Thanks for the link. I guess it didn't make Google yet :(
Who Ruined Gaza?
September 22, 2005
I never miss, and always learn from the blog at History News Network by Judith Klinghoffer, scholar at Rutgers.
She just excerpted from an article by Ephraim Karsh, head of Mediterranean Studies at Kings College, University of London. The excerpt is below. The entire article contains much more and can be found here, copied from Vancouver, Canada’s National Post. Karsh’s book, Arafat’s War (Grove, 2004) is a must read as well, at least if one wants to really know “Who Ruined Gaza?”, the title of the article from which the below excerpt comes.
"Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians also made vast progress in social welfare. Life expectancy rose from 48 in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared with an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000. (In Saddam(’s) Iraq, by comparison, the rate was 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23…). And under a systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases such as polio, whooping cough, tetanus and measles were eradicated. No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinians’ standard of living. By 1986, 93% of the population in the West Bank and Gaza had electricity around the clock, as compared with 21% in 1967; 85% had running water in dwellings, as compared to 16% in 1967; 84% had electric or gas ranges for cooking, as compared to 4% in 1967; and so on for refrigerators, televisions and cars. . . ."
Then came Arafat:
"This combination of corruption and terrorism proved catastrophic… (W)ithin six months of Arafat’s arrival in Gaza, the standard of living in the strip fell by 25%, and more than half of the area’s residents claimed to have been happier under Israel. Things got much worse in 2000… Arafat’s terror war… eradicat(ed) the fragile fabric of civil society that had been developing in the territories during the decades prior to his arrival. Unemployment increased from 10% to an average of 41% during 2002, and the proportion of the population that was poor rose from 20% to over 50%…"
| Sep. 22, 2005 | 11:26 PM
Bnksd1@aol.com Thursday, September 22, 2005 | GO TO WEBLOG