The team writing the World Bank 2011 World Development Report are taking a remarkably open and 'webby - watch us work' approach to their task - posting as they go along and inviting comments.
This latest post by NIGEL ROBERTS is remarkable, if only because Israel continues to keep foreign correspondents out of Gaza. This state censorship means that there are few independent eyewitness accounts of what life is like in the Strip. This is a thoughtful post well worth reproducing in full:
Gaza City, January 9, 2010
"I don't see much sense in that," said Rabbit. "No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn't. But there was going to be when I began it. It's just that something happened to it along the way."
Winter in Gaza
I first visited this place in 1994. Even then, the name was synonymous with misery. What I remember, though, was a crowded, contentious place possessed with energy and, in the minds of many, the hope of an end to 46 years of exile.
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| Photos © Natalia Cieslik Rex Bryan, Yezid Sayigh (from left), and I on the right during our trip to Gaza. | |
I haven't been here for four years, and am here on WDR business with Yezid Sayigh (our West Bank and Gaza case study author), Rex Brynen and Natalia Cieslik of the WDR core team. Today, Gaza feels dead. It's cold. A few green Hamas flags droop from the electricity lines. Much of the damage from the battles of December 2008 has been cleared away, but bullet-strikes run up and down many of the apartment blocks. There is little color anywhere; little of the efflorescent graffiti that once covered walls, few advertizing bill-boards, hardly any of the posters of 'martyrs' once claimed by contending political parties. As we drive the length of the Strip, the streets are almost empty.