Customer Reviews

The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development

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This book is the most thorough analysis of the economy in the Gaza Strip that I have been able to find. I highly recommend it for those who seek more details than your average sources. Very well documented and referenced as well.

As usual, Pipes backs up his arguments with nothing save petulant diatribe. Roy's study of Gaza is first-rate and highly recommended by many scholars in the field. A very thoroughly investigated look at the Israeli governments slow destruction of infrastructure and economy within the Occupied Territories.

Although the information was dated, the flow of the information and specific data points were excellent. It sets an excellent foundation for today's current events and helps to provides a foundation for understanding what will probably occur in the very near future.

Though her ostensible subject is Gaza, Roy's emotions are engaged when the subject is Israel. The Israeli government, she writes, "has attempted to dispossess Palestinians of their political and cultural patrimony through the direct expropriation of their economic resources." So intense is her hatred of things Israeli that Roy finds normal language inadequate. Instead, she reverts to archaisms (its military occupation since 1967 has been "malefic") and neologisms (its policy in Gaza has been one of "de-development," a term she made up to mean the "deliberate, systematic destruction of an indigenous economy by a dominant power"). Even when the Israelis do something right, such as subsidize the growing of carnations in Gaza, Roy finds that the Palestinians "suffered considerable losses" from the program, due to the capriciousness of the Israeli marketing company. As for the Declaration of Principles (DoP), the less said, the better: Roy writes that this agreement "will not alter the underlying relationship between occupier and occupied, only its form."

When Palestinian sympathizers like Roy dismiss Yasir Arafat as a sell-out for having signed the DoP, it invariably prompts the thought that they are less interested in the welfare of Palestinians than with the opportunity to vent spleen at the Jewish state. Its academic trappings aside, this would seem to a be a book whose purpose first and last is to discredit Israel.

Middle East Quarterly, March 1996