And the economic wealth of the Palestinians is FAR greater than had the Israelis handed the West Bank back over to Jordan.
That is an absurd theory.
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Though Israel's barring of development in the territories was well known, its extent came as a surprise even to the most knowledgeable observers when they had an opportunity to visit Jordan after the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty of October 1994. The comparison is particularly apt, Danny Rubinstein observes, since the Palestinian populations are about as numerous on both sides of the Jordan, and the West Bank was somewhat more developed before the Israeli takeover in 1967. Having covered the territories with distinction for years, Rubinstein was well aware that the Israeli administration “had purposely worsened the conditions under which Palestinians in the territories had to live.” Nonetheless, he was shocked and saddened to discover the startling truth. “Despite Jordan's unstable economy and its being part of the Third World,” he found, “its rate of development is much higher than that of the West Bank, not to mention Gaza,” administered by a very rich society which benefits from unparalleled foreign aid. While Israel has built roads only for the Jewish settlers, “in Jordan people drive on new, multiple-lane highways, well-equipped with bridges and intersections.” Factories, commerce, hotels, and universities have been developed in impoverished Jordan, at quite high levels. Virtually nothing similar has been allowed on the West Bank, apart from “two small hotels in Bethlehem.” “All universities in the territories were built solely with private funding and donations from foreign states, without a penny from Israel,” apart from the Islamic University in Hebron, originally supported by Israel as part of its encouragement of Islamic fundamentalism to undermine the secular PLO, now a Hamas center. Health services in the West Bank are “extremely backward” in comparison with Jordan. “Two large buildings in East Jerusalem, intended for hospitals and clinics to serve the residents of the West Bank, which the Jordanians were constructing in 1967, were turned into police buildings by the Israeli government,” which also refused permits for factories in Nablus and Hebron under pressure from Israeli manufacturers who wanted a captive market without competition. “The result is that the backward and poor Jordanian kingdom did much more for the Palestinians who lived in it than Israel,” showing “in an even more glaring form how badly the Israeli occupation had treated them.”
Electricity is available everywhere in Jordan, unlike the West Bank, where the great majority of Arab villages have only local generators that operate irregularly. “The same goes for the water system. In arid Jordan, several large water projects...have turned the eastern bank of the Jordan valley into a dense and blooming agricultural area,” while on the West Bank water supplies have been directed to the use of settlers and Israel itself -- about 5/6 of West Bank water, according to Israeli specialists.
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The fact that you cannot face is that THE WEST BANK WILL NEVER BE INDEPENDENT of Israeli influence or control.
Stop waving the blue & white pom-poms, already. ;-)
Tom |
