According to MK Eli Elaluf (Kulanu), one of the reasons for the surge in Arab terror across Israel in recent weeks is poverty. 

The chairman of the Knesset Labor, Health and Welfare Committee, Elaluf asserted on Tuesday that “some of the protest and revolt from the Arab population we’ve been seeing in recent weeks is an outgrowth of poverty.” 

“Nearly 50 percent of the Arab population in this country lives in poverty, and not enough is being done about it,” he added. 

Speaking at a special session for the “Day of Poverty,” Elaluf said he was positive that “if the poverty rate in the Arab sector were lower, we’d see fewer Arabs participating in protests and supporting the wave of terrorism.”

Poverty within Israel’s Arab sector is indeed a noted problem, with the population of Arabs living below the poverty line twice as high as the number of Israeli Jews. 

According to a report compiled the Knesset Research and Information Center, 52.4 percent of the Arab population in 2013 was living in poverty compared to 23.8 percent of the Jewish population. 

But many of the terrorists who carried out recent attacks against Israelis came from middle class, even wealthy families, with their social media profiles featuring pictures of themselves in designer clothes or with fancy cars as much as imagery and slogans of violent anti-Semitism.

Many Israeli politicians have attributed the latest terror wave to the incitement campaign being waged by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority as well as rampant anti-Semitism within the Palestinian Arab population. 

As Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid put it: “If Palestinian youth try to kill youth their own age in the streets, they are not doing so because garbage trucks don’t come on time in East Jerusalem or because their schools lack budgets. Rather it is because someone brainwashed them on the social networks with horrific incitement in which Jews are compared to monkeys and pigs and they are called to kill innocent civilians.”