Regarding the Israel / Gaza conflict, are the people of the Gaza Strip officially stateless, or what? In the media, they sometimes seem to be considered a people of Israel, and sometimes not. I know they’re not (as a rule) Israeli citizens, but I did think they were Israeli nationals.
I am asking because there is a lot of condemnation of states such as Syria attacking their own people, and yet the rhetoric around Israel is couched in entirely different language, as a conflict between two different nations. Please note that I am not trying to compare the Syrian and Israeli situations or make a statement for one side or the other; I’m only asking whether the people of the Gaza Strip are in any sense people of Israel, and if so, in what sense(s).
The Palestinian Authority issues passports to any person who has proper documentation of Palestinian nationality, but they are not recognized everywhere, and Egypt is very suspicious of them. Words like “citizenship” and “nationality” and “subject” do not always have the same meaning in all countries.
I think Israel considers them to be Israeli citizens, but does not grant them many rights of citizenship.
Bigger question: what country owned Gaza before the 1967 War? I’d have assumed (perhaps wrongly) Egypt… but if it WAS Egyptian territory, why didn’t Egypt get it back after the Camp David accords?
They’re nothing. They’re not citizens of anywhere or nationals of anywhere. They’re stateless people. West Bank residents were citizens of Jordan, and I think Gazans were citizens of Egypt when those two countries controlled those areas, but both countries stripped Palestinians of their citizenship after Israel took them.
Israel’s offered citizenship to most residents of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, which Israel’s annexed and considers part of Israel (and most have not accepted it, although with the Syrian Civil War, more and more Golani are). That’s not true for the West Bank and Gaza.
Little in the way of natural resources, with less than 10% of it arable, useful land. It has natural gas resources and - I would suppose - access to fishing in the med. That’s pretty much it. The population - 1.8MM at the moment - is crammed in at a rate of 5000 per square kilometer. That puts in in the #5 slot behind Macao, Monaco, Singapore and Hong Kong without the advantages of trade and free movement those places enjoy.
It’s a recipe for amazing squalor. I agree that, if positioned rightly, it could become a banking or other center of exchange. But that requires some sort of coherent development plan that has, so far, failed to gain traction.