The Palestinians are a case in point where they had tons of other choices all the way down the line, and chose terrorism with depressing consistency.
If you start the story in 1970, maybe. They had precious few choices before that, and since the ones they had after that were largely created by terror, it’s no real surprise that some of them thought more and better terror might get them more and better choices.
When you look at the world's people, you find that terrorism has an extremely low correlation with true desperation, and an extremely high correlation with an ideology that is supportive of terrorism. Islamism is the chief such ideology in the world today. Once you see this, it is simply false to keep asserting that desperation causes terrorism, just not universally. Desperation has nothing to do with the case.
Ideology provides the leaders. Desperation provides the footsoldiers, and in most cases an antagonist: desperation is usually fairly easy to attribute, honestly or not, to an outside agent. A terrorist movement needs all of these. Without a desperate mass to provide refuge and cannon fodder, ideology will not spread beyond a hard core that can be isolated and eliminated. Look at Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigade, and the similar movements that emerged in Europe. They had an ideology that was supportive of terrorism, and they had outside support. Without a desperate mass that could be won over with ideology, they were never able to spread that ideology beyond their inner militant core. They were eventually tracked down and killed or imprisoned. |
