This article comes as no surprise. I have often wrote about the intimate connection between Israel’s foreign policy and it’s negative economic consequences. From another perspective, the collapse of Israel’s social-economic infrastructure as the price of occupation, can be viewed as one more reflection of the change from a socialist Europe-centric Israel, pre-1967, to a neo-liberal US-centric colonial Israel, post-1967.
“Israelis are paying a high but rarely acknowledged economic and social cost for nearly 40 years of occupation, says a report commissioned by Oxfam published Friday. The report says that military spending, the cost of Jewish settlements to colonize Palestinian land, and the collapse of tourism and other enterprises because of the two intifadas have severely undermined the economy and greatly increased poverty.”