Israel's Stock Markets Beats Out its neighbors

[Dick Dastardly]

18. You are wrong the Palestinian standard of living across the board has improved massively from

1967 until the 2nd intifada.
You hit, a trifecta of wrong in this post because it goes without saying you are also wrong with the ridiculous apartheid and BDS fantasies.

Anyway
Since the occupation began Israel built schools, roads, hospitals universities, electrical grid, sewer, water and a lot of other infrastructure. The Palestinians worked in Israel, engaged in trade and grew from one of the poorest Arab areas to one with the fastest growing gdp and highest standard of living of any Arab country except the oil states. Improvements in health, education, economic and just about every measure of living standards skyrocketed.

Here is a previous post I made

For nearly 30 years, Israel permitted thousands of Palestinians to enter the country each day to work in construction, agriculture and other blue-collar jobs. The Israelis got cheap labor, and the Palestinians earned significantly more than they would at home. Until the mid-1990s, up to 150,000 people -- about a fifth of the Palestinian labor force -- entered Israel each day. After Palestinians unleashed a wave of suicide bombings, the idea of separation from the Palestinians became popular in Israel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Palestinian... The PA’s Economic Situation After the Oslo accords, the Palestinian economy entered a steady growth path. Palestinian GDP grew at an average rate of 8% annually between 1995-2000, reaching US$4,512 million by 1999. Palestinian employment also improved. Unemployment declined to 11.8% in 1999, compared with 23.8% in 1996. The median net wage peaked at US$17.3 daily in 1999, compared with US$11.5 in 1996. With the eruption of the Second Intifada (2000) and the subsequent border closings, the Palestinian economic situation deteriorated. Election of the Hamas government in 2006 worsened the situation as direct aid was cut off. http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:A71P49gUeDgJ:www.m... 

--"Private consumption per capita rose during 1969-1986 at an overall rate of 5% per annum." 

-- Outside of regugee camps in Gaza (which Israel wanted to replace with permanent housing, but was prevented so as not to help solve the "refugee crisis" that provided the PLO's reason for existence), "in 1986, 95% of the Households in Gaza had running water and 100% had electricity (compared with 3 percent for water and 14% for electricity in 1974)."
--The percentage individual "with at least 9 years of education has risen from 22% in 1970 to 46% in 1986 in the West Bank, and from 32% to 54% in the Gaza Strip during the same period." Not noted in the paper I'm citing, all of the universities in the West Bank and Gaza were opened during the Israeli administration of the territories. There were none before that.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124x222592



Here is a great article outlining improvements in living standards during the occupation. I have many more.

What Occupation?
During the 1970's, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world-ahead of such "wonders" as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself. Although GNP per capita grew somewhat more slowly, the rate was still high by international standards, with per-capita GNP expanding tenfold between 1968 and 1991 from $165 to $1,715 (compared with Jordan's $1,050, Egypt's $600, Turkey's $1,630, and Tunisia's $1,440). By 1999, Palestinian per-capita income was nearly double Syria's, more than four times Yemen's, and 10 percent higher than Jordan's (one of the betteroff Arab states). Only the oil-rich Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.

 Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians also made vast progress in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the West Bank and Gaza fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared with an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22). And under a systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles were eradicated. 

No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinians' standard of living. By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in 1967; 85 percent had running water in dwellings, as compared to 16 percent in 1967; 83.5 percent had electric or gas ranges for cooking, as compared to 4 percent in 1967; and so on for refrigerators, televisions, and cars.

 Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980's, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990's, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria. 

ALL THIS, as I have noted, took place against the backdrop of Israel's hands-off policy in the political and administrative spheres. Indeed, even as the PLO (until 1982 headquartered in Lebanon and thereafter in Tunisia) proclaimed its ongoing commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state, the Israelis did surprisingly little to limit its political influence in the territories. The publication of proPLO editorials was permitted in the local press, and anti-Israel activities by PLO supporters were tolerated so long as they did not involve overt incitements to violence. Israel also allowed the free flow of PLO-controlled funds, a policy justified by Minister of Defense Ezer Weizmann in 1978 in these (deluded) words: "It does not matter that they get money from the PLO, as long as they don't build arms factories with it." Nor, with very few exceptions, did Israel encourage the formation of Palestinian political institutions that might serve as a counterweight to the PLO. As a result, the PLO gradually established itself as the predominant force in the territories, relegating the pragmatic traditional leadership to the fringes of the political system.*

 Given the extreme and even self-destructive leniency of Israel's administrative policies, what seems remarkable is that it took as long as it did for the PLO to entice the residents of the West Bank and Gaza into a popular struggle against the Jewish state. Here Israel's counterinsurgency measures must be given their due, as well as the low level of national consciousness among the Palestinians and the sheer rapidity and scope of the improvements in their standard of living. The fact remains, however, that during the two-and-a-half decades from the occupation of the territories to the onset of the Oslo peace process in 1993, there was very little "armed resistance," and most terrorist attacks emanated from outside-from Jordan in the late 1960's, then from Lebanon. 
http://www.aish.com/jw/me/48898917.html