The U.N. estimates that Gaza’s fragile economy will take no fewer than 350 years to recover from the disruptions of war.
The United Nations has some bad news. The Gaza Strip’s fragile economy has been so catastrophically disrupted by the war its governing authority started on October 7 that it will take no fewer than 350 years for this tiny plot of land to recover. An editor of the Guardian reproduced the accusation, and his colleagues published his thoughts on the matter apparently without evincing any skepticism toward the claim.
The assessment is a pristine example of why straight-line projections are inherently fallacious. The U.N. report that produced this dubious conclusion notes that almost all economic activity in sectors including agriculture, manufacturing, and services has ground nearly to a halt — as one might expect amid ongoing counterinsurgency operations. That won’t last forever, and those sectors will start to rebuild and resume their previously profitable operations when Israel’s battlefield objectives are achieved.
The notion that it will take a century longer than the United States has been a country for this 139-square-mile strip of desirable land along the Mediterranean coast to put itself back together — with or without foreign support (and it will very much be with) — is fanciful. To justify that assumption, let’s look back at what the world looked like 350 years ago.
In that year, 1674, the Netherlands formally settled the third Anglo-Dutch trade war and handed over control of what would become New York to the British. The Royal Society’s Robert Hooke wrote that year of the existence of “attractive powers” that would influence his rival, Isaac Newton, in his work toward a concept of a “law of universal gravitation.” John Graunt, a demographist widely considered to be the father of modern census-taking methods and an influential epidemiologist, died.
The stage for the Second English Civil War was set when Charles II, a fugitive from parliamentary justice, attempted to cajole the Scottish to invade England, which they subsequently did. The Ottoman Empire retained functional possession through its vassals of the Ukrainian Black Sea Coast — a history Vladimir Putin resents to this day. John Lawson, the English explorer who chronicled the flora and fauna in the American Carolinas and founded the cities of New Bern and Bath, N.C., was born.
The artist Jan De Bray completed “Adoration of the Magi,” which hangs today in Bamberg, Germany’s historical museum. The Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek observed microorganisms such as yeast and protozoa for the first time. The English well-being enthusiast Thomas Willis revolutionized medicine when he pioneered a foolproof method for distinguishing diabetes from other causes of polyuria: tasting the blood and urine for its relative sweetness.
The point here is that a lot can change in 350 years. Not, apparently, in Gaza. The U.N. and its chroniclers at the Guardian have either such a low estimation of the talents of average Gazans or a pathological mistrust of their Israeli neighbors (or both) that they assume a mid-conflict status quo will pertain well into the indefinite future. That says a lot more about them than the subjects on which they are opining.