Gaza in Proportion

In this day of information saturation, you would imagine that easily-obtained numbers, showing the relative might of the Gaza Strip and of the State of Israel would be prominently featured in a box  next to news coverage of the recent re-re-re-re-ignition of the conflict between Israel and the Gaza strip. I touched on this in the last post. Herewith some additional data:

Gaza Strip Compared to Israel
			Ratio
	Gaza Strip	Israel	Gaza	Israel
Population (mil)	1.657	7.941	1	4.79
Per capita GDP ($)	3,100	31,467	1	10.15
Area (sq. miles)	139	8,019	1	57.69
Population per sq. mile	11,921	990	1	0.08

The tabulation shows differences between the Gaza Strip and Israel in terms of population, per capita Gross Domestic Product, area, and population density. Nearly 1.7 million people in Gaza occupy a mere 139 square miles, with some 11,900 per square mile. Compared to the inhabitants of Gaza, Israel’s population is ten times richer, has nearly 5 times more people, and nearly 60 times more area. Israel’s density is less than a tenth of Gaza’s.

What follows next is a map of both. Alas, the Gaza strip is virtually invisible. I’ve provided an arrow that points to it.

Now the spectator populations across the world, looking at this, and reading the hyped coverage in the media—where the oppressed and one might say suffocated population of Gaza is the chief villain, might well say, Hmmm…

U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Are we in some way participating, through the taxes that we pay, in the violence centered on Gaza that is now beginning in Israel. Yes, in a way. In the current fiscal year we gave Israel $3.1 billion in military aid; it accounted for 99.4 percent of all aid we gave that country. That’s a fair amount of money, indeed a fifth of Israel’s 2012 expenditures on the military ($15.2 billion), that number from to Wikipedia (link).

I show here a graphic tracking U.S. military aid to Israel for FY 1997 to FY 2013 (the last is proposed) along with bars showing what percentage that aid is of total U.S. aid to Israel. My source is a Congressional Research Service paper dated March 12, 2012 (link).

Two out of every ten bullets or missiles or bombs are ours, you might say. We don’t participate in targeting.

Danse Macabre

The New York Times this morning breathlessly tells me that another Mideast Peace Plan is in the offing. More. Evidently President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu are racing to be the first to unveil one—evidently because he who’s first wins, the other loses. Obama (of course) will make a well-framed speech. Netanyahu will address the U.S. Congress. Horse race, conflict, Israel, Peace Plan, edge of chair, stay tuned. Danse Macabre.

Now if the madness were merely in the media, it wouldn’t matter much. If a genuine peace plan were actually in the offing and the parties were genuinely serious concerning the actual plan, and its outcome, rather than serious about other things, I’d fault the media for failure to dig deeper and failing to tell the public something of substance. But here the situation is so clear and evident, has repeated so often, is rooted so firmly in relative power relationships, yet another repetition of the Danse Macabre is not worth noting at all.

Netanyahu must do something to keep the money flowing. In 2009 Israel received $5.38 billion in economic and military aid and in grants and credits—second to no one else except Iraq and Afghanistan—countries we are actually running or trying to. In 2009 Israel’s grants and credits were $1.992 billion, down from $2.955 billion in 2008. Its economic/military grants are also down, from $2.508 billion in 2007 to $2.425 billion in 2008; no economic/military aid data were available for 2009 from my source here. This means that our 2008 largesse was worth 2.6 percent of Israel’s GDP in 2010. So much for Netanyahu’s motives. As for his intentions actually to cede land to the Palestinians, to “tear down that wall,” to echo a former President, or to stop building on Palestinian lands—those intentions are non-existent. Therefore it must be about the money—and, as we know, paper and talk are cheap. You can tear up the paper later and un-say the words in Hebrew.

Now as for our President, he appears to suffer from the delusion that speeches are action. And now that—a mere two years and four months into his first term—the news are all about an election still 19 months in the future, it is high time for Obama to do something about his legacy. Every president must decorate his legacy with a bit of glass-diamond called Mideast Peace Plan, and Obama will deludedly believe that to make a good speech is to act. So let not a Netanyahu steal a march. Out with the brilliant ideas, stunningly delivered.

Danse Macabre. I wish I could sit this one out.