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| Volume IX, December 2002, Number 4 |
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| EXCERPT: Ending the Palestinian Economy |
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| Sara Roy |
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Dr. Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University. This article emanates from a project supported by a grant from the Research and Writing Initiative of the Program on Global Security and Sustainability of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The terrible violence and destruc-
tion that now describes the
conflict between Palestinians and
Israelis in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel is without precedent but not without context. This context has many dimensions but is defined primarily by Israel's continued occupation of Palestinian lands. Israel's violent five-week incursion into the West Bank that began at the end of March 2002 and daily incursions into parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WB/G) since then, particularly Israel's reoccupation of most West Bank cities in June 2002, are perhaps the most visible illustrations of the government's unwillingness to end the occupation. Another critical dimension of the current context is economic, particularly as Palestinians unquestionably face the approaching breakdown of their economy, a humanitarian crisis and the destruction of ordinary life.
In an appearance on American television, the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, stated that "poverty does not cause terrorism; terrorism causes poverty."1 Echoing a similar sentiment, a group of former (and right wing) Israeli generals argued that if Israel declared sovereignty over the area west of the Jordan River, the Palestinian uprising would wither "because the suicide bombers are not blowing themselves up out of despair, but out of hope they can drive us out of the territories. As soon as they find out that won't happen, the level of violence will also drop."2
These statements at best reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the context in which the majority of Palestinians now live. This context is dehumanizing and paralyzing and is characterized in large part by levels of poverty and despair that have no parallel during Israel's 35-year occupation of WB/G. Not since 1948, perhaps, have Palestinians faced such conditions of loss and dispossession. These conditions, writes Edward Said,
multiply the distortions stemming from the original condition of loss and dispossession . . . . [T]hey offer additional dislocations and the reproduction of distortions whose widening effects extend the whole range, from war to increasing numbers of refugees, more property abandoned and taken, more frustration, more anger, more humiliation . . . .3
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1 Interview with Shimon Peres, the Charlie Rose television show, February 2002. A related argument can be found in Daniel Pipes, "God and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?" The National Interest, Winter 2001/02, pp. 14-21.
2 Amos Harel, "Rightist Ex-generals Propose Massive Invasion of Territories," Ha'aretz, January 31, 2002.
3 Edward W. Said, "Afterword: The Consequences of 1948," Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 215.
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