How Philly Area Geography Offers Insight To Hamas, Israel, Gaza Crisis

PHILADELPHIA, PA — When the militant Palestinian organization Hamas launched a devastating terrorist attack on Israel early Saturday morning, it set aflame a region that is a perpetual tinderbox and brought renewed global focus on the Middle East.

Some 1,200 Israelis were killed in the attacks. And thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip in Israel's retaliatory strikes.

The entirety of the contested landscape, so pivotal in world history, current affairs, and the future of global and economic stability, can be expressed in Delaware Valley terms.

Israel

At 8,200 square miles, Israel is about the size of New Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania combined. The Jewish state was carved from the British Mandate for Palestine following the Holocaust and World War II. It shares borders with the Mediterranean sea and Muslim states on all sides. Relations are contentious with northern neighbors Lebanon and Syria, loosely positioned in the analogy where New York's Hudson River Valley would be, and more normalized with southern and eastern neighbors Jordan and Egypt.

Palestine

Palestine is the name for Israeli-occupied territories that border the state of Israel. The lands are claimed as places of invaluable spiritual importance and ancestral home lands by both Jewish and Muslim peoples.

The Gaza Strip

Palestine includes two territories. The Gaza Strip is 25 miles long and 6 miles wide, and is almost exactly the same square mileage as the city of Philadelphia. It's bordered by Israel to the north and west, the Mediterranean Sea to the east, and Egypt to the south.

While Philadephia is among the world's most significant cities, it's density pales in comparison to the Gaza Strip. According to one NBC News analysis, a portion of the Strip known as Gaza Municipality has more than 677,000 residents. In Philadelphia, Gaza Municipality would be about equal to the 19124 area code, covering the Frankford neighborhood and the nearby area. As dense as that chunk of Philadelphia is, its population is about 69,000, a fraction of the same land in Gaza.

The Gaza Strip is ruled by Hamas, the militant, Islamic-nationalist organization that is behind the recent attacks in Israel.

Israel has effectively blockaded all of Gaza for the last 16 years, making it an "open air prison" and one of the densest regions in the world. In Philadelphia terms, this would be tantamount to adding about half a million residents to the city proper. But unlike other growing cities which sprawl to rapidly growing suburbs, residents of Gaza have nowhere to go.

The West Bank

The other Palestinian territory is the West Bank. It is separated from the Gaza Strip by Israel. At 2,200 square miles, it's about the same size as Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Montgomery, and Delaware counties combined. If Philadelphia were the Gaza Strip, the West Bank would be roughly positioned near the southern New Jersey Shore, about 57 miles away.

The West Bank is run by a political party called Fatah, a socialist-democratic, secular entity that has advocated for a peaceful solution and which has condemned the attacks by Hamas. Fatah and Hamas have engaged in some level of armed conflict and political dispute since 2007, when Hamas fighters expelled Fatah from the Gaza Strip.

Both Hamas and Fatah want Palestine to be recognized as a state by the United Nations and the world's powers (it is currently a UN "non-member observer state"). Fatah has expressed support for a more liberal "two state" solution, in which Israel and Palestine could live peacefully side by side, with shared rights to key lands. Some 43 percent of Israelis and 42 percent of all Palestinians support some version of this as well, although the current Israeli regime does not.

Cause for current conflict

Analysts believe the progress of talks which would normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel inspired the timing of the attacks by Hamas. A close relationship between the Saudis and Iraelis would be more in the favor of Fatah and the West Bank, and less in the favor of Hamas, who counts some of Saudi Arabia's strongest historical enemies as its allies in Iran, Lebanon, and Syria.