Israel or the Palestinians? Who’s Dependent?

John Podhoretz..
Commentary/Contentions..
31 July '12..

I have a piece in the New York Post today that suggests only a liar or an insane person would deny that Israel benefits from a political culture far healthier than the corrupted and diseased culture of the Palestinian polities. You can read it here. Mitt Romney pointed out the wild disparity in GDP in the areas controlled by the Palestinians and those under Israeli dominion. Someone on Twitter commented that Israel is a “welfare state” living off the U.S. and we should see what would happen if it were cut off.

Well, let’s see. U.S. aid to Israel has remained steady around $3 billion a year since the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1979. It was set that high in part because Israel surrendered functional oil fields to Egypt when it gave back the Sinai and lost a significant source of income. In 1980, that aid was enormously important to Israel’s general health. It constituted something like one-seventh of the nation’s overall GDP ($22.8 billion). Flash forward to 2011. Israel’s GDP was $245 billion. U.S. aid constituted 1/81st of Israel’s GDP.

What’s more, almost all that aid is in the form of military assistance, much of it in the form of support for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense efforts, which have direct R&D implications for the United States. In other words, Israel is testing, under real-world conditions, equipment the U.S. may need to use later.

Weinberg - Methinks thou doth protest too much

David M. Weinberg
A Citadel Defending Zion
03 November '11

http://davidmweinberg.com/2011/11/03/methinks-thou-doth-protest-too-much/


Reading the Israeli or foreign press these days, one could get the impression that Israeli households are uniformly collapsing under the weight of the government’s tightfisted capitalist policies, and that everybody is out protesting for “social justice” on the streets of Tel Aviv.

Except that it isn’t so.

It’s not so because the public does not homogeneously lay the blame for the high cost of housing, food, water and electricity on the current government. Polls indicate that most Israelis, despite their desire for structural reforms in pricing and welfare, understand that Prime Minister Netanyahu is a steady hand at the economic till during turbulent times; and that without him, the situation would be much worse.

Nor do Israelis have a unitary vision of “social justice.” Very few Israelis truly want to bring back socialism, or chuck the free market philosophy that has helped catapult Israel into the OECD. Obviously, the extreme concentration of industrial, financial and natural resources in the hands of a few very wealthy Israeli family conglomerates needs to be rolled-back. But a return to Labor Party cronyism and the Big Labor dictatorship of Israel’s early decades isn’t all that attractive.

Moreover, mainstream Israelis are now avoiding participation in the increasingly partisan (and consequently dwindling) street protests. The militant socialist demands of Daphni Leef and her colleagues raise fears that the protest movement has a hidden hard-left-wing agenda, one that is blatantly anti-democratic, even Marxist. The Trachtenberg Committee recommendations, which already have been partially adopted by the government, may not provide the instant solutions that Daphni is demanding – but they are great step forward.

Yet Daphni and the hard-left NGOs behind her have rejected Trachtenberg outright.

Eydar - Between Haifa and Beersheba

Dror Eydar
Israel Hayom
14 August '11


http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=327

The massive media manipulation of the social protests sweeping Israel for the past month makes it hard to present a well-formulated opinion on the subject. But the movement has brought to light some very valid questions, as well as some extremely important discourse. The issues the protesters have raised -- the cost of living, the housing crunch, the distribution of land for construction, market concentration and privatization -- must remain front and center. As for solutions, would the honorable leadership of this protest group (I have no idea who elected them to that position, but let's leave that worthy question for some other time) kindly form a political party and let the voters decide on whether to endorse their socioeconomic platform? For the time being, though, Israel will continue to have an elected government, which has appointed a committee of experts with a mandate for introducing changes to our society.

But at its current phase, the protest appears two-pronged. At its core is a vibrant discourse about values, a conversation that cuts across all sectors and includes people of all stripes. It focuses on economics and the actions of each and every one of us vis-a-vis the Israeli public domain. But at its outer layers, the ones the media has focused on, there is a tinge of political-partisan intent. It is a legitimate desire to want to influence politics, but this might also explain why Haifa, a city historically receptive to a socialist-communist ideology, saw many more protesters in its streets than did Beersheba. Could it be because the public connects the propaganda primarily with the Left, and sees beyond it? Perhaps people refuse to buy the sudden epiphany of singer Margalit Tzanani, that which led her to embrace the protesters, and instead view her shift -- she initially made statements that seemed to attack the protesters' motives -- as a forced conversion by the Inquisition.

And indeed, the speeches at the rallies in Haifa smacked of class warfare and Marxist-Communist ideology. They sought to warn of a possible conspiracy in the making: the government, some say, "might launch another war" just to silence the protesters. To the best of my knowledge, the last two wars were waged by left-wing governments. But propaganda is propaganda.

"The number of protesters in Beersheba does not make the protest a failure, heaven forbid," said the Channel 2 reporter who stepped into chief news anchor Yonit Levy's role as the person to fire up the demonstrators. This statement makes it official that the Israeli media submitting to the protest, with its incessant "reporting," as early as Friday, that 30,000 protesters were "expected to show up" in Beersheba. Six years have passed since the destruction of the Gush Katif settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip. The differences in the media treatment then and now are striking. I would advise a slick entrepreneur to set up protest encampments across from the national TV and radio broadcast stations in a call for a media New Deal -- namely, a redistribution of the media's public resources.

These are not mere luxuries. In many senses, it is a greater right to have your voice heard in the media than it is to have a job or food on the table. Many Israelis are denied this right -- only a privileged few enjoy it and they treat it as their prized possession. It is a moral disgrace when the media, like an unelected political party with all the characteristics of a genuine party, usurp public programming so that they can rally the public troops rather than do their duty and report. Dear citizens: You must wake up. Someone is trying to make it so that you believe in what they, not you, think is right. If justice is what the cameramen, reporters and their colleagues seek, let's fight for media justice as well as social justice.

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Doron - Do we need another Greece?

Daniel Doron
JPost
Op-Ed Contributor
10 August '11


http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=233303

The tent-dwellers’ revolt calls for the enforcement of ‘the will of the people’(like all autocrats). It refuses to rely on democracy.

Do we want a little anarchy? If so, let us don our red Lacoste shirts (imprinted with hammers and sickles), gather at Rabin Square and sing “The Internationale” (the anthem of the mass murderers who just wanted to make life better and more just) like the young tent-dwelling protesters did.

Let us hoarsely scream, “The people demand social justice!” and “Let the revolution destroy privatization!” and call for a return to benevolent Socialism, to the good old Mapai days when everybody except for those holding the red party card were equally poor, and solidarity reigned supreme (or so we are told).

Let us harken to the lovely young ladies, the fresh plantings of the New Israel Fund; pay attention to what terrible rage animates their mission. Let us search for meaning in their worn-out clichés, and try to forgive their inability to articulate what they really want.

Let us marvel at a young generation that repeats like parrots the stale mantras of their aging Marxist professors, who dominate social studies and humanity departments in all our universities. Let us bemoan the fact that generations of exceptionally talented young people are incapable of coming up with one fresh idea, one that is not a repetition of recycled leftist slogans.

Let us shed a tear that a young and vital generation can only become fired up by what it negates, what it hates, what it despises; that it cannot suggest one solution to any social problem other than let the government pour more money into it, or let it offer us a big teat from which to nurse because it is so hard to grow up and shape our own destiny.

Let us observe sadly the Woodstock- style celebration, the beating of darbukas past midnight, the smoking of sweet weeds, the politicking and the intrigues – who should dominate the stage, who will best inflame anger and frustration, who will best silence the voices of dissent that denote that the vociferous minority does not really represent a majority in this revolt; that the majority is behind the less photogenic but more serious cottage cheese revolt people, despite the fact that they have no buddies in the media to blow their horn.

The tent-dwellers’ revolt calls for the enforcement of “the will of the people” (like all autocrats). It refuses to rely simply on democracy, on elections every four years.

The tent-dwellers’ screaming minority wants the masses to follow the messages formulated by the New Israel Fund, to understand that the struggle is not about the high cost of living and of housing, but about the lack of “social justice” and about the occupation that is the mother of all evil.

They want to impress on us – as the New Israel Fund keeps reiterating – that “social justice” will not come to Israel, that our coveted socialist state of all its citizens (that will replace the quaint notion of a Jewish state) will not happen before we first “make peace” with the gangs of terrorists and thieves in Ramallah known as the Palestinian Authority. They care not if in the process we help build another jihadist state that robs its citizens, as in Gaza, of any human right.

They care not if we help the gangsters imported by us from Tunisia to make the local population dirt-poor and miserable. Vive la liberte! To achieve their obsession with building another criminal Arab state, the leaders of the tent dwellers’ protest want to topple Binyamin Netanyahu’s government.

What better opportunity exists to undermine it than to exploit the true misery of hundreds of thousands of Israeli families that cannot make ends meet? So on with the fiery demonstrations.

Hopefully they will succeed in shifting the justified rage so many Israelis feel against their rapacious economic system, against the bureaucrats and oligarchs that exploit them so badly, and direct it against Netanyahu to serve their own agendas. And yes, a little chaos like in Athens could help. They tried it at the mass demonstrations. It did not catch on yet.

Let us be clear. The people of Israel do suffer under our dysfunctional economic system. Our politicians are the ones who put this system in place and who keep maintaining it for their own benefit and for the bureaucrats, the oligarchs, the monopoly unions and others with privileged access to power. But if there was one person who made an effort to change this, it is Netanyahu. He met, and still meets, huge resistance from those who benefit from our rotten system. Still, he did manage, against all odds, to occasionally prevail, paying a heavy political cost.

We have now in Israel an historic opportunity for those who, like Netanyahu, wish to make real changes but lacked the political support to overcome the resistance of those opposing change. It is not clear yet whether he will win the day, whether he believes that he can get a strong enough backing to rise to the occasion. Let us pray he does.

The writer is director of the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress.


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Running the Numbers

Jon
Divestthis.com
05 March '10

Given that the theme of this year’s increasingly fraying “Israel Apartheid Week” is Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), I thought it might be useful to summarize the progress of the BDS movement since it began a decade ago. Because so much of the BDS project is based on words, including competing claims of success and failure, I thought it best to provide a summary based primarily on numbers which (as I recall from my business days) are the only things that tend to get preserved as information travels up or through an organization.

Since these numbers need to be “scored” against some criterion, I’ve decided to abandon my usual critique of the BDS narrative and, in this instance, accept as a given their primary thesis: that economic activity related to Israel translates to political approval or disapproval. Now some people may say this is overly generous in that it allows them to continue to claim that purely economic decisions are actually fueled by partisan considerations. But if we accept (albeit temporarily) their founding principle on a micro level, then they must also be willing to be judged along the same criteria on a macro basis. And regarding that macro basis, here is Exhibit A:



My goodness! During the very period when BDS was supposedly on the march, the size of Israel’s economy (as measured by GDP) nearly doubled from $110B to $190B. Now given that the BDS project is based on their activity having economic consequence for the Jewish state, the takeaway from this chart seems to be that such consequence has been an explosion of growth in the Israeli economy.

(Read full article)
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