Isolated? Israel Isn't Isolated

Gabriel Scheinmann..
The National Interest..
21 January '13..

Following the reaction to Israel’s bevy of construction announcements late last year, one would assume that Israel’s right-wing, settlement-crazed government had, once more, managed to thumb its nose at the world and deepen Israel’s already-perilous pariah position. It had just received international support during Operation Pillar of Defense and the Obama administration’s backing in opposing the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN. Yet Israel not only announced construction in East Jerusalem and the large settlement blocks, but also advanced zoning plans in E-1, a barren, 4.6 square mile area that connects Jerusalem to Maale Adumim.

Condemnation was instant and global. Israeli ambassadors were upbraided across Europe. The Swedish Foreign Minister went so far as to say that “what the Israelis did on E1 has shifted opinions in Europe,” while the Obama administration said the construction would be “damaging” to a two-state solution and that it shared the same sentiment as its European allies, which had condemned Israel vociferously. Meanwhile, Time magazine dubbed 2012 “The Year of the Israeli Settlement” and the New York Times called Netanyahu’s plans “disturbing,” saying that it furthered Israel’s isolation.

But once the hysteria dissipates, it becomes obvious that Israel is far from the isolated and cast-off state it is made out to be. On the contrary, Israel is actually at the height of its global integration, increasingly enmeshed across diplomatic, economic and cultural fronts. Settlement construction may indeed spark outrage in European capitals and angst in the White House, but it has not stood in the way of Israel’s greater inclusion in the global economy and international institutions, as well as increased normalized diplomatic relations.

Historically, Israel was most isolated during the Cold War, as the entire Soviet-backed Eastern Bloc, save Ceausescu’s Romania, did not have relations with the Jewish State. As if that wasn’t enough, neither did China, India, or Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). To top it off, following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, nearly the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa suspended relations with Jerusalem under pressure from the Arab oil embargo. During the 1980s, outside a few exceptions, Israel only had full diplomatic relations with the United States, Canada, Latin America and Western Europe. Even then, it did not have relations with Spain until 1986 or full diplomatic relations with Greece, which was the sole European country to vote against Partition in 1947, until 1990. Relations with the Vatican weren’t established until 1994.

Greenfield - Israel’s ‘You Built It’ Culture

Daniel Greenfield..
frontpagemag.com..
07 August '12..

When Mitt Romney arrived in Jerusalem and suggested that Israel’s success contrasted with its Muslim neighbors was due to a culture of success, he was waving a red flag in front of a red bull. Romney’s comments were as provocative to the left as Obama’s “You didn’t build that” remark was to us.

To the left, success has become the Mark of Cain. Where success once used to be proof of good character, the balance has shifted and it is now proof of bad character. The left blames all disparities on injustice. If A has less than B, then B has somehow discriminated against A. All that’s left is for the sociologists and critical race theorists to plug in the variables, write their papers and explain the mechanism for the injustice and how it can be remedied through centralized redistribution.

This is the era of “You didn’t build that” where achievement is inherently unfair and an object of guilt. To succeed is to steal. Anyone who has achieved more than those around him has unfairly taken from them. And the more he succeeds, the more he has to feel guilty about and the more he must atone through social justice.

Mitt Romney didn’t build companies; he unfairly redistributed what should have been equal resources in an unequal way to create that success. America also didn’t build anything; it just looted the resources and markets that should have been divided equally among the nations of the world. And the same goes for Jews and the Jewish State. Individual success is not exceptionalism; it’s stealing from the collective.

The left already knows why Israel is more successful. Because it’s a greedy country whose success has come at the expense of its poorer neighbors. The left finds the idea of explaining success in terms of character, either individual or national, to be offensive. To suggest that success is due to personal virtue is to also imply that failure is due to a lack of virtue. The left is not interested in exploring what’s wrong with nations or groups that fail, only in explaining how their failure is no fault of their own.

The left was only interested in Jews as an oppressed minority and in Israel as a small doomed country. Once Jews became successful and Israel emerged victorious, the left turned on them and on Israel.

Israel’s success is one of the greatest weapons that the left uses against it. If Israelis were still living in tents and trying to get the power to stay on for more than a few hours a day, the Jewish State wouldn’t make nearly as tempting a target. Israel’s transformation from a bunch of refugees and farmers armed with third-rate weapons to a prosperous nation of flowering orchards, booming tech companies and new towns rising out of the earth, is proof of its immorality. If the Jewish State were truly moral, it would have stayed poor.

A Sense of Purpose

Emmanuel Navon
For the Sake of Zion
31 December 09

To end the Year 2009 on an upbeat note, I would recommend the reading of two recently published books: One State, Two States by Benny Morris, and Start-Up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer –provided you read them in that order.

Morris has gone a long way since his self-appointment as a "new historian" poised to question Israel's historical narrative and "myths." In January 2004, he surprised –and shocked- many by declaring to Ari Shavit that "when the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy;" that "there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing;" that it was necessary to uproot the Palestinians in 1948; that Ben-Gurion "had carried out a full expulsion –rather than a partial one- he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations;" that "the non-completion of the transfer was a mistake;" that in circumstances which "are liable to be realized in five or ten years … acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential;" that "there is not going to be peace in the present generation;" that "we are doomed to live by the sword;" that "something like a cage has to be built" for the Palestinians; that all Israelis can do at this point is "to be vigilant, to defend the country;" and that "the Arab world as it is today is barbarian" ("Survival of the Fittest," Haaretz, 9 January 2004).

In One State, Two States, Morris shows that the Zionist movement accepted the principle of partition out of political realism from the time it was first proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have systematically rejected the idea, and Arafat only deceived Israel with the Oslo Agreements to implement the "phased strategy." With the steady radicalization and islamization of Palestinian society today, Morris argues, chances of implementing the two-state solution are null.

Morris also shows, no less convincingly, that the alternatives to the two-state solution (including an Arab-dominated bi-national state) are unrealistic and undesirable (as far as Israel is concerned, at least). So there is no alternative to a solution that doesn't work. Great.

Morris is a realist. He realizes that Israel is in a catch-22 type of situation. Probably because he didn't want to end his book on a bleak note, he does suggest a way out by proposing the revival of the "Jordanian option." Nice try, but it doesn't wash. Jordan doesn't want it and, as Morris himself explains at length, the Palestinians will never sign a deal that leaves a sovereign Jewish state in the equation.

Despite his unconvincing attempt to sound optimistic in the last two pages of his book, Morris makes a compelling case: There is no solution.

(Continue reading article)
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Getting it started

Clifford D. May
Washington Times
07 November 09

People forget how small Israel is. Its entire population is a little over 7 million - smaller than Lima, Peru. Its land area is about 8,000 square miles, smaller than New Jersey. By comparison, Jordan, its neighbor to the east, occupies 35,000 square miles; Egypt, to the west, covers 386,000 square miles.

There are more than 20 Arab states with a combined population of 325 million and more than 50 majority-Muslim states with a combined population of well over a billion. By contrast, Israel is the world's only Jewish-majority state - and 20 percent of its population is Arab, most of them Muslim.

So why is so much attention - and firepower - focused on this tiny nation? Israel's critics say it is because the Jewish state has deprived Palestinians of a homeland. But Jordan, situated on the three-quarters of historic Palestine lying east of the River Jordan, from which the country took its name when it was created in the 1920s, is populated, not surprisingly, mostly by Palestinians.

Palestinians also inhabit Gaza, from which Israel withdrew every settler four years ago. And, under various peace proposals, Israel has offered to remove its citizens from more than 90 percent of the West Bank, a territory occupied in 1967 at the end of a war with Egypt, from which it took Gaza, Jordan, from which it took the West Bank, and other Arab neighbors whose stated goal was Israel's eradication.

Defenders of Israel argue that it is despised for different reasons, not least because it is an outpost of Western values in a region, the broader Middle East, engaged in a long-term project of religious and ethnic cleansing. One country after another has become inhospitable toward its minorities. As a result, Jews, Christians, Baha'i's and Zoroastrians are among the minority groups that have been eliminated, decimated or compelled to flee to more tolerant corners of the world.

There also is the fact that, economically, Israel punches way above its weight. As Dan Senor and Saul Singer describe and document in "Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle," the "greatest concentration of innovation and entrepreneurship in the world today" is found in the Jewish state: a higher percentage of GDP devoted to research and development than anywhere else in the world; more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other country; 80 times as much venture capital investment per capita as in China; more companies on NASDAQ than all of Europe combined.

What's more, Mr. Senor and Mr. Singer believe the conventional and sometimes stereotypical explanations for this success - e.g., Jews work hard, Jews are smart - are either wrong or insufficient.

A key factor, they theorize, is that virtually all Israelis serve in the military where a specific set of skills and values are pounded into them. They learn, for example, "that you must complete your mission, but that the only way to do that is as a team. The battle cry is 'After me': there is no leadership without personal example and without inspiring your team to charge together and with you." The Israeli military encourages a kind of entrepreneurship: the assumption of both responsibility and risk at a young age, coupled with on-the-job experience making life-and-death decisions.

In recent years, American military men and women have been facing and overcoming daunting challenges. Mr. Senor and Mr. Singer suggest that upon return to civilian life they should not "deemphasize their military experience when applying for jobs" and that employers should recognize the skills and habits that young Americans are now acquiring while fighting for their country.

That is not an argument in favor of war. But war has been both declared against us and thrust upon us. Those who believe otherwise indulge a dangerous delusion. What's more, the inconvenient truth is that war, not peace, has been the norm throughout history. And reports of history's death have been exaggerated.

Israel may be a "start-up nation," but it also is an upstart nation. It defies the "international community" by daring to defend itself, and it prospers even while under attack. For much of the world, such behavior is unforgivable.

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.
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