a poor, chaotic place of 1.5 million people, 70 percent of them refugees and their descendants . . . [whose] people are even more constrained by Israeli and Egyptian security restrictions on their travel [compared to their West Bank brethren]….
But the coupling of “hothouse” along with “Gaza” brings to mind another sort of “hothouse” – the agricultural hothouses left behind by Israel when Israel fully withdrew its settlements and its military from the Gaza Strip well within the lifetime of this generation of lost Gazan youth less than two years ago. But Erlanger doesn’t even mention the historic, wholesale uprooting of Jewish communities in land that Palestinians claim as their own. Presumably, the complete, unilateral relinquishing of land to Palestinians does not fit into his narrative of a “destroyed generation” whose members “never see anything good in [their] lives”?
This selective and inaccurate spread, with a large front page, above-fold photograph of a Palestinian youth against a backdrop of fire, and four more large color photos across two pages, is not so much investigative journalism and analysis as it is a portrayal of a viewpoint endemic to The New York Times.