Poseur Alert

‘”The Mockingbird Next Door’ conjured mostly sad images in my mind. Ms. Lee has a regular booth at McDonald’s, where she goes for coffee. She eats takeout salads from Burger King on movie night. When she fishes, she uses wieners for bait. She feeds the town ducks daily, with seed corn from a plastic Cool Whip Free container, calling “Woo-hoo-HOO! Woo-hoo-HOO!” Somehow learning all this is worse than it would be to learn that she steals money from a local orphanage,” – Dwight Garner, NYT.

(Hat tip: the wonderful Michelle Dean)

Understanding The Permanence Of Greater Israel, Ctd

A small but telling story in the Baltimore Sun reveals how an American couple and their kids, after losing their jobs, have decided to relocate to Israel. Except they’re not relocating to Israel – but to a settler outpost near Jerusalem in the occupied territories. But neither the couple nor the reporter notice this rather pertinent fact:

The Brenners acknowledge the controversy surrounding moves such as theirs, part of a larger movement that many view as a stumbling block to peace in the region. But they say peace is also part of their dream. “We understand that there are other people living in Israel. … We want to live in peace,” David Brenner said. “My wife and I pray for a time when the Jewish people and Arabs and Christians will be able to live peacefully side by side.”

Notice “other people living in Israel” means others living in the occupied territories. Greater Israel already exists. And always will.

Superhero Social Justice

Kevin O’Keeffe relays the big news out of the comic book world:

Continuing the trend of diversifying their lineup of heroes, Marvel announced on last [week’s] episode of The Colbert Report that the next Captain America will be Sam Wilson – currently known as The Falcon. … It’s the second big change for Marvel’s Avengers this week. On Tuesday, the women of The View announced that the next Thor would be a woman. Like with Thor, the new Captain America isn’t an off-shoot series – this is the primary Captain America, and the first black Captain America to officially hold the title.

Freddie sighs at those he believes are confusing symbolic firsts for real progress:

The glee with which these changes have been met, contrasted with the bleak state of structural change and economic justice, will tell you pretty much all you need to know about a certain strain of contemporary American liberalism. We’re mere weeks away from a Supreme Court decision where an alliance of religious crazies and corporatists was able to remove a legal provision requiring employers to pay for emergency contraception, but don’t worry, ladies! You too can now be portrayed as a heavily-sanitized version of a minor god from a long-dead pantheon. Black Americans continue to lag national averages in a vast number of metrics that depict quality of life, and in some of them have actually lost ground, but never fear. The guy portrayed punching people while wearing red white and blue spandex will now be black.

Lighten up, Freddie. Progress comes in all forms, big and small. And it’s often the small cultural changes, added together, that have the most lasting impact. Ta-Nehisi put it best, in a post written four years ago, reacting to the news that Captain America was headed to the big screen:

One thing that makes me sad–I wish they’d been ballsy and made Captain America black. … The subtle power of a black Captain America–in the age of a black president–really could be awesome.

Also awesome:

So far, the Hollywood version of Captain America hasn’t made the same move as Marvel, but here’s hoping. Meanwhile, Danny Fingeroth explains the business logic behind these sort of decisions:

[T]he challenge for comics is how to retain the existing audience and also grow new readers. How do you keep the attention of someone who has read thousands of stories and also take advantage of the visibility and familiarity that the movies and TV shows have brought to the characters? (Interestingly, in recent years, more girls and women have started reading superhero comics again, perhaps lured to the comics by the popular movies and TV series.) One of the answers is to make seemingly radical changes in a character, such as having Thor become a female (or to have a black man become Captain America). The Internet buzz indicates that as many fans are outraged by the gender switch as there are those who are intrigued.

But Liz Watson remarks that “slightly unconventional decision—from casting Heath Ledger as the Joker to putting pants on Wonder Woman—is met with a level of feverish debate normally reserved for schisms within the Catholic Church”:

The equivalence between comic books and scripture is telling of how seriously canon is taken by these fans. To violate the status quo is akin to sacrilege.

The irony is that a format characterized by the boundless scope of imagination is ultimately extremely conservative when it comes to risks with character or story. Major developments like deaths or marriages are almost always undone, via fantastic contrivances ranging from deals with the devil to time-travel. Characters are de-powered, murdered, raped, aged up and down, and yo-yoed between universes with an alarming lack of fanfare. It’s the same problem suffered by long-running soap operas, where catastrophes are regularly smoothed over or forgotten in order to keep the premise going. At least on soap operas, actors leave over contract disputes or pass away. In comics, the stories can go on indefinitely. As such, the limitless nature of comic book fantasy is used, by and large, to keep limits in place.

Related Dish here on the recent move to introduce the first black woman as a major character to the Star Wars franchise. Update from a reader:

Great to see Marvel Comics finally catch up with the times, and finally catching up with DC Comics. However, like most things in the comic world, don’t expect this to be new normal. Don’t expect that Sam Wilson will be Captain America for 30 years, unlike DC’s Jon Stewart, an African American who’s been a Green Lantern for over 3 decades. Hell, for readers of a certain age group, Jon Stewart is the REAL Green Lantern due to having a prominent role in the acclaimed Justice League animated series. Or let’s not forget that Wonder Woman has been a pillar of DC’s “Trinity” (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman) for over 6 decades, and has been headlining her own comic book for over 70 years.

There’s no doubt that the comic book industry (and its fandom) has a long way to go. Misogyny is still rampant, and there still exists an undercurrent of racism. But I think the current hagiography regarding Marvel does a disservice to the industry as a whole. Comic books have been at forefront of social issues from the very first Action Comics, when Superman was a crusading populist who was willing to kill slum lords, through Green Arrow having to deal with teen a sidekick who was a heroin addict (Green Lantern vol. 2, #85, August 1971, “Snowbirds Don’t Fly”), to an openly gay Golden Age superhero (Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern from the ’40s).  Did you also know that one of Green Arrow’s other sidekicks was HIV-positive? Google Mia Dearden.

If I’ve learned anything from my decades of reading comics, it’s that the more things change, the more things stay the same. Steve Rogers will be Captain America again, Thor will be male again, and we’ll wait another 5 years for some great barrier that was broken earlier to be broken again.

The View From Your Obamacare, Ctd

A reader has a jaded view:

It’s nice to see some of the stories you post about how much the ACA has helped people. The President Obama Visits Boston To Talk About Health Carestories where people mourn for those who refuse it and need it are sad. Allow me to present you with a third type, the people who aren’t eligible due to system bugs.

Yep. Jack and shit for my family. I tried to sign up, since my wife and kids’ coverage ended in May and the ACA won’t cover them. We aren’t rich. We’re lower-middle class, according to the federal poverty line, but out of red state Medicaid income levels. I tried the site – nothing but errors. I spent an hour or more on the phone and neither the persons I spoke to or their supervisors understand why they can’t process it for us. I could call my senator or congressman, but I doubt Lindsey Graham or Trey “Benghazi” Gowdy will investigate.

I’m disabled and currently get Medicare. Prior to May, my wife, two small kids and I all received Medicaid.

It was my secondary provider and the only coverage for my wife and kids. My wife had been in school full time and started working two jobs at the end of last year – one ultra low-paying factory job and another seasonal government position. A few months later she was offered a permanent position at the government agency. Our income went from close to the poverty line to significantly higher than that. Not wealthy or even upper middle class, but not subsistence level either. Our income increased and I didn’t want to accept benefits fraudulently, so I called up Medicaid and told them about the income change (not easy to do since the state has minimized the number of social workers) and they set coverage to end that month.

Next I use the ACA website calculators and make sure we are eligible. I try to process an application and there are tons of errors. This is on the federal site. My state (South Carolina) didn’t do anything regarding ACA exchanges. I then call up the ACA support line. He walks the app through the same way I just did and it says my family isn’t eligible. Nothing. He puts me on hold for long periods to consult supervisors. Nothing. My family’s coverage ended, we meet all criteria for coverage, we are all US citizens – born and raised here. Nothing.

No explanation. No assistance. Nothing. They couldn’t figure out why. We are eligible to get coverage outside of the yearly switch period due to loss of coverage according to the rules and staff. So we meet the requirements but the computer hates us.

Anyway, glad it’s working for someone I guess. Must be nice.

Update from a reader:

I’m confused about one notable detail – the writer mentions a wife who recently started a permanent government position. If this is a Federal position, the writer and the kids would almost certainly be eligible under the FEHB (Federal Employees Health Benefit program) – the full family coverage is more somewhat more expensive than individual plan, but very likely a pretty reasonable deal out of the wife’s paycheck.

If this were a state position – or certain (fairly common) local government positions – I think the family would be eligible for the different options available under the South Carolina’s Public Employee Benefit Authority coverage. It looks to me that the deals here are a bit more expensive than the options under the FEHB options, but that’s a pretty quick peek.

Only wrinkle I’d be able to imagine seems a little bit arcane/improbable to assume: if the wife were divorced and there were a former spouse that had a divorce decree requiring the wife to provide coverage, that might be an issue, since SCPEBA only allows one spouse to be covered, and the divorce decree’s mandate might trump the current spouse’s coverage.

In any case, I think that the wife checking with her benefits administrator about expanding coverage from individual coverage to full family coverage would be a more economical strategy than trying to insure the spouse or spouse and children under a separate ACA plan. Hopefully, this sort of request would be pretty common and straightforward for the wife’s benefits admin.

The original reader follows up:

Those options for federal workers don’t apply because it’s a union job and the contract provides for some weirdness. She can join the union any time but can’t get healthcare until she’s been working her contract for a year. Even then she wouldn’t be eligible for most of the other normal federal benefit programs like life insurance until she is “converted” to a career position.

Welcome to the new United States Postal Service. Career-track mail clerks and carriers begin in a position that pays similar to career posts or even more, while having virtually no other benefits except annual leave (paid time off). The USPS will pay for a large portion of our insurance premiums come next year, but until then we are out in the cold.

The family is in great health with the exception of me (here’s a plug for CIDP – Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy – similar to MS). We were broke with insurance and now we’re less broke with the possibility of being broke again if a medical situation arrises.

It’s disappointing, but hey, my 2nd grader was doing algebra two years ago and his little sister is on the same path. They’ll be in college by 12 or 13. I can still type, knock on wood. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I count myself lucky if anything this nation manages to do is actually aimed at helping me. If it doesn’t hit the mark, at least Obama tried.

(Photo by Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Retroactive Reform

On July 18, the US Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to retroactively apply new sentencing guidelines and allow almost 50,000 federal drug-offense prisoners the possibility of shorter sentences. Dara Lind provides background, including the Obama administration’s role, or lack thereof:

The US Sentencing Commission is independent of the Obama administration. In fact, the Department of Justice originally wanted the Sentencing Commission to approve a much more limited plan — one that would only let about 20,000 prisoners apply for shorter sentences. This week, reports surfaced that Department of Justice officials had been meeting privately with the Sentencing Commission, and had softened its position a little: it now wanted something that would affect about 40,000 prisoners. It’s not clear if the plan the Sentencing Commission approved today is the one the DoJ was lobbying for in private, or a different one.

Chris Geidner passes along Holder’s response to the new development:

“The department looks forward to implementing this plan to reduce sentences for certain incarcerated individuals. We have been in ongoing discussions with the Commission during its deliberations on this issue, and conveyed the department’s support for this balanced approach. In the interest of fairness, it makes sense to apply changes to the sentencing guidelines retroactively, and the idea of a one-year implementation delay will adequately address public safety concerns by ensuring that judges have adequate time to consider whether an eligible individual is an appropriate candidate for a reduced sentence. At my direction, the Bureau of Prisons will begin notifying federal inmates of the opportunity to apply for a reduction in sentence immediately. This is a milestone in the effort to make more efficient use of our law enforcement resources and to ease the burden on our overcrowded prison system.”

Douglas Berman asks how many of the eligible prisoners will be able to get a lawyer:

As hard-core federal sentencing fans likely already know, most lower federal courts have ruled that federal prisoners do not have a Sixth Amendment right to counsel applicable at the sentence modification proceedings judges must conduct to implement reduced retroactive sentencing guidelines.  Consequently, none of the nearly 50,000 federal drug offense prisoners who may soon become eligible for a reduced sentence have any right to legal assistance in seeking this reduced sentence.

Fortunately for many federal prisoners seeking to benefit from previous guideline reductions, many federal public defender offices have traditionally made considerable efforts to provide representation to those seeking reduced sentences.  But even the broadest guideline reductions applied retroactively in the past (which were crack guideline reductions) applied only to less than 1/3 of the number of federal prisoners now potentially eligible for reductions under the new reduced drug guidelines.  I suspect that pubic defenders are unlikely to be able to provide significant legal help to a significant number of drug offenders who will be seeking modified sentences under the new reduced drug guidelines.

Jim Newell focuses on the muted response to from the right:

Had the Sentencing Commission and Holder made such moves even just a decade ago, there’s no question they would have been lambasted by Republicans — The Obama administration is setting dangerous drug addicts into the streets to eat your babies, et cetera. And yet, after the announcement Friday, there was relatively silence from the party, even though we’re just ahead of midterm elections.

How Does Ukraine’s Civil War End?

Ivan Katchanovski predicts that attempts “to solve the conflict in Donbas by force will lead to mounting casualties among civilians, Ukrainian forces and armed separatists”:

Even a military defeat of separatists is unlikely to end the conflict because it reflects significant regional divisions since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, including a history of separatism in Crimea and Donbas. And Russia, with significant military, political, and economic leverage over Ukraine, is there to stay.

An internationally mediated negotiated settlement — which would include international investigations of the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines plane and other mass killings — could preserve Donbas as a part of Ukraine. An example of one such peaceful resolution of an armed conflict between separatists and the central government is in Macedonia, in the former Yugoslavia. A negotiated settlement can also stop an escalation of the civil war in Ukraine and the growing conflict between the West and Russia. But such a peaceful resolution in Ukraine is not very likely to happen.

Maxim Eristavi’s report suggests that fighting won’t stop anytime soon:

On Friday, Putin called again for peace talks—but nobody in Kyiv is listening at the moment.

The Ukrainian public and its leaders insist they will go all the way to defeat the rebels.“It is time to put an end to this aggression, and the world should join us in the eliminating of terrorists. It doesn’t matter where they are,” Oleksandr Tyrchynov, the speaker of parliament said in a public statement, most likely hinting at a possible military campaign along the Russian border.

The war has its political upsides. Local analyst Yuriy Romanenko told me that the new ruling elite has the same core problem as the old one—corruption—which makes Western countries especially wary of providing more assistance, absent major economic and political changes. It also makes Kyiv less willing to compromise. “But the second they realize that they are losing the Eastern Ukraine war, peace talks will probably have a big comeback moment,” Romanenko said. “It’s an easier thing for them to do than go through painful reforms.”

But, even if Kyiv wanted a peace deal, it’s doubtful that many of the rebels are capable of negotiation. For example, Motyl does a close reading of rebel leader Pavel Gubarev’s “Methodological Guide for Struggle Against the Junta.” His take-away:

Is compromise possible with the likes of Gubarev? Probably not. He detests Ukraine and Ukrainians, and his agenda consists of little more than terrorism. Can Russian President Vladimir Putin control him? That, too, is by no means clear: fanatics such as Gubarev are by definition uncontrollable.

If so, the Poroshenko government may have no choice but to attempt to crush Gubarev and his militant groups. The bad news, for Kiev, is that Gubarev is implacable and is willing to die. The good news is that his manual clearly, if unintentionally, reveals that the militant groups are isolated, on the run, and in constant fear of exposure. His open admission that “[w]inning people’s confidence will not be easy” hardly reflects deep popular support. As the document stresses, the terrorists cannot trust the local population, not even the local criminals who in the early days of the insurgency actually comprised a significant portion of the fighters. Nor can they rely on their own comrades to remain silent, if captured, for more than a “few hours.”

The Biggest Loser In The Gaza War

Hussein Ibish nominates the Palestinian Authority for the dubious distinction:

There is no question that Abbas and the PA were suffering a crisis of legitimacy in recent months, at the same time that Hamas was enduring an even greater crisis at virtually every register. But now, at least, Hamas has seized the initiative, albeit at a hideous cost. It alone appears to wave the Palestinian flag, however speciously. It alone claims to have a strategy for national liberation — armed struggle and “resistance” — no matter how implausible.

The danger is that the bloody and reckless hostilities between Israel and Hamas at least constitute something, which a PA armed with nothing may find difficult to counter politically. With each successive flare-up of violence between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group has taken more blame from both Palestinian and broader Arab public opinion for the deaths and destruction. Hamas’s political “bounce” from nationalist sentiment against Israel has been more fleeting. But if the PA still appears ineffective, marginal, and irrelevant, even the heaping of public blame on Hamas might not stop it from gaining significant ground in the Palestinian political landscape.

But the PA has taken some action – namely, appealing to the UN Security Council and attempting to leverage its longstanding threat to seek an ICC investigation of Israel:

“We call on the Security Council to adopt a resolution that condemns the Israeli military aggression against the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip, calls for its immediate cessation, calls for the lifting of the Israeli blockade on Gaza Strip, and calls for protection of the Palestinian people,” Palestine’s U.N. envoy, Riyad Mansour, told the Security Council in an emergency session on Gaza.

Mansour said that if the Security Council failed to respond to his government’s appeals, the Palestinian Authority would “have no recourse but to turn to the judicial bodies of the United Nations and the international system.” The remark appeared to be a veiled warning that the Palestinians were prepared to ask the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) to probe Israel’s military conduct. The Palestinians had previously agreed to hold off on asking for an ICC investigation into Israeli conduct as long as U.S.-brokered peace talks showed signs of progress.

Hamas now says it has captured an Israeli soldier, which Ishaan Tharoor says could further strengthen the group’s position relative to the PA:

[F]or militant groups like Hamas, one captured Israeli soldier is vital currency. Israel rebukes Hamas for not accepting the offer of ceasefires brokered by outside parties, but the ceasefires on offer did nothing to satisfy Hamas’s longstanding demands regarding the release of Palestinian prisoners (including some who were re-arrested after being freed in the exchange for Shalit), the loosening of border controls in heavily blockaded Gaza and the payment of salaries to some 40,000 public employees in Gaza. …

Hamas was not in a particularly strong position to win any of its demands — that is, until it claimed to have captured another Israeli soldier. If that proves true, then it could be a game changer. Still, the biggest loser in the wake of the Shalit release was neither Israel nor Hamas, but the Palestinian government of President Mahmoud Abbas, who has long been at odds with the Islamists. In one fell swoop, Hamas won a real victory — the release of over 1,000 Palestinians — when years of Abbas’s diplomatic wrangling and quixotic missions for U.N. recognition have achieved little to improve the lot of Palestinians.

Criminally Bad Parenting, Ctd

A reader steams:

If we’re going to lock this woman up for an unsupervised visit to the park, why not lock up all the middle- and upper-class parents for the supervised abuse of team sports like football and soccer, where head trauma occurs at such an alarming rate? But of course, no one would dream of that. We only lock up poor black women trying their best to earn a living and have few options for childcare.

Another adds:

By that logic, my parents should both be rotting in jail! I grew up in California in the late ’80s, and was only really limited by how far I could ride my bike. My days were spent exploring the creeks and hills of south San Jose, swimming at the lake, rollerblading (ugh) to the comic store, and hanging at the 7/11 playing Street Fighter II. All on my own, with no adult supervision, and the understanding I’d be home for dinner. I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything, and I’m saddened that letting your kids loose is now criminalized.

But another dissents:

Are these bloggers for real?  It’s my understanding that the arrested mother left her kid at a park – far enough from her home that the kid was effectively stranded – for the entirety of her work shift. If they think this is comparable to someone allowing their child to visit a park on their street corner for a couple of hours unattended, they need to get their heads examined.

Another adds some more context: “Let’s juxtapose South Carolina law enforcement’s decision to arrest a mother for permitting her 9-year-old daughter to play alone at a park with the fact that the Palmetto State currently has no law requiring firearm owners to prevent children from gaining access to firearms.” A parent is on the same page:

As a cautious and earnest parent, when I hear about a new initiative to “protect kids from harm,” a moment of fear strikes when I consider the possibility of being held criminally responsible for an accident. Especially when the decision is made by someone that doesn’t know me or my kids, or what our kids are capable of. We all take chances sometimes, and it’s up to us as adults to figure out our boundaries and to listen when our kids communicate their boundaries.

Even so, I am frequently outraged by news stories articles that describe tragic incidents when a kid picks up Dad’s (or Mom’s) loaded gun from a table and shoots a sibling or a friend to death. Inevitably, police deem it as an “accidental shooting” and that’s the end of the story. Criminal neglect? No. Second-amendment rights.

I think these cases should be treated as felony criminal neglect. I am sensitive to the argument that the parent has “suffered enough loss” and locking them up is unnecessarily costly to society. However, in every jurisdiction that I know of, the felony conviction carries with it the appropriate corrective action: the offending parent forfeits the right to own a firearm.

Circling back to the issue of letting kids play unattended, a reader shares a harrowing story:

Last summer, as I was sitting in my living room on a very hot day, our 6-year-old went out to play and had been out for about five minutes, 10 max. She was allowed to go outside if she stayed on our side of the street and didn’t go past the corners. We live in a residential neighborhood, know our neighbors, and it’s a short block.

As I was sitting there, our daughter walked in, distraught. I asked, “What is the problem sweetie?” She said pouting: “A woman just made me come inside.”

I asked her if she knew who the woman was (“No”) and why (“I don’t know, I was just playing on the corner”). Just then a middle-aged woman came up to our door and pounded on it. Since I was in a T-shirt and boxers (did I say it was boiling hot?), I opened the door to shield myself. She just started laying into me: How dare you let your child out there alone? She could have been snatched off the street! You should be ashamed! and more

I was a taken aback, to say the least. I asked her where she saw her (on the corner) and then explained to her that it was a safe neighborhood and that we knew the neighbors. She’d have none of it. She just kept yelling at me and said, I’m calling the police! I was shocked. I told her to go ahead, that I had had enough and shut the door. She stood on the porch for a long time, until I went to the door again and told her to get off our property. She went to the street and talked on her phone. Just then my husband and our 10-year-old came home. I explained who the woman was.

That night, just as our daughters were going to bed, a policewoman came by. I told her the story. She said she got a call and had to check. Before she walked away she asked one more question: “Were you in your underwear? The woman was concerned you were in your underwear.”

“Yes,” I said, “I was in my boxers, it was freaking hot today and the air conditioner was not working.” She gave a knowing smile and walked away.

That was quite an experience. Frankly, I was more concerned that woman would return and snatch her away than I would ever be of someone else. She was just nutty enough to do it.

More Dish on the subject here.

Growing Up Gazan

Mourning for 3 children killed by Israeli airstrikes

First, a reminder of why there are so many images of wounded and dead children coming out of Gaza (and thus appearing on the Dish, to the dismay of many readers):

UNICEF says about half the children who’ve died in Gaza during Operation Defensive Edge have been under age 12. (That’s one sixth of civilian casualties, for those keeping count.) In contrast, more than 40 percent of the population is age 14 and younger. Shoot a rocket blindly into the Strip and your chances of hitting a prepubescent child are almost 50-50.

With that in mind, Shlomi Eldar argues that isolation has fed the radicalism of the young men of Hamas’ military wing, along with their delusion that a war with Israel is winnable:

The Qassam Brigades’ militants of today are children of the second intifada. Even before they were recruited or enlisted in the Qassam Brigades, they drank the jihadist messages that the movement spreads among all the needy of Gaza who knock on the gates of its institutions (the dawa — Hamas’ welfare institutions). The great neglect of Gaza in the years Israel controlled it helped Hamas to grow.

In the past, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel, learned its language, got to know its culture and even formed ties of friendship with their Israeli employers. In the course of the second intifada and Hamas’ rise to power, these ties have all been severed. The older generation found itself unemployed and without income and the youth found work with the militant wing of Hamas and the other organizations (Islamic Jihad as well as the popular resistance committees).

These young men, who have not once in their lives left the borders of the Gaza Strip and have never seen Israel, have been fed the stories of the wonders of the Palestinian rocket, which was developed in Gaza’s workshops and can shake Israel. The stories of the glory of Hamas have been impressed well in the young recruits and the doctrine that has been so deeply etched in them has given them the feeling, or the delusion, that salvation could be gained through the rockets that have been developed in Gaza.

And the children who make up a majority of Gazans today don’t necessarily have anything better to look forward to:

A normal life … is nearly impossible in Gaza. It is one of the most densely populated areas in the world — home to about 1.3 million Palestinians, roughly one-third of whom live in U.N.-funded refugee camps. The territory is riddled with poverty, its local economy completely stifled by the blockade. According to UNRWA, about 80 percent of the population receives aid. Official Palestinian statistics put Gaza’s unemployment rate at nearly 40 percent, while youth unemployment hovers around 57 percent.

“We have a whole generation who have grown up under occupation,” says Dr. Mona El-Farra, health chair of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. “We have a whole society traumatized, living with extensive psychological damage.”

More than half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 18. They have grown up intimately familiar with war: This is the third Israeli bombardment Gaza has faced in just the past five years. “Even if the fighting ends tomorrow,” Farra says, “The poverty won’t end. All of us, especially the youth, will still be trapped.”

(Photo: Relatives of three children killed during the airstrikes of Israel mourn near the death bodies of children in Gaza city on July 19, 2014. By Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)