The biggest myth about terrorism is that poverty causes it.

Terrorism is not a "weapon of the poor." If poverty causes terrorism, the evidence would look very different.

Radicalized Palestinian children at a “summer camp” in the Gaza Strip, being trained in weapons-use, so they can kill Jews and become martyrs (photo: Hamas)

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This is a guest essay by David E. Firester, the author of “Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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For decades, political leaders, international organizations, and pundits have framed terrorism as a “weapon of the poor.” The language is familiar: Terrorists are “driven by despair,” “pushed to the edge by poverty,” or “radicalized by socioeconomic exclusion.”

This framing does more than misdiagnose the problem. It quietly shifts moral responsibility away from those who plan and execute attacks, and toward the societies they target. If Jews are attacked in Israel or abroad, for example, we are told to ask what Israel has done to “radicalize” its attackers or how Israel’s treatment of “Palestinians” has supposedly “left them no choice.” In this narrative, terrorism becomes a kind of tragic, if regrettable, feedback signal from the oppressed.

That is a language choice, not an empirical conclusion. And it is a revealing one. It treats terrorists as passive products of structural conditions rather than active agents making strategic choices. It also implies that the path to reducing terrorism runs mainly through development aid, job programs, and grievance-recognition — rather than through disrupting networks, degrading capabilities, and challenging the ideologies that celebrate killing civilians.

The trouble is that when you actually look at who becomes a terrorist, and why, the poverty story falls apart. Beyond these core findings, a broad cross-section of work, ranging from interviews with suicide recruiters and would-be bombers to ethnographic and theoretical studies, has likewise found that terrorists are not uniquely impoverished or mentally ill, but rather embedded in ideological networks that frame violence as meaningful and rewarding.

Nowhere has the poverty narrative been more persistent, or more distorting, than in how the world talks about the “Palestinian” cause. For decades, Western institutions have presented a morally simple picture: “Palestinians” are poor, dispossessed, and desperate, whereas Jews are rich, armed, and powerful.

In that framing, terrorism against Jews becomes the “expected” response of an impoverished population with “no alternative.” When Hamas or other factions massacre civilians, their actions are quickly reframed as “resistance,” as an understandable (if regrettable) outgrowth of the socioeconomic gap between Israelis and “Palestinians.”

This story does three things at once.

First, it erases the ideological content of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and their allies — groups whose charters, sermons, education systems, and media products talk about annihilating Jews, not raising wages.

Second, it launders anti-Jewish violence through the language of social justice, as though the central fact were not that Jews are being hunted, but that the attackers are “marginalized.”

Third, it blurs the line between “Palestinian” branding and broader jihadist currents, allowing Islamist sympathizers to cloak their own antisemitic campaigns in the same moral costume.

In that picture, Jews are not the victims of deliberate ideological hatred; they are portrayed as the necessary price of someone else’s economic frustration. The poverty myth thus functions as a rhetorical shield around the “Palestinian” cause and its jihadist fellow-travelers, even when the people pulling the trigger are neither especially poor nor especially powerless.

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Over the last two decades, economists and political scientists have asked a basic question: If poverty and lack of education really drive terrorism, then terrorists should, on average, come from the poorest and least educated strata of their societies.

They do not.

Using survey data and biographical information on members of Hezbollah and Hamas, economist Alan Krueger and historian Jitka Maleckova found that terrorist operatives were more educated and less likely to be poor than the general population around them.¹ Professor of Economics and Public Policy Claude Berrebi’s detailed study of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives reached a similar conclusion: Higher levels of education and better economic status were positively associated with participation in terrorism, including suicide attacks.²

That alone should make us suspicious of the familiar claim that terrorism is “what happens when people don’t know any better.” In many cases, the most committed terrorists know exactly what they are doing — and are better educated than the people they kill.

Political scientist Ethan Bueno de Mesquita’s formal model of mobilization and recruitment helps explain this pattern: In a recession or under poor economic conditions, more volunteers may offer themselves to terrorist organizations, but those organizations screen for “quality” and select the more capable and educated among them.³ Empirically, that is what three other professors found when they examined “Palestinian” suicide terrorism: Deteriorating economic conditions allow organizations to recruit older, more educated, and more experienced bombers who carry out more lethal attacks.⁴

At the country level, economist Alberto Abadie compared terrorism across states and found no straightforward relationship between national poverty and terrorism once political variables are taken into account. Instead, the key predictor is political freedom: Terrorism is more common in countries that are neither fully authoritarian nor fully democratic, where repression exists but channels for peaceful political competition are limited.⁵

Professor of Political Science James Piazza, using another cross-national dataset, likewise found that poor economic development alone does not explain terrorism. Instead, the most important drivers are state repression and sharp social cleavages: ethnic, religious, or ideological divides that terrorist organizations can exploit.⁶

Even when scholars detect some correlation between macroeconomic downturns and terrorist incidents, the pattern is modest and mediated through political and organizational factors. Economic contractions can coincide with upticks in terrorism, but the effect is neither simple nor deterministic; it depends on regime type, conflict history, and other structural features.⁷

Large-scale reviews have begun to call out the poverty–terrorism link explicitly as a myth. In a recent survey of the economics of terrorism, it was identified that “terrorism is mainly a product of poverty” as one of the field’s recurring myths, noting that the balance of evidence points instead to political institutions, grievances, and organizational dynamics.⁸

The bottom line from this empirical work is clear:

• Terrorist operatives are often better off and better educated than their peers.

• National poverty in and of itself is not a robust predictor of terrorism once you account for politics and repression.

• Where economic conditions matter, they tend to influence who gets recruited and how deadly attacks are, not whether terrorism exists in the first place.

• Poverty is real. It is corrosive. It is morally urgent. But it is not the causal engine of terrorism.

So, if poverty is not the root cause, what is?

The answer, uncomfortable as it is, lies in the realm of ideas and incentives.

Terrorist organizations are not random collections of desperate individuals. They are political–military actors with stories about who they are, who their enemies are, and how violence advances their cause. They deliberately target civilians not because they have exhausted all other options, but because they believe attacks on civilians will bring concrete benefits: publicity, recruitment, leverage in negotiations, sabotage of rivals, or status within their own community.

Certain religious organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah function as “clubs” that provide social services and mutual insurance to members in exchange for high-cost signals of commitment, including participation in terrorism. The club structure filters out free riders and strengthens in-group ties. In that environment, volunteering for violence is less about a missing paycheck and more about belonging to an exclusive, ideologically charged community.

Political scientist Ethan Bueno de Mesquita’s work on mobilization similarly treats terrorism as the result of strategic interaction between governments, organizations, and potential recruits. In his model, people join terrorist groups when they believe the ideological and material benefits outweigh the risks. Organizations, in turn, select recruits who can carry out effective attacks, which is why terrorists are often more capable than the average person in their community.

Extremist factions use terrorism to sabotage peace processes. By attacking civilians, they aim to provoke harsh retaliation that discredits moderates and collapses negotiations. That is not the logic of desperation; it is the logic of political calculation.

Many terrorist groups are less effective at achieving their stated political goals than strategic models would predict. Instead, terrorism often functions to build intense affective bonds within the group — a kind of militant fraternity in which members gain identity, status, and meaning through violence. The point is not that terrorists are “irrational,” but that their core payoffs may be social and psychological rather than the policy concessions outside observers focus on.

More recently, political scientist Max Abrahms argued that Hamas’ campaign has “worked” in part by “promoting discrimination and violence against minorities in other countries that the terrorist group hates,” intentionally exporting insecurity and antisemitism far beyond Israel itself.⁹

Across these different approaches, a consistent picture emerges:

• Terrorists are not simply the “wretched of the earth” lashing out blindly.

• They are embedded in organizations that frame the world in stark ideological terms (e.g. sacred versus profane, “us” versus “them,” pure versus polluted).

• Violence is chosen because it serves purposes within that worldview, such as signaling resolve, enforcing in-group norms, undermining rivals, or seeking transcendent reward.

That is what links a Hamas suicide bomber on a bus in Jerusalem, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad cell targeting Israeli civilians, an Islamic State team in Paris, and two father-and-son terrorists opening fire on a Hanukkah celebration near Sydney. Their socioeconomic backgrounds differ. Their local contexts differ. What they share is a set of ideas about Jews, about the West, about martyrdom, and about what killing civilians can achieve.

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Insisting that terrorism is mainly about poverty does three kinds of damage.

First, it misdirects policy. If you believe terrorism is driven by lack of jobs and schools, you will pour resources into development programs and expect terrorism to decline. But when recruits are drawn disproportionately from the better educated and relatively better off, raising education and income may simply expand the pool of capable volunteers.

Second, it confuses moral responsibility. The poverty narrative implies that those who organize and celebrate attacks on civilians are, in some sense, victims of circumstance. Responsibility is subtly shifted from the killers to their targets or to vague “systems” that supposedly “gave rise” to the violence. For Jews around the world who now have to worry about being shot for doing something Jewish in public, that is not just analytically wrong; it is morally perverse.

Third, it corrupts our language. By treating terrorism as an understandable “reaction” to structural injustice, we begin to speak about it as though it were a form of political feedback rather than a choice to murder innocents. We do this most obviously in the context of Israel, where attacks on Jews are often framed as “resistance” to Israeli policies toward “Palestinians” rather than as the continuation of a long ideological project that predates the modern state of Israel.

This is not an argument against fighting poverty or promoting economic opportunity; it is an argument against confusing those worthy goals with counterterrorism — and against letting them become excuses for anti-Jewish violence.

Terrorists are driven by stories, symbols, and strategies, not simply by their socioeconomic place. When we say that the “Palestinian” cause, or jihadist movements more broadly, are just the “weapons of the weak,” we quietly dignify attacks on Jews as the natural language of the oppressed.

If we refuse to see that these are chosen acts of hatred in service of ideological projects, we will keep being surprised when the next well-educated, not-especially-poor young man picks up a gun and attacks a Jewish event in a wealthy, peaceful country.

And, if we want to understand terrorism — and protect the societies it targets — we have to start by getting the language right.

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1. Krueger, Alan B., and Jitka Maleckova. 2003. “Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17 (4): 119–144.

2. Berrebi, Claude. 2007. “Evidence about the Link Between Education, Poverty and Terrorism among Palestinians.” Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy 13 (1): 18–53.

3. Bueno de Mesquita, Ethan. 2005. “The Quality of Terror.” American Journal of Political Science 49 (3): 515–530.

4. Benmelech, Efraim, Claude Berrebi, and Esteban F. Klor. 2012. “Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism.” Journal of Politics 74 (1): 113–128.

5. Abadie, Alberto. 2006. “Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism.” American Economic Review 96 (2): 50–56.

6. Piazza, James A. 2006. “Rooted in Poverty? Terrorism, Poor Economic Development, and Social Cleavages.” Terrorism and Political Violence 18 (1): 159–177.

7. Blomberg, S. Brock, Gregory D. Hess, and Akila Weerapana. 2004. “Economic Conditions and Terrorism.” European Journal of Political Economy 20 (2): 463–478.

8. Gaibulloev, Khusrav, and Todd Sandler. 2023. “Common Myths of Terrorism.” Journal of Economic Surveys 37 (2): 271–301.

9. Abrahms, Max. 2008. “What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy.” International Security 32 (4): 78–105.