Stephen M. Flatow is President of the Religious Zionists of America (RZA) He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995 and the author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror. Note: The RZA is not affiliated with any American or Israeli political party.
Israelis have long noticed something disturbing about the men who mastermind jihad against us: many are not the poor and uneducated villagers that Western analysts love to imagine. Some of the most violent figures in Palestinian Arab terrorism - and beyond - are not only highly educated, but they are also doctors, professors, and university scientists. They were trained to save lives and educate in their fields. Instead, they devoted themselves to ending lives.
Take Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Look beyond the masks and rifles, and you find a surprising concentration of white-collar professionals.
Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, a pediatric specialist and university lecturer, served as Hamas’s de facto leader in Gaza. He could diagnose childhood diseases - and then calmly justify the murder of Israeli children.
Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, another Gaza physician and surgeon, co-founded Hamas. He performed surgery in the morning and helped direct suicide bombings at night.
Dr. Fathi Shaqaqi, founder of PIJ, was also an MD. A man who treated infants created an organization dedicated to blowing up buses in Israel including the one in which my daughter Alisa was riding.
Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a Cairo-educated surgeon, became the successor to Osama bin Laden, treating global jihad like a clinical procedure.
And the movement has its American academic wing:
Professor Sami Al-Arian, a PhD in computer engineering, tenured at the University of South Florida, founded the think-tank WISE, and later pled guilty to conspiring to provide services to PIJ. Today he is still quoted as a respected “speaker on Palestinian rights” in anti-Israel media - a case study in how academia launders extremist legitimacy.
Nor was Al-Arian just a fringe academic.
His think-tank recruited Ramadan Shallah, a PhD in economics from the University of Durham in the U.K. Shallah taught economics in Florida - and then took over PIJ after Shaqaqi’s assassination, directing suicide bombings and thousands of rocket attacks while claiming to be a “scholar of resistance.” From the faculty lounge to terror leadership, his transition stunned Americans - but not Israelis.
These men were not driven by desperation or lack of opportunity. They were educated enough to earn degrees, practice professions, gain status, and live comfortable lives. Instead, they chose to weaponize their intellect and prestige to lead others to kill.
The idea that terrorism grows out of poverty has always been a comforting Western fiction. It absolves ideology and implies that “more aid” is the solution. Yet Hamas and PIJ leadership show the opposite reality: terrorism thrives in universities, not refugee camps.
Hamas’s founders did not radicalize in Gaza’s alleyways. They graduated from medical schools in Cairo, Alexandria, and Beirut. They collected credentials, not bread rations. Universities confer leadership, networks, confidence, and technical skills. They train organizers, not merely fighters. That is why Hamas builds tunnels with engineering precision and designs rockets in underground labs. Terror needs brains before it needs fists.
Why do doctors and professors appear so often among terror leaders?
Because their calling gives them credibility. In much of the Arab world, doctors and academics carry social authority, a presumption of moral seriousness. When a respected professor or physician preaches jihad, his title becomes a weapon. People assume that someone trained to heal and someone trained to teach must “know what they’re talking about.”
They weaponize trust. They heal patients and teach students to gain legitimacy - then send other people’s children to die. They are the ultimate professional hypocrites.
This profile matters today more than ever, especially in universities and medical associations abroad where polite professors and activists quietly excuse terrorist ideology and call it “resistance.”
The soft-spoken academic who justifies violence is far more dangerous than the masked rioter. One recruits; the other merely riots.
Israel has warned the world for decades: this is not a struggle of poverty. It is not a misunderstanding. It is not a cry of the oppressed. It is an ideological movement led by educated elites who could have cured disease, educated children, or built economies - but chose to spread death.
The world keeps treating terrorism like a social illness. Israel and every world leader not wearing blinders knows better. It is a moral illness - one deliberately cultivated by brilliant men who chose darkness. Until the world recognizes that terrorists do not need jobs or houses, but defeat, it will keep being fooled by men in white coats with blood on their hands.