Gaza could have been wealthy and successful

Friday-weekend blog

All we ever hear about Gaza is that it is poor and undeveloped due to supposedly being oppressed by the beastly Israelis. We don’t ever hear anyone mentioning that Gazans receive more aid money per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world. In fact, Gazans receive just over double the amount of aid per inhabitant as the next highest recipient of aid. Yet we never see anyone in the mainstream media wondering what has happened to all the many tens of billions the international community have hosed into Gaza.

So, here are just a few facts. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip totaled over $40 billion between 1994 and 2020. That’s just over $1.5 billion per year. This figure doesn’t include the hundreds of millions of dollars and many millions more of weapons Iran has given to Hamas to kill as many Israelis as they can. The population of the Gaza strip is about two million. The fertility rate of women in the Gaza Strip is about 3.54 childen per woman. That means there are around 363,000 families in the Gaza Strip. If Gazans receive over $1.5 billion per year in aid, then that’s equivalent to more than $4,000 per family per year if I’ve got my decimals in the right place.

Time after time after time, the international community has increased the amount of aid poured into the Gaza Strip and in return expected the Gazans to engage in peace negotiations with Israel:

And time after time after time, the Palestinians have agreed to various accords only to immediately break them and launch violent Intifadas against Israel. Evidently, our Gazan friends prefer hatred and conflict to peace and prosperity.

As for where the many tens of billions of aid have gone, of course building over 200 miles of tunnels with an electricity supply and equipping them for 40,000 to 50,000 fighters is probably quite expensive. And I rather suspect that most Hamas bosses have luxury mansions in places like Qatar and Dubai along with incredibly healthy offshore bank accounts while ordinary Gazans can’t afford to feed their families. Moreover, building all these tunnels must require quite a lot of concrete. So there wouldn’t be much left to build homes and schools and hospitals and suchlike for Gaza’s two million Jew-hating, Hamas-adoring citizens.

Instead of blaming the Israelis for the desperate plight of Gaza’s two million population, perhaps it would be more appropriate (though rather politically-incorrect) to blame the corruption, stupidity, backwardness, religious fanaticism and predilection for violence and hatred of the Gazans themselves for their misery?