Gaza: New Dynamics of Civic Disintegration

In late March 1993, in response to some of the highest levels of violence since the uprising began, which left twenty-eight Palestinians and fifteen Israelis dead in March alone, Prime Minister Rabin sealed off the West Bank and Gaza Strip, barring 120,000 Palestinians from their jobs inside the green line, and announced that Israel would have to become far less dependent on Palestinian labor in the future. While these actions are not without precedent, they often follow attacks against Jews within Israel proper, attacks which momentarily sear the political status quo, and which are almost always committed by Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, themselves the object of uninterrupted abuse.

Sara M. Roy is a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, where she is currently coediting a book on USAID policy and programs in the Middle East and Africa. She recently completed a manuscript on the problem of economic de-development in the Gaza Strip.