As the long decades of Palestinian-Israeli tension wear on; it appears there is a separate evolution underway between the Palestinians who live on the West Bank and those who are trapped in Gaza. The West Bank Palestinians have troubles enough, but there is a latent vitality there and tranquility of a sort isn’t too hard to find among many of them. By contrast, the Gaza Strip – even before the events of December 2008 and January 2009 – seems dysfunctional. There are a number of reasons why this may be, but here is another consideration.
Fighting like a cornered rat is no mere metaphor to anyone who has ever encountered Rattus norvegicus in such circumstances. Even when out massed on a ratio of 200 to 1, if a rat can’t escape, it will fight without reckoning the odds… and can leave a lasting impression in more ways than one. This begs a question: What does one do with a rat that wants you to fight it?
This rat simile is not intended as a smear on the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, but is a means of understanding a mechanism that explains the area’s dysfunctionalism: It is very overcrowded.
Rats were used as the test subjects in a famous experiment by the psychologist John B. Calhoun (originally published as “Population Density and Social Pathology” in the February 1962 edition of Scientific American). Calhoun provided adequate food and water for an expanding population of rats in a series of linked cages, and observed there was a direct parallel between over-crowding and casual murder, rape, infanticide and cannibalization among the rats. Even though all the rats had their basic survival needs met, as they became over-crowded, a dramatic increase in pathological behaviour ensued.
It should be pointed out that the tiny Gaza Strip has one of the highest rates of natural increase in the world, averaging 3.442% in 2008 (effectively doubling the population every 20-21 years). It is also one of the most densely crowded places on the planet – over 3,880 people per square km. The only political entities more crowded than this are Macau, Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore and Gibraltar; all of which are considerably more prosperous and their residents have much more freedom to travel.
By way of comparison: Israel’s 7.18 million citizens are clustered together at 325 people per square kilometre; and the average for the West Bank’s 4.52 million inhabitants is a population density of 799 people per sq km. The population growth rate on the West Bank is also very high (2.225%), but is still lower than that on the Gaza Strip.
Given recent events, a quick review of the Gaza Strip in the last 60 odd years might be necessary. In the 1947 plan for the partition of Palestine, it was to be an independent Arab entity, but was occupied by Egypt in 1948. As Gaza filled up with Arabs fleeing Israel, Egypt contained them to keep as a permanent propaganda weapon against Israel. It should be remembered that there was no distinct ‘Palestinian’ Arab identity until Arafat created it in the 1960s.
Another often forgotten fact was that the 600,000 Arabs displaced from the new state of Israel were matched by the 800,000+ Jews of the ancient communities of the Middle East who were expelled (frequently with much violence) and resettled in Israel. This makes one wonder why towns full of multi- story apartment buildings in the Gaza Strip are still called ‘Refugee Camps’. However, the continuation of a UN bureaucracy, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which has dealt with Palestinian Refugees since 1950 probably explains much – it’s one of the biggest UN programs and has a vested interest in perpetuating itself. It is also apparently the largest employer in the Gaza Strip.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Gaza became the base for much terrorist activity under Egyptian sponsorship against Israel. A few Palestinians in the strip were allowed by Egypt to leave and make their fortunes elsewhere, but the bulk had to remain to fester in impotence and rage.
In the 1967 Six Day War, Israel occupied the Gaza strip and remained there until 1994; when 92% of the territory was handed over to Fatah/Palestinian Authority control. During those 27 years, the quality of life – water, power, medical care, economic opportunities, etc. – radically improved; not that gratitude was expected or received by the Israelis. Between Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and then Hamas, the young were ideologically conditioned to hate Israel; this was then enhanced by the restrictions imposed by a wary Israel’s security measures.
For its part, Israel was glad to get out of Gaza; but continued to be bogged down by the need to secure the Jewish settlers who were still using 8% of the Gaza Strip’s best farmland (Indeed, some 20% of Israel’s agricultural exports once came from Gaza farms). Also, with the Second Intifada in 2000, the Israelis felt the need to attempt to control the extremists on the strip – not that this helped much and the bill was stiff.
As a part of a strategy of trading land for peace, Israel completely evacuated the Gaza Strip in 2005 and forcibly took the settlers back with them. Gaza was now completely under Palestinian Authority (PA) control – technically. Israel remains in control of Gaza’s entry points, but allows anything except weapons (and material for making them) to pass through. To defeat this, the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip started tunneling to Egypt. However, since 2000, various elements within Gaza started building and firing rockets into Israel; and this has continued ever since.
Arafat’s PA was deeply unpopular, largely because of their corrupt practices. Moreover, as has always been the case among the Palestinian Arabs since 1948, other elements in the Arab World had been encouraging factionalism and supporting their own cat’s paws. The Salafists of the Islamic Brotherhood encouraged the growth of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, whereas Hamas (for all that it is a Sunni group) found money and arms coming from Iranian sources as well as from Damascus.
After the 2006 Palestinian elections, the PA retained control of many Palestinian institutions despite the Hamas electoral gains. In 2007, Hamas violently overthrew the PA authority in the Gaza Strip and have been running it since. This has been to the great detriment of the Christian Arabs of Gaza, but Hamas militants have also murdered many Fatah supporters and imposed Sharia law, with its usual cruelties.
Rockets are being still fired into Israel, but these were joined in 2008 by mortars. A growing number of rockets are not improvised weapons anymore, but are ‘Grad’ artillery weapons from stocks made in China and Russia, and presumably imported via Iran.
And so we come to the present. Gaza is crowded with 1.4 million people on 360 square kilometres. Because of the continuing security threats emanating from the area, its borders with Israel and Egypt are sealed; and few people get to leave.
If the observations from Calhoun’s experiment also apply to humans, then the Gaza Strip would be one certain place to find out.
Rats have been known to commit infanticide. Female Rats (does) kill their weak kittens (yup, rats have cuddly names) to ensure the survival of the rest of their litter. Strange males (bucks) kill kittens to bring does back into estrus – a trait some other mammals share – and strange females might kill off a litter to enhance the survival of their own. Calhoun noticed that crowding greatly increased these behaviours.
Humans, we like to believe, are altogether more complicated than rats. Do the inhabitants of the Gaza strip engage in infanticide? Not the way rats do; or in common human ways either. Are instances of child abuse outside of Arab/Palestinian cultural norms? This is a question that couldn’t be properly framed or answered without considerable rancor and controversy. Besides, the Gaza Strip is not a place that routinely attracts social workers, except for highly politicized ones.
Yet one really has to wonder about the attraction of turning one’s children into shaheed (suicide bombers). Given the financial rewards for the family of a shaheed, plus the attendant prestige and the promise of a religious reward; does the prospect of turning an over-crowded family’s liability into an asset constitute infanticide in the conventional sense? It arguably does.
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Note the cool ‘Action Man’ poses, and not an Israeli in sight…
Aside from the recent Hamas claims of hundreds of civilian casualties (as usual, accepted without question), it seems that most of the dead were armed 16 and 17 year-old boys – according to a January 22nd 2009 story by Lorenzo Crimonesi in the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera. One might be reminded of the infamous ‘massacre’ in Jenin, where 1,500 dead turned out to be 54, 45 of who were Palestinian gunmen. It seems as if Hamas sent boys out to do a man’s work while their own leaders skulked under cover until the Israelis withdrew.
There was also the absolute willingness of Hamas to deliberately shelter behind women and children in the recent fighting. In most Mammalian species, males defend females and the young: Deliberately putting them in harm’s way to enhance a male’s prestige is positively unnatural.
Rats have courtship behaviours, and in Calhoun’s overcrowding experiments, these were dispensed with and rape became noticeable. As for rape in the Gaza Strip; a loaded cultural argument looms. In the Islamic World generally women have no choice but to marry, and often have little say in the selection of their husband. Western notions of what constitutes consent, coercion and sexual assault are not considered as such, and our standards are even more alien where a society is controlled by misogynistic Islamicists.
It has been noted in Algeria, Iraq and Afghanistan that the “Fighters” of the Jihadist movement can be very insistent on so-called ‘temporary marriages’ with local young women; particularly if the Jihadists are outsiders. One result from this is that local Muslims start communicating with Coalition Forces and delivering intelligence.
Jihadis, of course, like to imagine that they are selfless paladins of virtue; so that a mere creature comfort or two as they await a martyr’s death in battle is a just and fair entitlement. Most Muslims have a very different interpretation of this behaviour; and what they see are armed gunmen demanding sex with their daughters – something NATO or Israeli troops don’t do. Have Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip been behaving this way? Some anecdotes suggest they have.
Casual murder? Well, that’s what Hamas is all about. In the last few years alone, there has been their vendetta against Fatah (and the dozens of prisoners they executed); beatings and assaults in Gaza – once beating a groom to death at his wedding party because of a public display of dancing and music; not to mention the thousands of rockets and mortar shells fired into Israel.
Calhoun’s overcrowded rats often turned cannibal, even though food supplies were adequate. Cannibalism in the Gaza Strip? This would be only in the metaphoric sense.
Aside from issues relating to famine, there are two basic explanations for cannibalism among humans: One is for ritual reasons, such as to absorb the power or spirit of an enemy; the second is because “long pig” is a dietary preference. Either way cannibalism is the consumption of human capital. By having somebody’s liver on a spit, you don’t have him or her as a slave or an adoptee into the tribe.
Is human capital wasted in the Gaza Strip? Well, it is squandered almost everywhere, but it seems the largest industry on the strip is to manufacture rockets to shoot into Israel. Schools don’t turn out engineers and physicians, but they do turn out new members of Hamas. The state of Gaza’s farms is unknown, but exports don’t come close to what they used to be when under Israeli control.
Even back in 2004, when touring Israel and the West Bank, the Gaza Strip was off limits for good reason – it was too hazardous to visit (by contrast, the author stayed for a week in an Arab neighbourhood in East Jerusalem). During that time, the going price for an AK-47 in Gaza was US $2000 or more, and bullets were around $2 each. There are places in the world where an AK-47 goes for $100 with the first box of bullets thrown in free. A young man in the Gaza Strip could get a car and a taxi license for that much, or lease a store front to open a business… but businesses and taxis were scarce in Gaza and AK-47s certainly were not.
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My rocket is bigger than your rocket…
As for dysfunctional behaviour generally, the actions of Hamas in the last two years can’t be seen any other way. They attacked what little government the Palestinians had, supplanted it with a ideology that is weird even by the standards of Islamic radicalism, and then started trying to goad a neighbour into a fight they couldn’t possibly win.
If Calhoun’s rat experiment can apply to human beings, then the Gaza Strip would suggest that it does. This also suggests a preferred solution… let more of the inhabitants move elsewhere.
This doesn’t mean letting them into Israel; Israel has enough problems and had to absorb 850,000 people displaced by the Arab World. Rather, it might be time to let the people of the Gaza Strip move elsewhere in the Arab World – as should have been allowed 60 years ago. This isn’t a perfect solution but the alternative is to continue this accidental experiment and see just how much over-crowding people can take before they completely self-destruct… and that’s not acceptable.
