Army dreamers.
I really don't know what to make of this and I'm scared to write anything flip. I wonder if you'd get similar sentiments from any other group in the Middle East outside Iran?
"This is the new fashion in the market," says Shorah. "It's a show of force, because the US army is powerful. It's a symbol of strength and of our refusal to put down arms."
The US army knock-offs are part of a broader trend here. After six years of an uprising against Israel and with Gaza heading once again for confrontation with the Israeli army, militancy has become a dominant theme in Palestinian culture.
Particularly now, as Gaza's 1.4 million inhabitants sit up each night waiting anxiously for an Israeli invasion aimed at rescuing a captured soldier, air strikes and tank shells are woven into the fabric of daily life.
The masked, fatigue-clad militants who roam Gaza's streets in the name of resistance to the Jewish state are lionized by Palestinian youth.
On their television sets these young people see images of US soldiers in Iraq, and they view them as the ultimate symbol of military might.
"People look in the streets and they see gunmen, they watch TV and see the US Army, and they say, 'I want to be a militant, too. I want that shirt,'" says Omar Bilbaysi, who owns three clothing shops in downtown Rafah.
...The trend is not limited to clothing. At barber shops across the West Bank and Gaza young Palestinians are demanding what's known as a "Marines," meaning a high and tight crew cut, the kind that is mandatory for US Marines.
Similarly, Abu Sim, a rank and file gunman in the Popular Resistance Committees' armed wing, has wrapped the barrel of his Kalashnikov with desert camouflage padding, another nod to US military fashion.
"I saw a US Marine sniper on TV doing the same thing," he says. "It's natural to copy the US military because they are powerful and so are we."
...While I'm thinking about Israel and Palestine, here's a long piece by Helena Cobban, proving, among other things, how impossible it is to write anything current about the situation there. This, though, is pretty striking:
Israel has largely ended the reliance on cheap Palestinian labor that for 30 years after 1967 helped to undergird its impressive economic growth. Israeli labor contractors have joined their counterparts in other rich economies of the Middle East in bringing large numbers of very cheap laborers from Asia or Africa into their country on a strictly “contract-only” basis. More than 100,000 Gaza Palestinians used to cross every day to work on farms and construction sites in Israel; now only 4,000 or 5,000 have the Israeli-issued permits required to do so.
I've not seen those figures before but surely throwing 100,000 Palestinians out of work (out of a total population of just under 1.5 million) over the course of a few years would be changing the dynamics in the region as much as anything else.
"This is the new fashion in the market," says Shorah. "It's a show of force, because the US army is powerful. It's a symbol of strength and of our refusal to put down arms."
The US army knock-offs are part of a broader trend here. After six years of an uprising against Israel and with Gaza heading once again for confrontation with the Israeli army, militancy has become a dominant theme in Palestinian culture.
Particularly now, as Gaza's 1.4 million inhabitants sit up each night waiting anxiously for an Israeli invasion aimed at rescuing a captured soldier, air strikes and tank shells are woven into the fabric of daily life.
The masked, fatigue-clad militants who roam Gaza's streets in the name of resistance to the Jewish state are lionized by Palestinian youth.
On their television sets these young people see images of US soldiers in Iraq, and they view them as the ultimate symbol of military might.
"People look in the streets and they see gunmen, they watch TV and see the US Army, and they say, 'I want to be a militant, too. I want that shirt,'" says Omar Bilbaysi, who owns three clothing shops in downtown Rafah.
...The trend is not limited to clothing. At barber shops across the West Bank and Gaza young Palestinians are demanding what's known as a "Marines," meaning a high and tight crew cut, the kind that is mandatory for US Marines.
Similarly, Abu Sim, a rank and file gunman in the Popular Resistance Committees' armed wing, has wrapped the barrel of his Kalashnikov with desert camouflage padding, another nod to US military fashion.
"I saw a US Marine sniper on TV doing the same thing," he says. "It's natural to copy the US military because they are powerful and so are we."
...While I'm thinking about Israel and Palestine, here's a long piece by Helena Cobban, proving, among other things, how impossible it is to write anything current about the situation there. This, though, is pretty striking:
Israel has largely ended the reliance on cheap Palestinian labor that for 30 years after 1967 helped to undergird its impressive economic growth. Israeli labor contractors have joined their counterparts in other rich economies of the Middle East in bringing large numbers of very cheap laborers from Asia or Africa into their country on a strictly “contract-only” basis. More than 100,000 Gaza Palestinians used to cross every day to work on farms and construction sites in Israel; now only 4,000 or 5,000 have the Israeli-issued permits required to do so.
I've not seen those figures before but surely throwing 100,000 Palestinians out of work (out of a total population of just under 1.5 million) over the course of a few years would be changing the dynamics in the region as much as anything else.
2 Comments:
So sad and pointless this conflict. Especially from an economics standpoint.
As a micro example: my great uncle is a chicken farmer outside of Tel Aviv. From 1993 till about 2000 he switched over from having mostly family work the farm to having nearly all Palestinian workers. He even learned to speak passable Arabic at the age of 75. Once the new intifidah started, it became harder and harder for Palestinians to enter the country and he eventually had to switch over to higher paid Israeli and foreign workers.
He never had a problem with any of the Palestinian workers and (like most Israelis) was perfectly willing to support a deal with Arafat.
Another issue where Clinton's instincts were right. He knew that 2000 was the time for a deal to be made or else watch progress slip away. Unfortunately, either Arafat couldn't humble himself to become a peacemaker or Barak never gave in enough on settlements and other non-land issues (depending on your perspective).
The other sad aspect is that the Palestinians and Iranians would like to have countries more like ours (with their distinct culture) and we are in conflict with them, but many of our "allies" in that part of the world want nothing more to do with us than sell us oil.
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