Here's what Daniel sent us. He's pointing at something that should be genuinely embarrassing for the entire peace-process industry. We've had decades of well-intentioned efforts — from Trump's Deal of the Century to left-leaning NGOs like the Portland Trust — all built on the same core assumption: if you give people jobs and prosperity, they'll stop wanting to kill each other. The evidence for this is, charitably, thin. The ideology of Hamas isn't exactly something you can displace with a business forum. And yet the same idea keeps getting recycled, over and over. Daniel's question is blunt: where's the actual evidence that religious and nationalist hatred can be mollified by a more comfortable standard of living?
October seventh made the failure of this approach about as visible as it's possible for a policy failure to be. You had the attack planned and executed during a period when Israel was actively expanding work permits for Palestinians, when Gaza was receiving record levels of Qatari aid. The economic peace playbook was running at full throttle — and the result was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Which you'd think would trigger some kind of rethink. But the policy machinery just keeps churning out the same prescriptions. You can already see it in the post-war reconstruction plans being floated for Gaza — same assumptions, same frameworks, same language. It's like watching someone try to fix a leak with the same bucket they've been using for thirty years, except the bucket has a hole in it and they keep pointing at the bucket's design specifications.
The thing that makes Daniel's question so sharp is that he's not asking whether economic peace is a nice idea. He's asking what the evidence actually shows. And the answer is uncomfortable, because the evidence shows something close to the opposite of what the theory predicts.
Where do we even start with this?
Let's define the thing first, because "economic peace" gets thrown around like it's self-explanatory, and it's not. The core theory is that economic interdependence and rising living standards reduce support for political violence and extremism. Give people something to lose — a job, a mortgage, a kid in a decent school — and they'll be less willing to blow themselves up or vote for people who promise to.
The Thomas Friedman column come to life. No two countries with a McDonald's have ever gone to war with each other.
Right, the Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention. Which Friedman himself walked back after NATO bombed Belgrade — a city that very much had McDonald's. But the idea stuck around in policy circles long after the intellectual scaffolding collapsed. And in the Israeli-Palestinian context, it split into two distinct lineages that are worth separating because they look different but share the same DNA.
Walk me through the split.
On the right, you get the Trump version — Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, the "Deal of the Century." Their framing treated the conflict as essentially a real estate dispute with some religious window dressing. The theory was: the Palestinians have been failed by their leadership, they're sitting on undeveloped land, and if you inject fifty billion dollars of investment — which is what they unveiled at the Peace to Prosperity workshop in Bahrain in June twenty nineteen — you can basically pave over the political questions. Borders, settlements, right of return, Jerusalem — none of it was in the plan. Kushner said it explicitly: if you improve the economy, you improve lives, and that leads to peace.
The developer's theory of geopolitics. Every conflict is just a distressed asset waiting for the right capital stack.
And then on the left, you have the Portland Trust version — founded in two thousand four by Sir Ronald Cohen, who's a major figure in the social impact investing world. Their model is more sophisticated on the surface. They run things like the Palestinian-Israeli Business Forum, they facilitate joint ventures, they frame it as building constituencies for peace through shared economic interests. The language is different — it's about empowerment, not real estate — but the underlying logic is identical: economic cooperation creates political moderation.
Two different aesthetics, same engine under the hood. The right's version is "build them a shopping mall," the left's version is "build them a socially conscious micro-enterprise incubator." Either way, the assumption is that political violence is downstream of material conditions.
That's the puzzle Daniel's pointing at. Both versions have been tried, in various forms, for decades. The amounts of money involved are staggering — the Bahrain plan alone was fifty billion, and that's before you count the European Union's annual aid packages, the Qatari fuel subsidies, the USAID programs, the NGO ecosystem. And yet, by any metric that matters, extremism hasn't declined. In key metrics, it's worsened. Support for armed resistance among Palestinians was higher in twenty nineteen — a period of relative economic stability — than it was during some of the harder years.
The question isn't really "does economic peace work." The question is why anyone still thinks it does, given that the experiment has been running for a generation and the results are in.
Let's look at the polling, because this is where the theory really comes apart. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has been tracking support for armed resistance and for Hamas for decades. If the economic peace theory were correct, you'd expect those numbers to drop when conditions improve and spike during downturns. That's not what the data shows.
What does it show?
The correlation is basically nonexistent. Between twenty seventeen and twenty nineteen, the West Bank and Gaza saw relative economic stability — Gaza was getting Qatari fuel money, work permits were expanding, there was construction, there was movement. And in that same period, support for Hamas and for armed resistance went up, not down. Meanwhile, during some of the harsher economic periods — the blockade tightening, aid disruptions — support actually dipped in certain quarters.
Which is exactly the opposite of what the model predicts.
It gets worse when you zoom in on October seventh. That attack wasn't planned during an economic crisis. It was planned during what was, by Gaza standards, a period of relative openness. The Israeli government had expanded work permits to something like eighteen thousand — that's people crossing daily, earning wages, building economic ties. Qatar was pumping in millions every month in fuel subsidies and cash. The economic peace machinery was running at full capacity. And Hamas used that period to plan the deadliest attack in Israeli history.
The prosperity didn't prevent it. The question is whether the prosperity actively enabled it — whether the economic opening provided cover, or resources, or both.
That's the uncomfortable implication, and there's a mechanism in the political science literature that helps explain it. It's called relative deprivation theory. The idea is that political violence isn't driven by absolute poverty — it's driven by the gap between what people have and what they expect to have. When you improve economic conditions, you raise expectations. If those expectations then hit a ceiling — because the political situation hasn't changed, because the occupation continues, because there's no path to sovereignty — the frustration can be more explosive than if conditions had never improved at all.
You're saying economic improvement without political resolution is actually more dangerous than stagnation.
In certain conditions, yes. The data from multiple conflicts bears this out. There was a major RAND Corporation study on counterinsurgency that found the same pattern — economic development projects in the absence of political legitimacy didn't reduce violence, and in some cases they correlated with increases. People don't just want to be less poor. They want dignity, they want sovereignty, they want their grievances recognized. If you throw money at them while ignoring those things, the money itself becomes an insult.
In the Palestinian context specifically, there's an added layer. The economic benefits are perceived as coming from the occupier. So accepting them isn't just neutral — it's collaboration. The work permits, the Qatari money, the business forums — from Hamas's perspective, those aren't peace-building tools. They're tools of normalization. They're designed to make the occupation tolerable, to buy off resistance, to create a class of Palestinians with a stake in the status quo.
Which brings us to the legitimacy trap. The Palestinian Authority has been walking this tightrope for decades — taking the economic cooperation, taking the security coordination, and in exchange getting labeled by Hamas as a subcontractor for the occupation. Every business forum, every joint venture, every economic initiative that doesn't address the political questions feeds that narrative. It delegitimizes the moderates and strengthens the radicals.
The Portland Trust would probably say that's exactly why their work matters — they're trying to build a constituency for moderation, a business class that wants peace because peace is good for business.
That's a coherent theory. The problem is that twenty years of Portland Trust programming haven't produced evidence that it works. The Palestinian business leaders who participate in these forums are already moderates. They're not the ones who need to be convinced. The question is whether their participation shifts anything in the broader political landscape, and the polling suggests it doesn't. The constituency for armed resistance isn't shrinking because some CEOs had a nice dinner in Tel Aviv.
There's something almost quaint about it. The idea that you can convene a business forum and that this will somehow compete with a religious-nationalist ideology that's been hardening for decades. It's like trying to fight a wildfire with a PowerPoint presentation.
That brings us to the second-order damage. It's not just that economic peace fails — it's that pursuing it can actively make things worse. The legitimacy trap is real, and it's been documented across multiple conflicts. When you pour money into economic cooperation without addressing political grievances, the population doesn't see generosity. They see a bribe.
The "shut up and take the check" theory of peacemaking.
The actors who benefit from that framing are the radicals. Hamas has been explicit about this for years. Their critique of the Palestinian Authority isn't that the PA is bad at governing — it's that the PA is a security subcontractor for Israel, trading political quiescence for economic crumbs. Every work permit, every business forum, every joint venture becomes ammunition for that argument.
The economic peace initiatives don't just fail to reduce extremism — they actively delegitimize the moderates who participate in them. The Portland Trust's Palestinian business leaders become evidence for Hamas's case, not counterweights to it.
And this isn't unique to Israel-Palestine. The US military ran into the same dynamic in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they actually studied it. The empirical findings are brutal for the economic peace crowd. A major analysis of counterinsurgency operations found that economic development projects — roads, schools, irrigation systems — had no statistically significant effect on reducing insurgent violence.
Wait, zero effect? Billions spent and nothing?
No statistically significant correlation between development spending and reduced attacks. What did correlate was the perceived legitimacy of the local government and security forces. If people believed their government was legitimate, violence dropped. If they didn't, you could pave every road in the province and it wouldn't matter.
The "hearts and minds" thing was basically a very expensive way of learning that people care more about who governs them than whether they have a new well.
The mechanism is exactly what we're seeing with Hamas. The development projects were perceived as bribes from an occupying force. Accepting them didn't build goodwill — it built resentment, because the underlying political reality hadn't changed. The same dynamic applies to the West Bank and Gaza. Economic peace tries to bypass the legitimacy question, and the legitimacy question refuses to be bypassed.
Which brings us to the ideological driver. This is where the economic peace theory really shows its blind spot, because it treats ideology as a mask for material grievances. Give people jobs and they'll stop being Islamists. The problem is that for Hamas, the ideology isn't a means to an end — it's the end.
Graeme Wood's work on ISIS made this point forcefully, and it applies to Hamas as well. These are religiously-motivated actors who view material comfort not as a goal but as a spiritual threat. Prosperity is a distraction from the true path. The Quranic framing is explicit about this — worldly wealth as a test, as something that can corrupt the faithful.
From Hamas's perspective, a Palestinian with a good job and a mortgage isn't a success story. He's someone who's been spiritually neutralized.
They've said this. Mohammed Hafez, who's done some of the best work on Islamist mobilization, documents how these movements frame economic development as a tool of the enemy — a way of making the occupation comfortable enough that people stop resisting. Hamas's goal isn't prosperity within the current system. It's the establishment of an Islamic state. Economic development is at best irrelevant to that project and at worst an active obstacle.
Which makes the whole economic peace enterprise not just ineffective but conceptually incoherent. You're offering people something they've explicitly said they don't want, in exchange for giving up something they've explicitly said they won't give up.
Yet the idea persists. That's the part that really needs explaining. Why does a failed theory keep getting recycled, across administrations, across political orientations, across decades?
Institutional inertia is part of it. The Portland Trust has been doing this since two thousand four. The State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative is built on the same assumptions. These organizations have staff, budgets, annual reports, conferences. Admitting the model doesn't work isn't just intellectually uncomfortable — it's existentially threatening.
Once you've built an entire operational model around economic peace, the cost of admitting failure is the dissolution of your raison d'être. So instead you tweak the program design, change the branding, commission another impact assessment that measures outputs rather than outcomes — how many business leaders attended the forum, not whether extremism actually declined.
There's a cognitive bias at work too. Doing something feels better than doing nothing, even if the something doesn't work. It's easier to sell a fifty-billion-dollar investment plan than to admit you don't have a solution. The investment plan looks like action. Admitting the limits of economics looks like surrender.
The uncomfortable implication Daniel's question points toward is that taking ideology seriously might mean accepting that some conflicts don't have a technocratic solution. That's a hard thing for the policy world to swallow, because the policy world runs on the assumption that every problem has a manageable, fundable, deliverable answer.
If it doesn't, you can always convene another business forum to discuss why.
Given all this — and I think we've laid out the evidence pretty squarely — what should people actually do differently? If you're a policymaker, an analyst, a journalist, or just someone trying to make sense of the next peace plan that lands on your desk, what's the framework you should be applying?
The first thing is to stop conflating economic development with conflict resolution. They're separate tracks. Economic development is worth doing for its own sake — people deserve jobs and dignity regardless of the political situation. But treating it as a substitute for political peace is a proven failure. If you're a policymaker, the actionable takeaway is: fund economic programs if you want to improve economic conditions. Don't fund them and then claim you're solving the conflict. That's not just intellectually dishonest — it's actively harmful, because it creates the illusion of progress while the underlying drivers fester.
Parallel tracks, not sequential ones. Don't tell yourself you'll do the economy first and the politics will follow. The politics won't follow. They never have.
For analysts and journalists — this is the part Daniel's question really speaks to — there's a single question you should ask when evaluating any peace proposal. Does this address the political and ideological grievances that drive the conflict, or does it try to bypass them? Call it the legitimacy question. If the proposal is primarily economic, if it treats borders and sovereignty and Jerusalem as too hard to touch, then whatever else it is, it's not a peace plan. It's an economic development plan with a peace branding exercise layered on top.
The track record of those is zero for however many we've counted.
The legitimacy question is a filter that would have caught the Bahrain workshop before it spent fifty billion dollars of other people's money. It would have caught the Portland Trust's theory of change before twenty years of business forums. It's not a complicated test. It's just one that the peace-process industry has a strong institutional incentive to avoid.
Because once you ask it, you have to confront the possibility that the answer is uncomfortable. That some of the grievances aren't negotiable through the mechanisms you have available. That's a hard thing to put in a funding proposal.
For listeners who aren't policymakers or journalists — just people trying to make sense of this — the framework travels. Be skeptical of any framing that reduces complex ideological conflicts to economic incentives. This isn't just Israel-Palestine. You see the same logic applied to Northern Ireland, where people point to the peace dividend as proof that prosperity solved the Troubles, while ignoring that the Good Friday Agreement addressed political sovereignty and identity questions directly. You see it floated for Kashmir, for Ukraine-Russia, for plenty of frozen conflicts where the temptation is to say "just get the economies going and the rest will sort itself out.
The Northern Ireland comparison is instructive because it's often cited as proof that economic peace works. But the sequence matters. The political settlement came first. The economic dividend was a consequence of the peace, not a cause of it. People get this backwards constantly.
The Good Friday Agreement didn't say "let's build some cross-border business parks and see if the IRA disbands." It addressed governance, identity, sovereignty, policing, prisoners. The economic benefits followed the political resolution, not the other way around. That's the lesson people should be drawing, and it's almost the opposite of what the economic peace model prescribes.
The practical toolkit is actually pretty simple. One: separate the economic track from the political track — fund both if you want, but don't pretend one does the work of the other. Two: apply the legitimacy question to every proposal you encounter. Three: be suspicious of any plan that treats ideology as a mask for material grievances rather than a genuine driver. And four: when someone tells you a conflict is really about economics, ask them why the people fighting it keep saying it's about something else.
Which leaves us with the question that's been sitting under this whole conversation. If economic peace doesn't work, what does?
I don't think we pretend to have a full answer. But the starting point has to be taking ideology seriously — not as a costume people wear over their real economic grievances, but as a genuine driver. Hamas means what it says. It has meant what it says for decades. The charter, the statements, the actions — they're consistent. The goal is an Islamic state, not a better-funded Palestinian Authority.
That's uncomfortable for the policy world to accept, because it means some conflicts don't have a technocratic resolution. You can't workshop your way out of a theological commitment. You can't convene a business forum that competes with a belief that prosperity itself is a form of spiritual corruption.
The challenge for anyone serious about this is to stop treating ideology as the thing you'll deal with later, after the economy is sorted. The ideology is the point. It's not an obstacle to the deal — it's the reason there isn't one.
Here's where this gets immediately relevant. As various actors start floating post-war reconstruction plans for Gaza — the Biden administration, European governments, the usual institutional suspects — you can already see the economic peace assumptions creeping back in. The language is about investment packages, job creation, infrastructure rebuilding. All of which is necessary for human reasons. None of which addresses the political and ideological drivers that produced October seventh.
The practical thing listeners can do is watch for that. When the next reconstruction plan lands, ask the legitimacy question. Does this address who governs, under what terms, with what sovereignty? Or is it fifty billion dollars and a hope that the politics will sort itself out later?
Because if it's the latter, we know how that story ends. We've watched it end the same way for decades.
Taking ideology seriously sounds like a simple thing. Turns out it's the hardest thing the peace-process industry has ever been asked to do.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the late Victorian period, cartographers recorded a phantom island off the coast of Greenland called "Buss Island," which appeared on maps for over two centuries before being conclusively disproven — and one theory holds that its supposed location was influenced by sailors mistaking the rare pigment effects of iceblink, a whitish glare on the horizon caused by light reflecting off distant sea ice.
A phantom island kept alive by ice glare. That's uncomfortably on theme.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop, our prompts come from Daniel, and if you want to send us your own questions, you can email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We're at my weird prompts dot com. Until next time.
