80% unemployment for young women, $1000 GDP per capita — inside the UN’s ‘Gaza uninhabitable’ report

Over at CounterPunch, Jonathan Cook has done a review of the new book by Jeff Halper called “War Against the People.” This new book seems to me to be extremely relevant to the topic at hand as well as to the situation in the Middle East and, surprisingly, to the significant role Israel may play in one aspect of neoliberal globalization. Below I provide some excerpts with a link to the article which I highly recommend.

Halper’s main conclusion is disturbing. Israel, he says, is globalising Palestine.

After decades of controlling Palestinians under occupation, he notes, Israel is unrivalled in all these spheres. It uses the occupied territories as a giant laboratory for developing and testing new ideas, technology, tactics and weaponry.

It is no coincidence, he believes, that the US is talking up global terror threats at the same time as wealth and power have de-territorialised, creating an archipelago of elite interests that stretch from parts of the US and Europe to Singapore and the Virgin Islands.

Transnational corporations need secure corridors for the flow of capital and labour, he argues, as the much of the rest of the world turns into wastelands or slums.

The concern is how to maintain a social order conducive to capitalism as great swaths of the globe are impoverished and migrants try to escape their desperate plight.

This is where Israel has stepped in. The place where Israel has developed its ideas and tested them is the occupied territories, says Halper.

The control of Gaza, for example, offers a blueprint for other states concerned about domestic surveillance, border security, urban warfare, migration threats, and much more.

The Palestinians, in this sense, are an important resource for Israel. Without the occupied territories, Israel would be New Zealand. It would be a tourist destination, not a regional hegemon. (Jonathan Cook) link to counterpunch.org

Source Article from http://mondoweiss.net/2015/09/unemployment-capita-uninhabitable

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