Israel/Palestine

For the record, when I talk about dramatically increased quality of life, I'm not talking about right now. Currently conditions are awful in the OPT; though still better than they would be in most Arab states. The best of which is undeniably Jordan.

Well, no. That's the average GDP for Jordanian citizens. Most Palestinian refugees were stripped of their Jordanian citizenships and live in conditions below the average. But still, Jordan represents the best case scenario. (Despite their having killed around 5,000 Palestinians in a weekend in the late 70's.) In Iraq and Kuwait, all of the refugees were expelled or forced to flee in the early 90's. Egypt simply forced all of them into Gaza back in the 50's. In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees are barred from working in most professions, living outside of the camps, owning property, traveling, having citizenship, or accessing the state education or hospital systems. They rely entirely on UNRWA for resources.



Security demands often end up screwing over the Palestinians financially. An example would be the closings of crossings in Gaza used for commercial goods following a bombing or mortar attack. For weeks it followed the same pattern. Hamas would bomb the crossing so it would lose down for 24 hours. When it opened again they'd bomb it again, etc., and after a few days all of the food and flowers the trucks were exporting would be worthless. This was surely Hamas' strategy. They certainly didn't want friendly business developing with the Israelis.

This wasn't as much of a problem when Gaza was under occupation obviously. But post-pull out there wasn't much they could do, short of actually going in there and bombing the shit out of everything. And once Hamas took control of Gaza entirely, trading with them at all was impossible. It would have been directly funding rockets and mortars that were fired across the border every day.



Sure, I would believe that. Honestly, I'm surprised it wouldn't be more. If Gaza hadn't immediately started firing rockets I think that it might have been economically successful.