 18, 2022

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.”

Read it all here.......