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It IS Hard To Get A Grasp Of The Situation
by James Glaser January 7, 2009 What I am writing about is Gaza. It is hard to understand what that little country is like. If you listen to NPR, you will hear a Palestinian backer say Gaza is the most densely populated country in the world, but then an Israeli backer will say that is an exaggeration. So you don't know who to believe So, I did the math. Everyone seems to agree that Gaza has a land area of 146 square miles, and 1,500,000 people live there. That works out to 10,274 people per square mile, which still doesn't tell us much. There are 640 acres per square mile. So we do the math again, and we now know that Gaza has 16 people on every acre of land, but then how big is an acre? A lot of homes around here have half acre or larger lots, but a true square acre is 208' x 208', or 43,264 square feet. Now we are down to a figure we can understand. We do the math one more time, and we have it. Each citizen of Gaza has 2,704 square feet of land to theoretically call his or her own. That is a patch of land 52 feet square. Fifty two feet by fifty two feet sounds like an OK size to live in, but then that isn't the real number. That would be the size everyone has if the whole of Gaza were open with nothing on it. No roads, no trees, no buildings, no gardens, no cars or trucks, well you get the idea. Anything that covers the ground takes away from the area that each person has to live on. Any way you look at it, no matter how you do the math, the people of Gaza are packed in pretty tightly by anyone's standard. Now maybe you can understand why so many people are upset with Israel attacking Gaza. You drop a bomb any place in that little country, and you are going to kill and maim a lot of innocent people. Israel will tell us that they drop leaflets warning people when they are going to attack some place. On the face of it this sounds dubious, but even if it is true, where the heck are the people supposed to go? Even with the best of intelligence, mistakes are made and bombs drop where they aren't supposed to. Heck, Israel is killing some of their own troops because of mistakes. Here are a few more things to think of as you watch reports about this war. There is a high unemployment rate, and much of Gaza is a refugee camp where generations have lived and died. It is reported that 80% of the country lives on less that $2.30 a day. Two-thirds of the population, that would be a million people, live without access to a sewage system. That might be OK if you live out on the farm, but these people are packed tight in an urban setting. That doesn't sound like a nice place to live or raise a family. People always ask what this fighting is about. Well to put it pretty plainly, the Palestinians are fed up living they way they do, and they really have no hope of changing their way of life. They look at Israel as their oppressors. So, they keep making home-made rockets and shooting them at Israel. Well, Israel doesn't know what to do with these people who they have kept living in squalor for the last 60 years. So, every so often they blast away at them with weapons given by the United States. After a lot of blood letting, the Palestinians quiet down for a while. Then in a few years or maybe months the people in Gaza look at the way they are forced to live, and they decide they need to fight back again. They shoot off some more home-made rockets at Israel. Then the cycle of heavy killing starts all over again. |
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