Abu Muqawama: Post
Abu Muqawama retains its autonomy and the views and beliefs expressed within the blog do not reflect those of CNAS. Abu Muqawama retains the right to delete comments that include words that incite violence; are predatory, hateful, or intended to intimidate or harass; or degrade people on the basis of gender, race, class, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. In summary, don't be a jerk.
Reading the Israel Summer
I am very reluctant, as I have written, to provide any analysis of Israeli domestic politics based on such limited time spent in Israel and an inability to speak Hebrew and thus study the popular and elite discourse.* But if Tom Friedman is going to start writing 842-word newspaper columns explaining each and every popular protest of 2011, I should at least summon the courage to write a blog post on what I was able to observe traveling through Israel last week speaking to everyone from politicians and newspaper editors to the good-natured folks camping out on the Boulevard Rothschild.
Macro-economically, I should start by pointing out, Israel is in a fantastic position. Blessed with strong growth, booming technology and defense industries, and probably the smartest central banker in the world, Israel should be the envy of both its neighbors and most Western countries. Underneath all that, though, a few grievances stand out:
1. There is no consensus on how much Israel should pay to continue to support infrastructure in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. By one calculation, Israel had spent $79 billion in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 by the mid-1990s and has obviously spent much more since then. Had Israel merely decided to keep a permanent military presence in both territories, by contrast, that would have cost just $10 billion. So a lot of those protesters in Tel Aviv who could care less about Judea and Samaria but care a lot about social services wonder why Israel is spending so much on the former while the latter amounts to less and less despite increasing national wealth. "The people made the state rich, and the state abandoned the people," goes one popular complaint.
2. Israel has poor people. These poor are, predominantly, Arab and Ultra-Orthodox. The former have, in general, limited employment opportunities, while the latter often elect not to work. By one estimate shared with me by an Israeli political scientist, just 36% of Ultra-Orthodox men work. These same men are also far less likely to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. You can see how this annoys people in Tel Aviv who both serve in the military and pay income taxes, right?
3. Imagine the United States in the Robber Baron Era of the 19th Century. Now multiply the degree to which the U.S. economy was dominated by a handful of men by a factor of three and you get a sense for Israel's economy. Many Israelis with whom I spoke are frustrated by the real or at least perceived way in which a handful of 15 or so families controls their entire economy and exerts a tremendous degree of political and economic influence over their daily lives.
Bear in mind, of course, that all of these grievances are, as one Israeli said to me, about "the fruits of success and not the fruits of failure." And also note, as Benny Morris did in this National Interest essay, that an external security threat could yet cripple these protests. But finally, remember that these protesters have yet to make a lot of the hard choices they will need to make if they actually want to see change. Explicitly calling out subsidies for the Ultra-Orthodox or calling for an end to support for settlement infrastructure will not be as popular as complaining about the price of cottage cheese and will require political lines in the sand to be drawn. It remains to be seen whether or not the people of the Boulevard Rothschild have the stomach or the discipline for that.
*So what does an East Tennessean who does not speak Hebrew do when stuck in the middle of a crowd of 250,000 in Tel Aviv? Everytime the crowd began to cheer and chant, I just repeatedly screamed "FREEBIRD!" at the top of my lungs. Obviously.
Over $4 billion dollars has
Over $4 billion dollars has been spent on the "security fence" (what Israel calls it) for the + 400 mile, 25 foot in height walls (which are steel reenforced concrete - several meters thick in some areas) that partially encloses Palestine and it''s people.
However, Israeli’s intentions for the barrier go far beyond protection. The Palestinian's object to the building of the wall because it strays from the “Green Line”, a border line defined during the 1948 war, and cuts into West Bank territory. The wall encompasses many Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are also said to be illegal by the Palestinians. Israel is cutting so deeply into the West Bank that enclaves are formed where Palestinians are literally boxed in on all four sides.
Some would say, this violates basic human rights of free movement. The barrier has disrupted the flow of people, goods and services in Palestine. So when you talk about protests, social services, taxes and unemployment in Israel, people instead might think about their neighbors, who are held hostage, starving and who are without jobs in their own country and it all becomes kinda blurry.... doesn't it?
$11 to $12 billion dollars will be the final cost of the Israeli / Palestinian Friendship Wall, when and if it is completed, fully enclosing the Palestine and it's people, who the Israeli's say they are still currently at war with.
Situations like this, make me wonder if the United States will ever have a President who is brave enough to say: "Tear down this wall!" ...again.
Reagan challenge to Gorbachev worked.
Why wouldn't it work today in Israel?
The Berlin wall prevented
The Berlin wall prevented people from leaving Soviet controlled Germany. Israel's security barrier (about 90% fence) is designed to prevent unauthorized people from coming in. Where's the resemblance?
(about 90%
(about 90% fence)?????????????????
......it's almost all wall. You might want to have your eyes examined.
Forgive me for stating the
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but Israel's economic miracle has far less to do with genius central bankers, and far more to do with outside support. US governmental support is over $3 billion in direct military support, ten billion in loan guarantees, hundreds of millions in economic assistence, etc. Private, tax deductible (hence, subsidized) support from the US is on the order of $1 billion per year. With that kind of funding, economic miracles are pretty easy to come by.
What your story and these facts make clear is the undeniable truth that US funding is the only thing that allows the Occupation to continue. Without that, the occupation would be entirely unsustainable, and collapse under its own weight relatively quickly since most Israelis clearly have no interest in paying for the occuapation. Hence, the occupation is, in financial terms, almost solely an American product.
Visitor, you got to be
Visitor, you got to be freaking kidding me.
Since he won't believe me, can someone else tell him that very little of the barrier is an actual wall. It is mostly a fence.
The 90% solution. Since walls
The 90% solution.
Since walls and fences can both be crossed, what holds them together is not the physical material, but the lethal firepower Israel uses against anyone getting too close. So damned if I understand what the "it's just a 'fence'" argument is supposed to demonstrate.
IDF budget ~$16B. ~7% of
IDF budget ~$16B.
~7% of GDP.
US DoD budget ~$ 680B.
~5% of GDP.
Egypt gets about $2B in direct military aid as well. It has a population of 82 million. Israel has 7.7 million people. Their GDP? About the same ~$215B. So, are miracles still easy to come by?
It's not just economic. Scientifically, academically, literary ... etc. #1 in per capita terms in many positive indicators.
Glenn Beck on the subject of
Glenn Beck on the subject of the Israeli Spring: http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=233891
I still can not understand why he is being given the red-carpet treatment by Israeli govmnt, even when seen from a purely cynical PR view. Just boggles the mind.
Freebird forever.
Freebird forever.
Why Freebird? Why not the
Why Freebird?
Why not the Takbīr?
Fnord, Glenn Beck is
Fnord,
Glenn Beck is evangelical, and has the ear and support of many evangelicals. They're arguably a bigger and better friend to Israel than the much over rated American Jewish Lobby. They can deliver for instance a helluva lot more votes.
Damn right they roll out the carpet.
The Berlin Wall was also
The Berlin Wall was also mostly fence - the wall was the sector running roughly north-south through the city centre. The sectors running around the city limits in relatively open country were multiple fence lines, with watchtowers and patrols, and with mines (the city centre sector wasn't mined although they did give the impression it was).
> There is no consensus on
> There is no consensus on how much Israel should pay to continue to support infrastructure in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. By one calculation, Israel had spent $79 billion in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 by the mid-1990s and has obviously spent much more since then. Had Israel merely decided to keep a permanent military presence in both territories, by contrast, that would have cost just $10 billion. So a lot of those protesters in Tel Aviv who could care less about Judea and Samaria but care a lot about social services wonder why Israel is spending so much on the former while the latter amounts to less and less despite increasing national wealth.
Oh, I see what you're doing there. You're conflating the amount of money Israel has spent on the Palestinians (where do you think they get their drinking water, power and roads from?) and the money it's spent on its settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.
I really have no idea why they're supporting the former, but the latter seems reasonable to me-there is no reason that Jews should not live in the West Bank and Gaza, especially considering the large numbers of Arabs living in Israel proper, and if they live there, they should have the same access to infrastructure as those Jews living in Tel Aviv, etc.
One state, with liberty and
One state, with liberty and justice for all.
As soon as possible.
Yeah, one state with liberty
Yeah, one state with liberty and justice for all should quickly take care of this: "Macro-economically, I should start by pointing out, Israel is in a fantastic position. Blessed with strong growth, booming technology and defense industries, and probably the smartest central banker in the world, Israel should be the envy of both its neighbors and most Western countries," and turn Israel into another Middle Eastern dump with dysfunctional infrastructure, endemic squalor, poverty and violence, a corrupt and oppressive government and piles of burning trash to the heavens.
It's pretty obvious, inductively (from the last 60 years of Middle Eastern politics) and deductively (from the stats on IQ) that an infusion of Arabs with political rights into a democracy pretty much invariably produces these results. Over 1400 years, there have been zero Arab popular governments which did not produce violence and squalor. All the Arab governments which rose above the level of squalid shitholes ran and run on the framework of a ruthless and constant enforcement of a smart minority's will on a dumb and emotionally unstable majority. Regardless of how this makes you feel, you won't be able to produce any counterexamples.
Enfranchising the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has led to 20 years of war and misery within their territories. Enfranchising them within the framework of a single-state solution would make war and misery endemic within the boundaries of that state. But massive human misery is really quite a small price to pay for appeasing the puerile political principles which you have been inculcated with. Especially when the price is being paid by Jews and Arabs on the other side of the planet, and you are safe from any responsibility for or consequences of your politics, amirite, bro?
It's pretty obvious,
That's a challenge. I'm not sure I'm interested enough to debate anything in the terms you use. Nor am I sure that I could muster a response that mattered if I did. I just don't see an enormous difference between populations that isn't reflective also of varying conditions that may or may not be of importance, and may or may not be amenable to change.
You are, perhaps, a citizen of Lake Woebegone? I've visited there, but I live out here in West Podunk, USA. We've just spend a decade getting ripped off by the people chosen to lead us, and I consider complaints regarding corruption in other countries secondary in priority to the truly ruinous behavior of the elites in our own midst. Including their use of the nation's military - that's you, B, right?
While there is a need to valorize the loss of life spent in defense of the nation, I personally resent like hell having our youth wasted in feckless wars that appear to have been all about the Bush combine. YMMV
I vote my conscious.
>I'm not sure I'm interested
>I'm not sure I'm interested enough to debate anything in the terms you use.
So, don't. Reframe the debate, if you insist on entering it and don't like its framework. That's how these things work.
We agree on one thing-the quality of governance in the US sucks. Of course, it has sucked for much longer than the last decade-you think it's bad that Bush sent a volunteer army to impose democracy on Iraq, costing the lives of 5K Americans? FDR sent a draftee military to impose democracy on half the world and Communism on the other half, with a correspondingly higher cost in casualties. We started the 20th century as a global economic powerhouse, and are well on our way to financial collapse.
If popular government yields these results when applied to a country whose citizens are, by and large, not homicidal rage-filled retards who view the world through a prism of idiotic conspiracy theories, why would you want to export it to those countries which are not in such an advantageous position? Why do you hate the Arabs?
Two words, B: John Hagee.
Two words, B: John Hagee.
Do you even bother checking
Do you even bother checking the things you write to see if they sound dumb before posting them?
You let me know when John Hagee's legions of hate-crazed sub-90 IQ-having followers start beheading Muslims and burning their countries' embassies over perceived insults, alright? Or when they start ethnically cleansing Catholic neighborhoods.
Drone warfare is so much more
Drone warfare is so much more refined.
Don't you ever get the feeling you're in a rut, B?
Add your comment