For a look at the conditions in Gaza around the
fin de last
siècle, the ones that created the environment that allowed Hamas to win that 2006 election and seize power, P.J. O'Rourke's piece titled "The Holyland - God's Monkey House" in his book
Holidays in Hell contains a travelogue of the place during the First Intifada. It's worth a read (and the Kindle edition is currently on sale for a buck ninety-nine.)
"In fact, I think it can be fairly said that everything in the Holy Land is cursed. The Gaza Strip certainly is. I drove down there to take a look at the place where Israel’s current batch of troubles began. The Strip is desolate and, at the same time, one of the most thickly populated places on earth. (Desolately overpopulated, cursed Holyland, blood-soaked home of the Prince of Peace—this region never seems to run out of oxymorons.) Gaza City has the same crowded poverty as Arab Jerusalem, but it’s all new and made of cement. The land around it, the mere 140 square miles that make up this gigantic international sore spot, should be a place of gilt-sand beaches and graceful dunes dotted with palms and oasis wells. Instead it’s Hell’s Riviera with eight refugee camps housing a quarter of a million people.
The Palestinians in these camps were displaced by the 1948 war—the one Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint won in Exodus. Since then they’ve been “temporarily” sheltered by the jack-off U.N.; ruled first by useless Egyptian bureaucracy, then by cold-hearted Israeli military fiat; ignored by the Western bloc; exploited by the Eastern bloc and just left there, like live bait in a geopolitical leg trap by their fellow Arabs."
