From Cohen’s new article “Clinton’s Mideast Pirouette:”
I hear that Clinton was shocked by what she saw on her visit last month to the West Bank. This is not surprising. The transition from Israel’s first-world hustle-bustle to the donkeys, carts and idle people beyond the separation wall is brutal. If Clinton cares about one thing, it’s human suffering.
In fact, you don’t so much drive into the Palestinian territories these days as sink into them. Everything, except the Jewish settlers’ cars on fenced settlers-only highways, slows down. The buzz of business gives way to the clunking of hammers.
The whole desolate West Bank scene is punctuated with garrison-like settlements on hilltops. If you’re looking for a primer on colonialism, this is not a bad place to start.
“Settler-only highways” doesn’t really pack the same punch as “Jewish-only highways,” which is what they are, but hopefully the point isn’t lost on anyone.
and what people are responsible for this human disaster….
worldwide jews support israel…..
call a spade a spade.
Roger Cohen is correct when he says Hillary cares deeply about human suffering. It's part of her Methodist DNA. If she cares about the suffering of the Palestinians more than Jewish money for her next election, she could possibly become the backbone to Obama's new Mideast policy construct. And won't that be something!
" hear that Clinton was shocked by what she saw on her visit last month to the West Bank. " "If Clinton cares about one thing, it’s human suffering."
Well, I doubt that she was "shocked"–I think she's known all along that there were two sides to the I/P conflict, but as senator from NY her political self interest (and if there's one thing she cares about, that's it) dictated that she pretend otherwise.
Not that she's worse than other politicians, but it's silly to expect any of them to place compassion for other people above their careers as politicians. We have to change how politicians perceive their interests if we want them to take an evenhanded stance.
"If Clinton cares about one thing, it’s human suffering."
That would be a welcome and heartening change for the US State Department leader. I hope its true, just as he says.
I wasn't impressed with this Clinton press release. If he was trying to reach her better angel — I believe, I can safely say it left her shoulder years ago when she sold herself to the lobby to get into politics.
I think it would be useful to review the full transcript of her testimony in front of our ever vigilant House Foreign Affairs Committee — as she has never been one for straight talk. From a BBC news article covering the same meeting you could have sworn there was no way Iran was going to be put on the back burner, for any reason.
Also, I'm sure Ms. Clinton and Mr Cohen are fully aware of the likelihood of a Hamas-Fatah partnership happening…
http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/26/hamas_and_fatah_back_to_the_grind
And this is the way the game is played.
i think the roger cohen piece advances an important point: the income differential between israel and palestine. my friend james north likes to say that the standard of living drop between israel and west bank is worse than us to mexico. and of course west bank is israel's ward; it is a bad reflectoin on israel society.
also it is significant that Cohen is spending more journalistic capital to get americans to pay attention to apartheid road system. let's hope he's influential
The roads in the WB are for Israelis only, not settlers or just Jews. Of course in practice it is virtually true that by and large only Jews roads — since few Palestinian citizens of Israel have any business in the settlements and the settlements are Jewish-only in their population. Still, no sense in allowing the Zionuts to point out "inaccuracies" about this, as they often do.
Jaffr, thanks for your honest reply. I would like to add two things. First, these roads were not built as "Israeli-only" roads. Some of the roads within the West Bank were closed off to Palestinian traffic after drive-by shooting incidents. Secondly, Arab Citizens of Israel may not have any business in the settlements, but they do have business and relations in the towns and villages, and they do frequent these roads.
"The transition from Israel’s first-world hustle-bustle to the donkeys, carts and idle people beyond the separation wall"
Fence. And the difference is the same as seen in any Arab and South American country between the areas of wealth and want. Along with a lack of education, you also have a lack of mobility.
Btselem(Israeli human rights organization) on the forbidden roads:
http://www.btselem.org/english/Freedom_of_Movement/Checkpoints_and_Forbidden_Roads.asp
and on Road 443 in particular:
http://www.btselem.org/English/Freedom_of_Movement/Road_443.asp
Anyone wanting a more detailed look at why the Palestinian economy is in tatters, rather than trying to swallow an ignorant racist and sophist view of the matter, can look at Btselem's site on the economic impact of the Israel's brutal restrictions on civilian Palestinian movement here:
http://www.btselem.org/english/Freedom_of_Movement/Economy.asp
And here is the report on Israeli restrictions on the Palestinian economy from 1967 to 1994:
link to btselem.org
And from 1994-2000:
http://www.btselem.org/english/Freedom_of_Movement/Economy_1994_2000.asp
And a good explanation of the inequities Israel was able to force on the PA in the Paris Protocols(part of the Oslo Agreement) here:
http://www.btselem.org/english/Freedom_of_Movement/Paris_Protocol.asp
Thanks Chris, because in your usual ham-handed and bigoted way, G-d love ya, you've made it germane to discuss the way that Israel has consciously damaged the Palestinian economy throughout the nearly 42 years of Israeli occupation.
Sorry… I realize there's a chance Cohen might read this site, but I'm a little sensitive to messaging at the moment. This has been a tough week for myself [and it looks like other bloggers] who knows what's a stake, and know full well how much Hillary is truly [whether she likes it or not] behind the Lobby.
Off to bed now.
"Settler-only highways" doesn't really pack the same punch as "Jewish-only highways," which is what they are, but hopefully the point isn't lost on anyone.
That's because someone will quickly point out the semantic game of saying a Israeli Muslim could theoretically drive on these roads. Letters will be written, hands would wring, conceptions of victimized Israelis in an anti-semitic press would be verified. Nevermind that Israeli arabs really don't need to drive to hill-top Israeli settlements unless there there for some labor – which on many roads is practically never.
Certainly, it lacks the punch, but these discussions are so closely followed and argued, that if the exact definition is not used, you open yourself into a huge semantic argument and the bizarre confirmation of victimization.
I cannot ses why humanitarian aid to simply give the palestians a humane standard of living should be connected with any conditions. Expcept it of course easier fotr isrel to bully a region it can nkeep criplled.
Just a fence. Lots of ways to build them, eh, Chris? Education? Well, here's a few snippets of building them in Israel proper, where arabs make up 20% of the citizen population–makes Jim Crow look like a saint:
[snip]
As one Palestinian Arab student stated:
I went to a very poorly developed and very poorly resourced high school that provided us with such limited, second-class opportunities for the future. Every day for 3 years we were bussed past a wealthy Jewish suburb – built on our land – and we watched the construction of a beautiful, modern, state-of-the-art high school for that community. In ways like this, the State has planted bitterness in our hearts. We weren't born with this feeling; it is the harvest of the discrimination we've experienced.
[snip]
Raz-Krakotzkin noted that:
in all the textbooks there is not one single geographical map which shows the [pre-1948 Palestinian] Arab settlements – only the Jewish settlements are shown. Generally speaking, the land itself has no history of its own, and the history of the land is presented as the history of the Jewish myth about it. The whole period, between the second temple and the Zionist settlement is not taught at all. But more precisely, the Israeli student has no idea whatsoever about the settlement of the country before '48, that is to say, has no idea about the history of the expelled themselves and of their life before the expulsion. And so the mythical image of the country was created as 'the Promised Land of the Jews' and not as a cultural-geographical entity in which the [Jewish] colonization took place.
[snip]
…the overwhelming trend in portraying Arabs in the Jewish curriculum formally (including history, geography, civics studies textbooks and Hebrew readers) remained negative as Bar-Tal and Zoltak (1989) described with regard to the portrayal of Arabs:
in 50.7% of the items, the presentation was negative, in 29.1 per cent it was neutral, and in the remaining 20.2% positive. Most of the positive images were in the context of individual presentation. The majority (60%) of the behavioral descriptions and 46% of the trait characterisations referred to violence and aggression. In this context, delegitimising labels such as "human savages", "bloodthirsty", "gangs of murders", "infiltrators and terrorists", or 'robbers' appeared frequently. The books presented 82% of occupations held by Arabs as being related to either violence (soldiers, robbers, or gang members) or to primitive farming and manual labor. Only 12% of the Arabs presented were professionals or white-collar workers. Positive descriptions of Arabs referred mainly to undefined situations, in an undefined time, either in the desert or in an undefined place, often in legends about the exotic East.
[snip]
Ironically, the state educational system's efforts to re-educate the Palestinian students to forget their history and identity, coupled with its discriminatory practices, may have ended up reinforcing their Palestinian identity and sense of the conflict with the Jewish majority. Rather than erasing their people's collective memory, it has provided them with a highly alienating educational experience, which has also served to maintain the separation between Israel's Jewish and Palestinian Arab citizens by fostering bitterness and enmity.
[snip]
As Daphna Golan-Agnon (2005), chair of the Committee for Equality in Education in the Ministry of Education's Pedagogical Secretariat from 1999-2001, explained:
In 1999, the Ministry of Education gave NIS 1,309,588,679 (some $350 million) to associations, less than 1.5% of which went to Arab associations. In other words, every year the Ministry of Education assists in the promotion of associations and bodies working on behalf of education (youth movements, newspapers, museums and so forth) but gives almost no help to Arab associations.
[snip]
As Daphna Golan-Agnon (2005), Chair of the Committee for Equality in Education in the Ministry of Education's Pedagogical Secretariat from 1999-2001, stated:
the Arab head of the Arab education system has no authority or budget, he never even says anything at the meetings. Between us, we call him 'the plant'. His deputy, a Jewish man appointed by the security service, actually runs the department'.
Nice, eh? And that's for the good arab citizens of Israel. Those arabs pushed into the OCT deserve worse.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holy_land_studies/v005/5.1abu-saad.html
You know tree, rather than striking out at Chris in your ham-fisted and bigoted way, you might actually compare the B'tselem reports and look at some economic statistics.
For example, while the first report rightly points out that, since the start of the second intifada, the 110,000 Palestinian workers have lost their jobs in Israel, the second report appears to fault Israel for "[e]ncouraging mass entry of Palestinians into the Israeli labor market, particularly in construction, agriculture, and services." So which is it? Now before you react in typical bullying fashion, I'd like to point out some statistics, which you can easily verify:
According to Efriam Karsh (Arafat's War, Grove Press 2003, pp. 44-45), who got these numbers from a variety of reliable international sources:
By 1986, some 45% of the population was employed in industrial plants in the strip itself. So, I guess that Israel didn't do enough to encourage Palestinians to enter the Israeli labor market.
"During the 1970s, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest growing economy in the world…." and per capita GNP (the common measure of standard of living) for the occupied territories grew between 1968 to 1991 from $165 to $1,715 – which was over 60% greater than that of Jordan and nearly three times that of Egypt.
Now, here's an interesting point. The infant mortality rate in 1968 in the West Bank and Gaza was 60 per 1,000 live births. What is telling here is that this rate was 50% higher than that in Nasser's Egypt and three times as high as the infant mortality rate in Jordan, which speaks greatly on how much Nasser and the Hashemites cared for their brethern beyond rhetoric!
And as for infrastructure:
Electricity: In 1967 roughlty 21% of the population had electricity round the clock. By 1986 nearly 93% did.
Running water: 16% of the homes in 1967 vs. 85%
I see, Citizen, and you're an expert on the subject based on… what… a single article. Never mind that the government is trying to rectify the situation by increasing the the annual educational budget for Arab education in Israel as a proportion of the overall budget. Or that the author relies on a 20-year-old study on the portrayal of Arabs (that's four years before Oslo!), and that the qualitative criteria used to assess the quantitative conclusions aren't provided.
Atta boy, Chris. Citizen states facts, and quotes from documented sources, and gives you a well-respected url reference world-wide
to double check–and you just toss out the word "whining." Then you change the issues presented, regarding Israel's use of walls and fences of every type imaginable, physical, economical, educational, psychological, etc, which addressed your earlier comment, by babbling about how the Palestinians leadership squanders what little resources they have to further their Jew-Hating utopia. Keep it up, Chris–everything you say gives concerned and intelligent readers a good window into the likes of you. I think
they will agree its time for us all to quit giving your ilk carrots to remain spoiled bigot brats–and start
giving your fellow travelers a big stick.
Some Might Call it Treason Count me amongst the 'some'.
Er, JES, I notice two of Citizen's snippets quoted were dated 2005, and another was dated up to 2001. Besides, those snippets reveal the mind-set of many Israelis who were educated in the Israeli Jim Crow
educational system. What did Israel do lately–increase the % of funds to arab citizens from 1.5% to 2%?
Pleas tell us. Also, I notice you have not provided even a single article in support of what you say. I agree
with Alice: Readers, judge for yourself what you are dealing with in trying to get objective data as rightfully concerned American citizens regarding our nation's rubber-stamping of Israel and what it actually stands for.
The whole world wants to kill every Jew, and solely because of that birth accident, and will at the first chance–always and forever. Chris Berel & his Stools in a nutshell. Do reasonable Americans want to tie these insane donkeys to our ever weaker cart?
Well, JES, you might read the Or Commission report.
From the summary:
The events, their unusual character and serious results were the consequence of deep-seated factors that created an explosive situation in the Israeli Arab population. The state and generations of its government failed in a lack of comprehensive and deep handling of the serious problems created by the existence of a large Arab minority inside the Jewish state.
Government handling of the Arab sector has been primarily neglectful and discriminatory. The establishment did not show sufficient sensitivity to the needs of the Arab population, and did not take enough action in order to allocate state resources in an equal manner. The state did not do enough or try hard enough to create equality for its Arab citizens or to uproot discriminatory or unjust phenomenon. Meanwhile, not enough was done to enforce the law in the Arab sector, and the illegal and undesirable phenomena that took root there.
As a result of this and other processes, serious distress prevailed in the Arab sector in various areas. Evidence of the distress included poverty, unemployment, a shortage of land, serious problems in the education system and substantially defective infrastructure. These all contributed to ongoing ferment that increased leading up to October 2000 and constituted a fundamental contribution to the outbreak of the events.
The details are even more interesting.
Even Olmert had to admit that not much had changed since the Or Commission's report. But each year Israeli governments promised the situation would improve. Now Netanyahu sings the same old song again.
The point is that he was quoting snippets; not necessarily the dates of those snippets. The point also is that the author of the paper might just have an axe to grind, and if Citizen wants to present himself as an "expert", then it is incumbent on him, not me, to provide additional information from other studies. Otherwise, all he is doing is trawling the Internet for trash about Israel.
Just for the record, I don't see where Alice is asking readers to judge for themselves. She's making the same kind of ham-fisted, bigoted (I love tree's introduction of those adjectives) assertions.
By the way, what does the author (who happens to hold a tenured position at Ben Gurion University) as well as numerous other professional have to say about the "Israeli Jim Crow" educational system? In other words, perhaps the classrooms weren't "state-of-the-art", but perhaps the teachers and texts were.
Readers, review all the comments by Chris Berel and those he responds to. You will see who the insufferable bigot is. He's also very dumb, so the analogy to a donkey is apt.
Well JES, he was quoting snippets, and those he quoted were so dated. Anyone who read the full source url
matter will get a really full handle on how the Israeli government instills bigotry in it's Jewish citizens, to go along with all the other sorts of walls it imposes against Arabs, whether citizens or those imprisoned in the OCT. You have not documented anything you've said at all, while you say others in this thread have not documented enough–not not documented at all. Pitiful showing JES. You ask us to find the source documentation
insufficient, the sources incredible. Yet you don't bother to document anything. We are just to take your
slurs as gospel. Please have some respect for the readers of this blog. Is that too much to ask? Also, anyone
who reads what Citizen said, at least if they are American, will immediately see the analogy to Jim Crow
as it was practiced.
@ Phil, Citizen & Alice & Bruce
Thanks for your input. Many of us fellow Americans have awakened rather late to the wool long pulled over eyes. Keep your shears sharp!
In case you missed it the second report covers the time from 1967 to 1992, when, as I'm sure you are aware despite your coyness, Israel encouraged the mass entry of cheap Palestinian labor into its markets. Starting in the 90's, when cheaper foreign labor from Asian countries and poor Eastern bloc countries such as Romania, etc., became available, and the restrictions placed on Palestinian labor(i.e., prohibitions against Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza staying overnight in Israel, lest they set up permanent residence there and upset the chosen demographics) Israel began placing more restrictions on the external Palestinian labor force.
You think that a 45% internal work force in Gaza proves that Israel didn't encourage Palestinians to enter the Israeli labor market? What did you expect, 100% external? According to the report you apparently read but did not understand, "1/3 of the Palestinian work force was employed in Israel" during the time period before 1994. A 45% internal work force in Gaza only provides further support for this statistic.(And I would suspect that your numbers on internal workers includes those were working for Israeli settlements in Gaza.)
From the B'Tselem report:
The import and export numbers were the result of Israeli restrictions on imports and exports from other countries into the occupied territories, thus creating the "captive" market for Israeli goods.
As for the infant mortality rates in 1968, I take it that what you meant to say was that the Palestinian rate was LOWER, not higher, than in Egypt or Jordan. A LOWER mortality rate would mean less deaths per thousand. This is not a particularly revealing statistic since Palestinian infant mortality rates had typically been lower than in Trans-Jordan or Egypt. Are you trying to imply some kind of miraculous descent of the infant mortality rates from June 1967(when the occupation began) to 1968-six months time? Highly doubtful, but a nice try at obfuscation by statistics.
And on your electrical and running water figures over a 20 year span, I would expect that as a normal course of growth, but what I would also expect as the result of Israel's colonialism is that most of the electrical supply and control of water is Israeli held. And this is exactly the case in the occupied territories. If Israel was interested in helping to create an independent and invigorated Palestinian economy it would have allowed the Palestinians to generate most of their own electrical power instead of being dependent on Israeli sources. However, over 40 years, the West Bank continues to get most of its supply from Israel due to Israel's "(f)ailing to invest in development of physical infrastructure in the Occupied Territories, and channeling some tax revenues collected from Palestinians to the Israeli treasury, rather than investing them in the Occupied Territories."
And of course we all know that Israel, which controls most of the water in the West Bank, sets a quota on Palestinian water usage which is much much smaller than the more generous allotment to West Bank Jewish settlers.
A Thirst for West Bank Water
B'Tselem-The Water Crisis
I'll be gone for a few days. Perhaps we could continue this discussion then.
"As Lee Hamilton, the president of the Woodrow Wilson Center, told me: “Initiatives are underway that show the United States is going to have some major differences with Israel."
About time.
Re..Hillary. I can personally attest to the fact that she does care about human rights. I had contact with her WH office in 1998 about a situtation and she dispatched a DOL attorney to fix it. And let me add I did this as an ordinary citizen, not as a big donor or political player…so this speaks well of Hillary.
Having seen first hand Hillary in action on that small human rights matter I was
all the more furious about her attitude toward I-P during her term as senator and that is the single reason I did not vote for her for President.
What I am counting on in the US-Israel, Netanyahu-Obama/Hillary standoff is Hillary's temper…she doesn't suffer fools and hypocritics standing in the way of anything she wants to accomplish. She can't stand failure.
I think everyone knows by now not to take Barrel or Witless seriously.
"Settler-only highways" doesn't really pack the same punch as "Jewish-only highways".
I would have put 'Israeli nationals'. Or 'people who have done military service in the IDF or have been exempt because of Tal Law'.
Bet there's way more American Jews who have served in combat IDF force than in USA's over the decades since Vietnam Era (they didn't serve then either).
"Yet you don't bother to document anything. We are just to take your
slurs as gospel"
My research indicates, that American Zionist supporters undergo a physiological and mental change when the subject of Zionism is brought up. This change is almost exactly analogous to those brought by continued cocaine abuse. Notice the alternation of grandiosity and paranoia, the coarsening of moral and ethical distinctions, and the final descent into the blackout or "tweaked" state. At that point they lose all control, but are completely unable to remember what they said or to be responsible for it.
Look into it. The parallels between the actions and attitudes of American Zionist supporters and those degraded by cocaine abuse are striking. I'd give anything to measure the activity at their vagus nerve.
From JSF, a comment by "sk":
The first footnote of Perry Anderson's typically magisterial survey stresses the same point:
http://www.newleftreview.org/A2330
Among those who advocated or prophesied the recovery of the land of Israel by the Jews were Milton, Locke, Newton, Priestley, Fichte, Browning, as well as the better known case of George Eliot. Among politicians could be numbered Shaftesbury, Palmerston, Milner, Lloyd George. In the Enlightenment tradition, there was Napoleon's call to the Jews to reconquer their patrimony, during the Syrian campaign of 1799. See the careful study by Regina Sharif of this neglected subject: Non-Jewish Zionism, London 1983, passim. Among political and bureaucratic elites, Christian Zionism was often quite compatible with anti-Semitism, since it projected departure of local Jews to the Holy Land: for this, see Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, New York 1999, pp. 33-36 et seq.
Following is an excerpt from Non-Jewish Zionism:
http://www.al-moharer.net/falasteen_docs/regina_sharif.htm
Long before Theodor Herzl accepted 'the mighty legend' of Palestine this legend had been made an intrinsic component of Western culture. The legend of Palestine as the ancestral home of all Jews vividly lived in the imagination of most Christians at the turn of the century, and continues to be felt today in the West's unequivocal support for Israel.
People view reality through a set images which may or may not correspond to empirical reality. This also holds true for foreign policy. This set of images is the product of a certain political culture and is transmitted from generation to generation through the process of socialization. The Zionist image matrix that evolved in the West over four centuries and which accounts today for the widespread Western pro-Israeli attitudes and policies is very complex but can be looked upon as the sum of the following images: the Biblical image, the image of self-identification and the moral image.
Here is an essay by the same author in which she delineates links between British Imperialism and Zionism.
sk | 04.27.09 – 8:01 am | # http://www.haloscan.com/comments/levi9909/3062230480375010577/#342554
lets get some restrictions on the israelis for the same reason…
Are you including dual citizens or just American Jews not living in Israel?
If the latter, then I suspect you are off the mark.
I've been perusing the death announcements in the paper throughout the Iraq war. American Jews seem to be under-represented, but certainly do appear. If you factor in other demographic data such as education or residence, then I suspect the disparities would narrow further. Have not seen any data yet.
During WWI and WWII, Jews in the military exceeded their percentage in the population. I can attest that my father and all of his brothers served in combat during World War II. I suspect my father's early death from leukemia was due to the armaments he handled for several years.
Approximately 150,000 Jewish-Americans saw service during the Korean War.
In Vietnam, about 30,000 Jewish-Americans served. Among them was Major General Ben Sternberg. Colonel Jack H. Jacobs won the Medal of Honor for heroism in Vietnam. Although Jews accounted for 2.5 percent of the U.S. population at the time, Jewish men accounted for only 0.46 percent of the war-related deaths in the Vietnam War. The evident explanation for this discrepancy is the use of college deferments by the higher than average proportion of Jewish men in college to avoid military service. The statistics difference is not significant if education is factored in.
http://www.gordon.army.mil/EOO/jewish3.htm
Just for the record, the following searchable table created by the UN makes it pretty clear that infant mortality rates in the West and Gaza (considered together) were lower, rather than higher than the respective national rates in Jordan and Egypt during the years in which those nations controlled the territories. The rates were close in the case of Jordan, and not so close in the case of Egypt. The table doesn't differentiate between the WB and Gaza, although it would be useful to know the difference (I would imagine that the rates in Gaza alone were closer to or perhaps higher than the Egyptian totals for those years).
The really telling statistic, however, is one that emerges when the territories are compared to ISRAELI rates in the years since the occupation. Rates have improved in the territories, as they have in Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, but right now the rate in the territories looks like it's about 4 times the rate in Israel "proper."
http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=PopDiv&f=variableID%3A77
Correction: the rates were higher in the territories than they were in Jordan before the Israeli occupation, although they were close. Also, the population of the territories have done slightly better with infant mortality rates under the Israelis than the populations of Jordan and Egypt seem to have done under their own regimes, but again they have not done nearly as well as Israelis have done since the occupation. Again, however, it would be useful to know how different the problem is in Gaza and the WB.
Infant mortality is a significant weapon in the demographic fight for dominance in historical Palestine and another way that Jewish majority can be preserved. The difference in infant mortality between Jewish and Arab populations in Israel proper is also telling, although the actual statistics are more difficult to come by.
"Starting in the 90's, when cheaper foreign labor from Asian countries and poor Eastern bloc countries such as Romania, etc., became available, and the restrictions placed on Palestinian labor(i.e., prohibitions against Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza staying overnight in Israel, lest they set up permanent residence there and upset the chosen demographics) Israel began placing more restrictions on the external Palestinian labor force."
No Tree. What actually happened was that with the first Intifada, and the frequent closures, Israeli firms (primarily agriculture and construction) started importing more expensive foreign labor. With Oslo, they went back to using local Palestinian labor. Then with the start of the second Intifada, and its armed uprising, those industries effectively turned to foreign labor almost completely. The fault in your argument, tree, is that the foreign workers (who have no choice but to sleep here) tend to want to stay, thereby upsetting the "chosen balance" as you put it. But then, you wouldn't know that and probably wouldn't care to, as it doesn't fit into your bigoted world view.
Now, Tree, as for your next argument, as taken from the B'tselem report. (And I should add, that I tend to hold B'tselem in generally high regard. It's only when ham-fisted bigots like yourself try to use their figures to distort the situation that I raise questions.)
Fully one-third of the Palestinian workforce was employed in Israel. But Tree, that leaves two-thirds employed in the West Bank and Gaza. What did you expect, one hundred percent? Considering that, between 1948 and 1967 that the previous occupiers failed to invest at all in infrastructure ("It's the UN's problem.") and politically exploited them ("It's the Zionists' fault that we lost Arab land!) and that, at the time of the occupation the GNP per capita was under $200, I'd say that the fact that two and a half decades later that two-thirds of the workforce was employed within the territories was a good sign.
As far as the import/export issues, I'd say that you (and B'tselem) need to look at what they were primarily importing and exporting. I'd be willing to be that this was primarily food and other perishables. That 80-90% of this should have to go through the nearest neighbor (remember, the Egyptians never bothered to build a port in Gaza, and Jordan is landlocked except for Aqaba). Finally, please recall that, under Oslo, the PA had an international airport and was beginning work on a deep-water port in Gaza. Then Arafat decided to return to the "armed struggle" and launch the Second Intifada.
Re. infant mortality rates. No, Tree, I meant what I said. The infant mortality rates in both the West Bank and Gaza were appreciably higher in 1968 than they were in the countries that had occupied them less than a year before. With access to modern medical facilities (BTW, it was Israel who built Shifa Hospital in Gaza where it is reported that the Hamas leadership recently hid) Israel reduced the rate to 15 per thousand in 2000.
What happened to the comments?