Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Palestine problem hopeless, but not serious

ringraziamo Asia Times per questo documentato articolo, che smonta uno
dei piu' diffusi pregiudizi sulla situazione palestinese
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH18Ak01.html
Palestine problem hopeless, but not serious
"The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable," declared
United Sates President Barack Obama in his June 4 Cairo address.
Really? Compared to what? Things are tough all over. The Palestinians
are one of many groups displaced by the population exchanges that
followed World War II, and the only ones whose great-grandchildren
still have the legal status of refugees. Why are they still there? The
simplest explanation is that they like it there, because they are much
better off than people of similar capacities in other Arab countries.
The standard tables of gross domestic product (GDP) per capital show
the West Bank and Gaza at US$1,700, just below Egypt's $1,900 and
significantly below Syria's $2,250 and Jordan's $3,000. GDP does not
include foreign aid, however, which adds roughly 30% to spendable
funds in the Palestinian territories. Most important, the denominator
of the GDP per capita equation - the number of people - is far lower
than official data indicate. According to an authoritative study by
the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies [1], the West Bank and
Gaza population in 2004 was only 2.5 million, rather than the 3.8
million claimed by the Palestinian authorities. The numbers are
inflated to increase foreign aid.
Adjusting for the Begin-Sadat Center population count and adding in
foreign aid, GDP per capita in the West Bank and Gaza comes to $3,380,
much higher than in Egypt and significantly higher than in Syria or
Jordan. Why should any Palestinian refugee resettle in a neighboring
Arab country?
GDP per capita, moreover, does not reflect the spending power of
ordinary people. Forty-four percent of Egyptians, for example, live on
less than $2 a day, the United Nations estimates. The enormous state
bureaucracy eats up a huge portion of national income. New immigrants
to Egypt who do not have access to government jobs are likely to live
far more poorly than per capita GDP would suggest.
Other data confirm that Palestinians enjoy a higher living standard
than their Arab neighbors. A fail-safe gauge is life expectancy. The
West Bank and Gaza show better numbers than most of the Muslim world:
Life Expectancy by Country in Years
Oman	75.6
Bahrain	75.6
West Bank and Gaza	73.4
Saudi Arabia	72.8
Jordan	72.5
Algeria	72.3
Turkey	71.8
Egypt	71.3
Morocco	71.2
Iran	71.0
Pakistan	65.5
Yemen	62.7
Sudan	58.6
Somalia	48.2
Source: United Nations
Literacy in the Palestinian Authority domain is 92.4%, equal to that
of Singapore. That is far better than the 71.4% in Egypt, or 80.8% in
Syria.
Without disputing Obama's claim that life for the Palestinians is
intolerable, it is fair to ask: where is life not intolerable in the
Arab world? When the first UN Arab Development Report appeared in
2002, it elicited comments such as this one from the London Economist:
"With barely an exception, its autocratic rulers, whether presidents
or kings, give up their authority only when they die; its elections
are a sick joke; half its people are treated as lesser legal and
economic beings, and more than half its young, burdened by joblessness
and stifled by conservative religious tradition, are said to want to
get out of the place as soon as they can." Life sounds intolerable for
the Arabs generally; their best poet, the Syrian "Adonis" - Ali Ahmad
Said Asbar - calls them an "extinct people".
Palestinian Arabs are highly literate, richer and healthier than
people in most other Arab countries, thanks to the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency and the blackmail payments of Western as well
as Arab governments. As refugees, they live longer and better than
their counterparts in adjacent Arab countries. It is not surprising
that they do not want to be absorbed into other Arab countries and
cease to be refugees.
If the Palestinians ceased to be refugees, moreover, it is not clear
how they would maintain their relatively advantaged position. They
cannot return to farming; for all the tears about bulldozed olive
groves, no one in the West Bank will ever make a living selling olive
oil, except perhaps by selling "Holy Land" products to Christian
tourists. Apart from tourism, the only non-subsidy source of income
the Palestinians had was day labor in Israel, but security concerns
close that off. Light manufacturing never will compete with Asia, and
surely not during a prolonged period of global overcapacity.
An alternative is for the Palestinians to continue to live off
subsidies. But why should they? Why should Western taxpayers subsidize
an Arab in Ramallah, when Arabs in Egypt are needier? The answer is
that they represent a security concern for Western countries, who
believe that they are paying to limit violence. That only makes sense
if the threat of violence remains present in the background and flares
up frequently enough to be credible. One cannot simply stage-manage
such things. A sociology of violence in which a significant proportion
of the population remains armed.
To contain the potential violence of an armed population, donors to
the Palestinian authority hire a very large proportion of young men as
policemen or paramilitaries. According to a February 10, 2008, report
by Steven Stotsky [2]:
Overhauling the Palestinian security forces will cost $4.2 to $7
billion over the next five years. What's more, the recent aid package
agreed on in Paris committing to $7.4 billion for the Palestinians
doesn't contain any provision for the security services.
The Reuters report follows a piece in the Jordan Times announcing
plans to train a 50,000-person police force for the West Bank. This
translates to one police officer for every 42-70 citizens (depending
on which population figures for the West Bank are accepted), an
unprecedented concentration of police presence. Currently, there are
only 7,000 Palestinian police officers in the West Bank (Reuters,
January13, 2008), so the new plan calls for a seven-fold increase. The
planned expansion would result in a density of police at least three
to four times that of major American cities that have to contend with
much higher crime rates than the West Bank.
Add to this bloated police force the numerous other state security
organizations as well as private militias, and it is clear that
security is the biggest business in the Palestinian territories and
the largest employer of young men. The number of armed Palestinian
fighters is estimated at around 80,000 or more than six times the
soldiers per capita in the United States. About one out of four
Palestinian men between the ages of 20 and 40 makes a living carrying
a gun.
That is, the economic structure of "pre-state" Palestine is heavily
skewed towards the sort of institutionalized means of violence that is
supposed to disappear once a state has been established. This is
absurd, and creates a double disincentive for the Palestinians to
maintain a low boil of violence. Just how this violence-centered
society is supposed to make the transition to an ordinary civil
society is an unanswerable question.
Once the problem is diagnosed with this kind of clarity, the solution
becomes obvious:
Cut Western support to the Palestinians with the aim of reducing
living standards in the West Bank to those prevailing in Egypt, as an
incentive for emigration.
 Demilitarize Palestinian society: offer a reward for turning in
weapons, seize them when necessary, and give newly-unemployed gunmen
employment weaving baskets at half pay.
Like many obvious solutions, this one never will be put into practice.
The problem all along has been the wrong set of expectations. Once
Palestinian Arabs adjust their expectations to correspond to levels of
income, education and health prevailing in other Arab countries in the
region, they can either form a state similar to other Arab states in
the region, or simply emigrate to those states as individuals.
The Palestinians cannot form a normal state. They cannot emigrate to
Arab countries without accepting a catastrophic decline in living
standards, and very few can emigrate to Western countries. The optimal
solution for the Palestinians is to demand a state and blackmail
Western and Arab donors with the threat of violence, but never
actually get one.
That is why the Palestinian issue is "hopeless, but not serious", in
the words of my old mentor Norman A Bailey, a former national security
official. As long as all concerned understand that the comedy is not
supposed to have an ending, the Palestinians can persist quite
tolerably in their "intolerable" predicament.
Notes
1. The Million Person Gap: The Arab Population in the West Bank and
Gaza, Bennett Zimmerman, Roberta Seid and Michael L Wise, February
2006. The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-ilan
University, Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 65. Click here.
2. Plan for Palestinian Police Force Seven Times Larger than Current
Force by Steven Stotsky, February 10, 2008.

 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH18Ak01.html
adesso quoti i nazi? Impressive!

 dei piu' diffusi pregiudizi sulla situazione palestinese
(cut)
Ah sì, "spengler" cioè david goldman, ex tirapiedi del nazista lyndon
larouche e redattore dii First Thing (la rivista di richard neuhaus,
il consigliere cattolico di bush). Uno che "ha visto la luce".
http://mondoweiss.net/2009/03/spengler-unwittingly-outs-himself-as-david-goldman.html
Ma a parte l'autorevole fonte, per te è un problema se i palestinesi
vivono più degli egiziani? O rappresenta una prova che in fondo dello
stato non se ne fanno nulla perché tanto stanno benone?
Alla fine l'avere un proprio stato non era - per te, almeno, visto che
l'hai ripetuto più e più volte - un fatto legato al diritto
inalienabile alla sovranità?
F.

 inalienabile alla sovranità?
la sovranita' piu' che inalienabile e' indivisibile. Non lo hai (LOL)
studiato?

 la sovranita' piu' che inalienabile e' indivisibile.
E cosa dovrebbe rimanere indiviso, a parte Gerusalemme? Anche i
territori che il piano di spartizione non ha assegnato a IL? Non è che
stai facendo confusione tra diritto alla sovranità e diritto ad
annettere militarmente territori?
F.

 E cosa dovrebbe
sai che sei divertente quando sali in cattedra?

 attraente. Certo se a uno piace Feltri...
ma mica è un problema leggere fonti di estrema destra, basta essere
coerenti e ammettere che la si pensa come loro...

 sai che sei divertente quando sali in cattedra?
tu no, mi metti tristezza. Adesso credo di aver capito da che bozzolo
oscuro stai cercando di uscire, e non ce la faccio più a giocare con
te. Per cui per favore da adesso in poi ignorami, io farò lo stesso
con te. Auguri (sinceri) per tutto.
F.

 oscuro stai cercando di uscire
hai letto la mail?

 Adesso credo di aver capito
mi permetto di dubitarne, visti i precedenti.
Coglione.

 hai letto la mail?
ieri si e ti ho anche risposto...
F.

 Coglione.
si è risentito. Hai capito benissimo...:D



Tu dei due saresti il Gran Mogol e lui la Giovane Marmotta, giusto?
MMAX
-- 
http://bloggoanchio.splinder.com

 Tu dei due saresti il Gran Mogol e lui la Giovane Marmotta,
veramente il contatto è stato casuale...la mail è partita perchè ho
spinto per errore "rispondi all'autore" anzichè "al gruppo"

 Tu dei due saresti il Gran Mogol e lui la Giovane Marmotta, giusto?
mah, io parlerei piu' di Tonio e Gervaso.

 ieri si e ti ho anche risposto...
Fragments d'un discours amoureux...[cit.] 

 Fragments d'un discours amoureux...[cit.]
o anche l'Impero dei sempi.

 Fragments d'un discours amoureux...[cit.]
a te non scrivo, rosicona

 ha scritto nel messaggio 
news:2e2e139b-1e15-420d...@f10g2000vbf.googlegroups.com...

oh mi hai gi� scritto, e in una circostanza che non ti fa onore
Per cui...tasi, sempio 

 oh mi hai già scritto,
non ho detto non ti ho mai scritto, ho detto che non lo farò più

 Per cui...tasi, sempio

rende conto di aver scritto cazzate (altro che Logi).
vero, vero
onore al merito