JERUSALEM — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney angered Palestinian leaders on Monday when he suggested here that the Israeli economy has outpaced that of the Palestinian territories in part because of advantages of “culture.”
Palestinians said that Romney was ignoring long-running Israeli restrictions on crossings from the Gaza Strip and West Bank, which are an enormous drag on commerce.
Mitt Romney enraged Palestinians by saying a better "culture" explains Israel's economic dominance in the latest remark on his overseas tour that critics are calling a gaffe.
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“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” the president said.
“All I can say is that this man needs a lot of education. He doesn’t know the region, he doesn’t know Israelis, he doesn’t know Palestinians, and to talk about the Palestinians as an inferior culture is really a racist statement,” Saeb Erekat, a top aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said in an interview.
Romney said at a breakfast fundraiser that he had pondered the reasons for Israel’s huge economic advantage over that of the neighboring territories.
“As you come here and you see the [gross domestic product] per capita, for instance, in Israel, which is about $21,000, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality,” Romney said, according to a pool report of the event.
In fact, the difference is far more stark than that. According to the World Bank, Israel’s GDP per capita is $31,282, compared to about $1,600 for the Palestinian areas.
Romney said he had studied a book called “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” searching for a reason why two neighboring places could have such disparate prosperity.
“Culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said, repeating the conclusion he drew from the book, by David Landes. “And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.”
Romney’s campaign said afterward that the remarks had been misinterpreted. “This was not in any way an attempt to slight the Palestinians,” Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, told reporters during a later stop in Gdansk, Poland. “And everyone knows that.”
Romney’s campaign said that the candidate had made similar observations about cultural differences before. Staff members sent out a transcript of a speech the candidate gave in Chicago in March, in which he cited a slightly different Middle Eastern comparison: Israel and Egypt, a sovereign country that does not face the same trade restrictions as the Palestinian territories.
But there, Romney’s main point was not about Israel. It was about the United States, and the advantages American culture has given this country’s economy.
“It was a point that he has made, and made today, about the differences between such countries as Chile and Ecuador and the United States and Mexico, and that the economic situations for prosperity are interesting to study and important,” Stevens said.
Reporters pressed him to explain what Romney meant by “culture,” but he declined to do so.
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