Will PA Terror Policy Kill the Economic Peace?

This question is asked by Dan Diker in a recent op ed

The double execution-style murders last week of Kim Levengrond Yehezkel and Ziv Hajbi at the Barkan Industrial Park took place in the aftermath of the recent fatal stabbing of Ari Fuld in the Gush Etzion commercial center. In both cases, the Palestinian terrorists, ages 23 and 17 respectively, carried out their assaults not in “settlements,” but in two of 16 industrial and commercial zones in Judea and Samaria – the “West Bank” where Palestinians and Israelis live, work and shop. These young men murdered Israelis in order to resist a growing Palestinian middle-class cooperation and normalization, in which tens of thousands of Palestinian families have chosen to shape their future by cooperating with Israel and living and working with Israelis.

Palestinian leaders and professionals living in towns and villages in areas C have expressed shame and sorrow quietly over terrorist acts such as these, as well as their inability to say so publicly. They have expressed disgust with their own corrupt and terror-supporting Palestinian Authority leaders who incentivize young Palestinians to murder Jews with more than $315 million annually, and whose official PA political and public culture and media incite them to murder Jews.   

While the  Israeli security forces are still investigating the circumstances of the Barkan atrocity, one link already seems clear: Both young terrorists are bound by the fear and rejection that the bottom-up economic normalization has created an irreversible economically driven “revolution of interests,” as former PLO leader Hani al-Hassan put it. The painful paradox of growing Palestinian-Israeli economic normalization mixed with intolerable Palestinian assaults underscores the importance of Israeli sovereignty and security in Area C. It further exposes the deepening chasm between the PA and the terrorists they support and glorify on the one hand, with the silent and silenced majority of Palestinians who see their economic and political futures linked to Israel, as opposed to a failed, corrupt Palestinian Authority.
As the standard of living for Palestinians has increased some 300% per wage-earner in Israeli-controlled, protected and administered area C, compared with the average annual salary in the Palestinian-controlled areas, the PLO and PA’s blood pressure increases.

Some 100,000 Palestinians commute to work in “pre-1967 Israel” every day, while some 30,000 Palestinians work in the Israeli-administered area C of Judea and Samaria, which is also protected by Israeli Labor laws for both Palestinian and Israeli workers. Palestinains to seek a future with Israel and Israeli companies. SodaStream and Rami Levy serve as good examples of harmonious work cultures and advantaged compensation policies that are driving Palestinian employment, prosperity, career development and political normalization that all threaten the Palestinian leadership’s perpetual hold on power.

In short, ongoing Palestinian terrorism has boomeranged against the Palestinian leadership. The silent Palestinian majority has linked its economic and political future to Israel and given up on its own leadership as an economic anchor and political solution.