Challenge: Gaza becomes the Arab Hong Kong

What precautions would have to happen make Gaza the economic center of the Arab speaking world?

Rules: Israel must exist and the West Bank must exist
 
Oil is found in the Meditranian, the Israelis and the Palistinians must join forces to retreive the oil. This creates an unprecidented peace in the holy land. te reserves are so large it supplies a good portion of the earth.

Many admenities are made for the oil workers in the area, and many corperations move in the area to gain money off of the people flooding to the area.
 
Does the UN partition plan fit the criteria?
Link: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...-Partition-Plan-1949-Armistice-Comparison.png

All the involved parties accept the plan (too ASB?) and the new Palestinian Govt. spends its first few years investing in infrastructure. If the tariffs and costs involved are less than the cost of just shipping Palestine could become a natural trading partner between Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. Over the next 50 years Gaza evolves as the commercial center of the Middle East.
 
Economic development in Gaza depends less on the miraculous discovery of natural resources and extractive industry than on politics and social history.

Until the Palestinians in Gaza stop thinking of it as a temporary way station or refugee camp while they wait for some Deus Ex Machina to wipe every Jew off the planet so they can reclaim their great aunt's bachelor flat in Haifa, which no Arab has set foot in since 1948, and actually start building a functioning, modern state in situ, they will not advance economically.

If they put half as much effort into higher education (leading to 21st century industries like finance, software development, electronics manufacture, shipping, tourism and media) as they put into rocket attacks, blowing up pizza parlours and assassinating fellow Arab politicians and journalists, they would be much better off economically.

Take tourism as an example. If you were looking for a place to spend a week long holiday on a Mediterranean beach, with occasional sidetrips into historic ruins and local cuisine, would you pick a war torn, factionalised refugee camp or would you just have it over with and go to Corfu or Ibiza again? If you were an investor in Dubai looking to situate, say, a printing plant for Arab language dime novels would you put it in a terrorist ridden, politically unstable war zone, or just get the things printed in China like everyone else?

The number one, and only truly indispensible ingredient for economic development, is a stable and relatively peaceful society. Until that happens, nothing else can.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Economic development in Gaza depends less on the miraculous discovery of natural resources and extractive industry than on politics and social history.
Seconded. Hong Kong, in case it had escaped people's attention, has no natural resources to speak of. Neither does Singapore or, for that matter, Taiwan. Meanwhile oil-rich Saudi Arabia is a terminally corrupt theocracy, and let's not even mention Nigeria. Basically, except in a rare few cases when a given polity is gifted with economically enlightened rulers (Dubai comes to mind), the discovery of natural resources is more likely to be a curse than a blessing. It leads a country to the erroneous conclusion that developing its human capital is redundant, but it is human capital that makes the difference.

The cruel irony is that Palestinians used to be a well-educated, well-connected, business-savvy bunch. They had their scholars, their intellectuals, their businessmen. But all that potential shrivelled and died in the toxic environment of oppression on the one hand, and hate on the other.
 
Hong Kong was a free market posterboy, and still is so we need to change the whole dynamic of the region. Have Israel stay in the communist camp, their neighbours staying the way they are and get a war where Israel take Gaza. Then Red-Israel leave it. And somehow make them run a free market system.
 
I think that this would be more determinate on what happens during the British Mandate of Palestine post WWI. Suppose the British overly develop a port at Gaza and it becomes a free port post WWII or even earlier?
 
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