Missing UN Report on Palestinian Living Standards

U.N. SAYS PALESTINIANS FARE BETTER THAN OTHER ARABS

Palestinian Arabs living in the Israeli-controlled West Bank and Gaza Strip have fared better in terms of life expectancy, adjusted real income, and educational attainment than many fellow Arabs, according to the United Nations. The U.N.’s 2005 Human Development Report, released to coincide with this month’s opening session of the U.N. General Assembly, ranks the Arabs of what it calls “Occupied Palestinian Territories” at 102 out of 177 countries.

The Associated Press and other wire services filed dispatches mentioning the report’s general finding – that not enough is being done for the 40 percent of the world’s people who live on less than $2 a day. But a September 19 Nexis search showed no news coverage of the study’s ranking of Palestinian Arabs under “Israeli occupation” higher than Algerians (103), Syrians (106), Egyptians (119), Moroccans (124) and Yemeni (151). Based on data for 2003 – a period of frequent Israeli counter-terrorism responses to the “al-Aqsa intifada” – the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip also were not far behind Tunisians (89) and Jordanians (90).

Contradicting the story-line

A great deal of news media commentary, and not a little reporting, has portrayed the Palestinian Arabs as impoverished, and forced by Israel to endure substandard if not subhuman living conditions. The U.N.’s 2005 Human Development Report suggests otherwise, the Palestinian ranking of 102 falling into the “medium human development” listing. For purposes of comparison, Norway (1), Iceland (2), Australia (3), the United States (10) and Japan (11) are among the 57 countries classified offering “high human development” and Madagascar (146), Swaziland (147), Sierra Leone (176) and Niger (177) bookend the “low human development” category.

Israel ranks 23 in the U.N. report. The top Arab states are the oil-rich, population poor sheikdoms of Qatar (40), United Arab Emirates (41), Bahrain (43) and Kuwait (44).

Arabs’ Self-Inflicted Woes

At first glance, the 2005 study might seem to conflict with the U.N.’s 2004 Arab Human Development Report, which asserted that the standard of living for 58 percent of the Palestinian population fell below the poverty line. But without the self-inflicted damage of the Palestinian’s 2000 – 2005 terrorism war against Israel, the territories – whose economies had grown markedly in the Oslo “peace process” years of 1993 – 2000 – likely would be listed even further ahead of Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Morocco and Yemen. As the under-reported 2004 study noted, much of what really ails the Arab countries, and the Palestinian Arabs, are “deficits of freedom,” including lack of Western-style political, religious, minority and women’s rights and the prevalence of corrupt, oppressive, unrepresentative governments.

Harry Golden, editor of the Carolina Israelite and author of the 1958 bestseller, Only in America, said that after a lifetime of clipping news articles, he often found that the important stories were on the back. Or, in this case of Palestinian living standards under Israeli control, especially compared to Arab brethren under their own sovereign governments, nowhere at all.

This important story deserves to be covered for at least three reasons: 1) the facts it reveals about Palestinian standards of living – as compared to fragmentary and often misleading feature reporting about “Palestinians under Israeli occupation”; 2) the under-reported reality of life in many Arab states;, and 3) the virtually unreported Israeli efforts to normalize daily life for peaceful Palestinians as much as possible.

The 2005 U.N. Human Development Report can be found here, and the Index ranking 176 countries plus the Palestinian Arabs here. (Hat tip: Leo Rennert)