1. The credit score of my neighbors does not determine whether I get a bank loan. If you want to base lending on whether someone personally engages in violence, fine, that’s your venture. If otherwise, it’s collective punishment.

2. The rocket fire out of Gaza has basically stopped, and even if it hadn’t, the 1.5 million people living there and the 2.5 million in the West Bank are not responsible for it.

3. The Palestinians need to have a better quality of life because their quality of life has been reduced by military occupation. The poverty of the Palestinian population is a direct result of the system of closures and checkpoints the Israeli military has forced on them and the refusal of Israel to allow investors into the West Bank and Gaza. Economic experts generally agree that if it weren’t for the Occupation, Palestinians would be one of the more thriving populations in the Middle East. Bethlehem used to be one of the more major tourist destinations in the Middle East. Gaza was one of the world’s greatest tulip exporters. Jeracho oranges are famous worldwide. Nablusi soap shares an equal fame. If you are so concerned with giving Palestinians a better quality of life, you should be advocating for an end to that which has destroyed their quality of life.

Suggesting that loans, conditioned on crime rates no less, is the solution to Palestinian suffering is like saying Africans under Apartheid would have been fine had they only had the capital to start their own crafts businesses.

“If you want to count rocket fire out of Gaza you might have more numbers to play”

This is pretty much what I’m getting at directly. Rocket fire into Israel needs to stop, and people in Palestine need to have a better quality of life.

1. It’s against international law. Withholding aid from the many in order to punish the few is Collective Punishment, which is a crime according to the Geneva Convention. Israel engages in illegal Collective Punishment already, but that does not mean everyone else should, too.

2. It assumes Palestinian violence is a case of misbehavior, that they are acting out and can be given economic incentives not to. Palestinian violence is in fact a direct response to the constant siege under which they have lived for the past forty years. If Israelis were systematically impoverished, denied water, humiliated, imprisoned, denied healthcare — if 70 Israeli woman had been forced to give birth at checkpoints, if 355 Israeli children were sitting in Palestinian jails, if over a thousand Israeli civilians had just been killed and 5,000 injured in a major air strike and invasion, if Palestinian soldiers came into Israeli homes night after night, you’d see a lot more Israeli violence, too.

3. It assumes there are enough Palestinian attacks into Israel to create statistical significance. There are maybe a half-dozen per year at this point. If there are five this year and six next year, are you going to decrease aid by 15 percent? Or worse, if there are none this month, and one next month, are you going to take it away entirely? If you want to count rocket fire out of Gaza you might have more numbers to play with, except now Hamas has halted its rocket fire entirely and is actually working to halt the rocket fire of smaller groups and individuals. Even when Hamas rocket fire was at it’s greatest volume, it had a hit rate of about a third of a percent, making it more a form of protest than an attack.

4. It ignores Israeli violence against Palestinians, which is actually far far greater. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada, the disproportion of Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths has grown close to seven to one. More Israeli soldiers have committed suicide than have died at the hands of Palestinians. In the meantime, while there are only a handful of Palestinian attacks per year, there are Israeli incursions into Palestinian refugee camps nightly across the West Bank. Even if you exclude Israeli military violence, Israeli settler violence against Palestinians is far more widespread than Palestinian violence towards Israelis, including burning olive groves, throwing rocks at children, beatings, pouring bleach on Palestinians, throwing garbage and glass bottles, and murder. Most of these are a several-times-daily occurrence in the Old City of Hebron, as reported by the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, a neutral international organization with a mandate from both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority to monitor the situation there for the past 15 years.