The Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza: Israel Misconceptions

Recently a few members have posted on ATS that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, that the Gazan society is one of the richest (per capita) as they import LCD's and Mercedes automobiles. They have made some outlandish claims in regards to the undemployment figures in Gaza and some have stated that it the Gazan economy is better off then the US. As a student of Economics, I have taken the libery to dispell these myths. In order to do so I will be sourcing the CIA World Factbook: www.cia.gov... and making comparisons between the Gazan economy, the American economy and the Israeli economy (to a lesser extent). I will aim to adress 2 major catogories: Unemployment and to a lesser extent poverty.

Unemployment

The Gazan unemployment figures are both blunt and clear. Currently they stand at 40% (2010)
www.cia.gov...

Some may be unable to grasp what 40% unemployment entails, however one could use two prime examples to compare with. Libya and the U.S. Firstly before I begin its important to note that full employment is impossible and unwanted, therfor countries set unemployment objectives. The U.S has an unemployment objective of 4% or anything below.

Take the Libyan economy which has a large public sector, large subsides, free health and education. The 3 most important items, food, oil and accomodation are all subsidised by the Gaddafi regime. Yet when the outbreak of civil strife in Libya began there was a massive 30% unemployment which directly impacted on the mass of the protests and later the civil war.

Gaza currently has 40% unemployment. They rank 184th in the world behind Swaziland, Gabon and Albania. By comparison Israel currently has 6.4% unemployment (rather good in this post global financial crisis world) with a real growth rate of 4.6% which is strong (too strong infact- to much growth results in inflation)

The Israeli aims in regards to the blockade were to damage Hamas (much like the American embargo on Cuba wanted to damage the Castro regime) and force the people to force Hamas from power. If one looks at the labor force figure they can see which jobs are recieving the most employment:

agriculture: 12% industry: 5% services: 83% (June 2008)

The 83% servives happens to be largely public not private. Industry and agriculture is virtually non-existent and has collapsed under Israeli pressure. This has strengthened the role of Hamas as the government as they provide public jobs where the private sector is lacking. Much like the Cuban embargo, the blockade has been counter productive in terms of strategic goals.

Poverty

My discussion on poverty figures will be breif. Currently 70% of Gazans live below the povery line: www.cia.gov...

One dosen't need half a brain to come to the conclusion that this is both serious and alarming. It is what people call a "humanitarian crisis". The international poverty threshold is anything including and below $1 a day. By comparison Israel has 23.6% people living below the poverty line, however, their threshold is living on anything including and below $7.30 per day.

Take Australia for example: The CIA World Fact Book states Australians living below the poverty line are NA% (not assesed) which means that the number is miniscule.

Conclusion

I hope people will look at these facts all available here:
www.cia.gov...

When one looks at the actual figures they see the truth. The truth is the Gazans are not rich, they are not wealthy and they are living in conditions far worse than you. They are ranked amongst some of the porest nations in the world. This is a fact as shown by the CIA World Factbook

I've avoided those threads to be honest, I didn't feel like getting into it
How can anyone claim Gaza to be rich when Israel has put a blockade on them and only recently allowed them to export flowers.

They can't export anything else and can't even get basic food and medical supplies as aid

Remember everyday the blockade continues everday Israel declares War on Gaza
A blockade, unlike an embargo, is an act of war!

So when people call Palestinians terroists remember, there's a WAR going on
You can't expect zero opposition to an undeclared war, sorry doesn't work like that

Good thread

reply to post by SpeachM1litant


The behavior of those posters is EXACTLY the same as Nazi propaganda makers. It's clear to me, I hope it will be to the others.

You are so right. The poverty in Gaza is a disgrace.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/41f928e41f74.jpg[/atsimg]

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/3dc0a01e6944.jpg[/atsimg]

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/8be05335d074.jpg[/atsimg]

ooops, my bad.
These pictures are from Egypt.
Why do they live in such poverty? Because of their corrupt government.
Same as the corrupt governance of Hamas. The only difference is, Hamas declared war on Israel and decided to perpetuate the refugees conditions for his own political agenda. With the help of UNRAW , “Palestinian” refugees in Arab countries (except Jordan) are not granted citizenship. Not only that, but Palestinians are the only people on earth who inherit a refugee status.

For this reason it has gone from 600 thousand refugees who had in 1948 to over 5 million today

www.rightsmonitoring.org...

double/
delete.

Tell them to get rid of Hamas.

reply to post by gravitational


There you go again.

"Ignore this issue because something else is going on somewhere else"

You're a real one-trick pony, aren't you?

reply to post by sonofliberty1776


This problem has been going on for decades....Hamas have not even been in power a full decade, Once again Israel likes to change the goalposts to suit it's agenda. Even then that is dismissing the will of the Palestinian people who voted in fair and free elections according to the EU(who funded and supervised them) are the Europeans lying?

Originally posted by TheWalkingFox
reply to post by gravitational

 

There you go again.

"Ignore this issue because something else is going on somewhere else"

You're a real one-trick pony, aren't you?

is that all you learned from my post?
I clearly pointed out the parallel lines causing poverty in those two places.
I clearly showed you how the refugee problem is a political tool.
You are just so narrow minded, that you can't see beyond your bigotry.

Now sit tight, do your homework and tell me – where have all the billions of dollars of international aid went, and why haven't that changed the lives of the refugees.

One trick pony is great song BTW.

reply to post by gravitational


Rather typical from you graviational. Firstly highlight the fact that there is people living in poverty in other places and then blame the Arabs for everything, while completely ignoring Israeli discretions. Because Israel can do no wrong right?

And Gravitational, pictures can be extremely misleading. In Egypt 20% (2005 est.) were living below the poverty line with 9.7% (2010 est.) unemployment. Rather alarming, but no where near as serious as those conditions in Gaza. One must draw parralels, that the state of the Gazan economy is not simply due to this culture of "Arab corruption" (remember when we were blaming povery in Russia on a culture of "Russian corruption"- which turned out be largely false as 72,000,000 people were impovrished by WESTERN backed and IMF and G7 forced economic reform). Oh for the record Egypt also went through similiar reforms, which emphasize the fact that the poverty while being strongly impacted by corruption is not largely due to actual corruption. Israel itself has had rampant corruption issues.

The equation is simple: The economic situation in Gaza has been caused largely by Israeli indiscretions- the naval blockade, numerous assualts, airstrikes and attacks and the virtual imprisoment which has only recently began to loosen only on the Egyptian side.

Gravitational, as an observer of the Israel-Palestine conflict, are you seriously saying that Israeli political and military policies have no effect on the Gazan economy, that is it purely due to corruption. Well in that case you are lying as the numbers show differently.

reply to post by SpeachM1litant


Pure nonsense.
The blockade began in 2007.
Refugees were poor for decades,
They will remain poor as long as people like you back them up, telling them to blame everything on Israel, instead of stopping hostility and start rebuilding their lives, for real.

Well that was the whole propaganda strategy devised by the KGB in the early seventies when they invented the Palestinians and created the PLO - to play them off as poor wretched victims - the Davids to the Israeli Goliath. Instead of the Arab Goliath to the Israeli David that is actually the true situation.

Congratulations OP in being a propaganda dupe - trouble is, the farce is getting harder and harder to maintain - given that MSM is losing it's monopoly on the information channels.

reply to post by gravitational


So Israeli discretions in no way impacted on the Gazan economy according to you?

So I'm guessing everything that is wrong in the Middle East is the Arabs fault?

Oh no a naval blockade impacting on fishing, reducing the number of imports especially construction materials required to industralize and the multiple airstrikes which are extremely disproportional do in no way impact on the Gazan economy?

I agree they should cease hotilities, but why cease violence when everyday settlements expand in the West Bank (The West Bank economy isn't doing that much better than Gaza with 46% of people living below the poverty line), Gaza continues to be a vitrual prison and Israel still hasn't made a commitment to a Palestinian state when final status talks finally arrive. As long as there are people like you, defending every action of the IDF and the Israeli government, advocating settlement expansion and the Jewish peoples entitlment ot Eretz Israel, then Israel is going to continue living in an insecure environment with no promise of peace. Land for Peace is the equation: It worked with Egypt even with the majority of the population disagreeing with peace settlement.

reply to post by JohhnyBGood


Being a propaganda dupe? I am not getting these facts from Al Jazeera, they are coming straight from the CIA World Factbook. Nice attempt at derailing the thread and playing to peoples fears. Your comment reminds of Nazi German propaganda.

Originally posted by gravitational
is that all you learned from my post?

Actually there's nothing that can be learned from your posts; all you're capable of is the same old ignorance, lies, and obfuscations that you demonstrate, post after post after post. And once we've seen one ill-educated shill who can't be bothered to come up with independent arguments, you've seen 'em all.

I clearly pointed out the parallel lines causing poverty in those two places.

No, actually you took your own ignorant, poorly-informed assumptions, given to you by some trash website, and squawked them out without so much as an attempt at critical thought.

Particularly interesting is that you absolutely, unequivocally flat-out deny that Israel's blockade has any effect on the poverty in gaza... which is, frankly, #ing stupid, since this is the entire goddamned point of a naval blockade. But let's bypass that blatantly logical point; your assertion is that the poverty in Gaza has existed longer than that. Which is true enough. You then assert that the cause of that poverty is Hamas being in power... even though they have only been in power for two months longer than the blockade.

Clearly your thought process is to just randomly blame # on Hamas while absolving Israel of any and all culpability. Israel goooooood, Arabs baaaaaad.

Fact of the matter is that Gaza is crap. it's been crap for thousands of years. It's 120 square miles of dry dirt and gravel. not a bad place if you're in the cement business, but generally crap otherwise. It has no noteworthy natural resources, and on its own could only support subsistence agriculture supplemented by modest industrial fishing. No matter who lives there or what the political conditions are, that is the basis of poverty in Gaza; it's poor for the same reason Oklahoma and South Dakota and Zambia and Mongolia are poor; there's not any resource worth exploiting there.

Now you take this literally dirt poor scrap of land. Cram 1.7 million people into it. Put an off-kilter government-by-guerrilla in charge of it, and then, just for grits and shiggles, put it under total military domination by an invading regional power with a stated goal of ethnic cleansing that has completely militarized the border and is currently blocking any sort of foreign trade, with threats of death to those foreigners.

"it's hamas' fault" is simplistic to the point of utter and total idiocy. The territory itself is poor. Israel is actively preventing any attempts to allieve that poverty. And no, Hamas isn't helping.

I clearly showed you how the refugee problem is a political tool.

Perhaps. But the fact remains that the "refugee problem" only exists because Israel continues to violate international law. Israel hates the negative press they're getting? Well f'in-A, obey international law and let the refugees Israel created come back to their homes.

You are just so narrow minded, that you can't see beyond your bigotry.

That's your argument? What are you, seven and a half?

Now sit tight, do your homework and tell me – where have all the billions of dollars of international aid went, and why haven't that changed the lives of the refugees.

Becuase the only people getting "billions in aid" are the Israelis. The amount if aid given to the Palestinians - in total, West bank and Gaza and refugees elsewhere - in the last forty years, comes in close to what Israel has been given in the last two. Maybe not even that. All that aid goes into the Israeli military, which has an active part in perpetuating the poverty of both Gaza and the West bank. Whatever's left goes home in the pockets of Knesset members, none of whom have any notion of obeying their internationally-mandated obligation to the refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars.

What aid is directed at the refugees comes in the form of perishables, primarily; You can't haul yourself out of poverty with a bag of wheat.

Originally posted by SpeachM1litant
reply to post by JohhnyBGood

 

Being a propaganda dupe? I am not getting these facts from Al Jazeera, they are coming straight from the CIA World Factbook. Nice attempt at derailing the thread and playing to peoples fears. Your comment reminds of Nazi German propaganda.

Sure there is poverty in Gaza, not surprising since they are ruled by fanatic terrorists whose priority is to attack their neighbour - but relative to say Egypt it is minor! - why is it in any way Israel's responsibilty to provide for them - the arab worldis rich enough to give them anything they need - is it not!

But then that is the game - to dangle them in front of the complicit media as the 'new eternal victims' - especially for dupes in the West to wring their hands over and cry crocodile tears.


As for Nazi propaganda - yes the Muslim brotherhood was taught this first hand from the nazi propagandists that Egypt harboured after WWII. Known as reversal of reality technique or 'moral inversion'.

The KGB were the ones that honed it into a fine art however.

Using the Inversion-of-Reality Method against Israel and Jews from the 1960s to the Present After the defeat of Germany, the propaganda methods of inversion of reality and the Big Lie fell into temporary disuse. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union and its allies in the Arab world reintroduced them during the 1960s, particularly after the Israeli victory in the Six Day War in 1967. That outcome represented a humiliation and posed an internal danger because it shook the foundations of authority. It heartened the minorities in the Soviet Union, not least the Jews. Having suffered a major reverse, the Soviet Union and the Arab countries decided to use political anti-Semitism to shift world attention from their own failures. They sought to delegitimize Israel, bringing about its isolation and destruction.

Some elements of the new propaganda campaign were:

The accusation that Israel was the aggressor in the Six Day War and denial of its right to self-defense. The passing of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, "Zionism is racism," on 10 November 1975 which conferred the standing of international law on a proposition totally based on the inversion of reality. This resolution transformed Zionism, the Jewish national movement, into the embodiment of evil by equating it with the depravity of Nazi Germany. The drafting of the PLO Covenant in its various versions of 1964, 1968, and 1974. This document claimed that justice was totally on the Palestinian side and that Israel had no standing at all.

The Hamas Charter of 1988. The unprecedented assault on Israel which took place at the UN Conference in Durban at the end of August and beginning of September 2001. Both the Arab world and the Soviet Union used inversion of reality as a method and drew on the idiom of Nazi propaganda. The transfer of this expertise cannot be traced in detail because the information is incomplete.

It is known, however, that many Nazis found refuge in the Arab world. From 1953, Egypt absorbed some two thousand of them. Some worked in Nasser's secret service. Some administered concentration camps. Others were involved in the design and construction of rockets.[31] Among this population were specialists in anti-Semitic propaganda. From Egypt, they disseminated anti-Semitism in the Arab world as well as the doctrine of Holocaust denial. Matthias Küntzel described their activities:

www.danielpipes.org...

I'm going to make this short and sweet

Originally posted by JohhnyBGood

www.danielpipes.org...

Will you next be citing David Duke for information on Israel?

reply to post by JohhnyBGood


You are right, Israel has no responsibility to provide one shred of aid to the Palestinians. Just because they have no responsibility does that mean they have a responsibility to do the opposite. Damage the Gazan economy?

I have heard a lot of stupid # coming from both you and Mr.Gravitational: But never in my life have I heard someone so blinded by their ideology, that they would claim the Israeli blockade of Gaza and their actions in regards to Gaza have no effect on the Gazan economy. You'd have to be either downright stupid or a liar to claim so and I don't think either of you are the former(stupid) even if I have said so before.

reply to post by SpeachM1litant


Yes S1M, I blame the Arabs for their own poverty.
Palestinians tried a coup d'etat in Jordan, then in Lebanon, resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands. They tried to destroy Israel with the help of their brothers, and failed.
In 2005 Israel left Gaza strip completely. Together with some sane Palestinians, they built a joint industrial complex near the Karni crossing, so both sides can benefit. It was the Palestinians themselves that constantly attacked that place.
Given all the financial aid they revived, that went strait to their corrupt administrators pockets, which they elected
I say yes, they are to blame.

reply to post by gravitational


So the blockade has no adverse economic effects? And the airstrikes which have destroyed industrial infastructure, schools and appartment complexes in no way affect Gazas economy? So everything Israel has done to the Palestinians is to help them? The virtual imprisoment and the restriction of LIVESTOCK necassary for self-sufficiency and agriculture helps the Gazans right? Last time I checked HAMAS wasn't using donkeys as rockets.

The retreat from Gaza was a complete joke. around 8000-9000 settlers left but at the same time around 14,800 settlers were approved to settle in the West Bank. It was a media spectacle designed to show too Israel, Palestine and the international community that it is impossible to dismantle settlements in the West Bank because the Israeli will be religously and emotionally affected.

"We Israelis are dedicated to peace, that is why we will dismantle settlements in Gaza only to replace them in the West Bank."