Those Who Forget the Past (50 page)

WHY DOES THE UNITED STATES SUPPORT THE STATE OF ISRAEL?

Israel and Egypt are America's largest recipients of foreign aid. Why should Americans want to spend their tax dollars supporting Israel and bribing the Egyptians into accepting peace on a continuous basis? Of what value is Israel to the United States? And if supporting Israel is such a great idea, how come the Europeans don't do it?

First let's look at what Israel is not. Israel is not a useful ally. We do not fight alongside the Israel Defense Forces in any battles. Nor does Israel fight any battles that we want fought on our behalf. The United States does not base troops or equipment in Israel. For its military adventures in the Middle East the United States has used aircraft carriers and bases in countries such as Egypt, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, etc. The U.S. military is more powerful than the next fifteen countries' militaries combined. There is no conceivable conflict in which having Israeli assistance would mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Israel is not an important trading partner. In reports by country at the U.S. Census Bureau's Foreign Trade Statistics department (http://
www.census.gov/foreign-trade/
), Israeli trade is buried in “Other.” The total volume of foreign trade with Israel was about $18 billion in 2002. This compares to $80 billion for Germany, $123 billion for China, $215 billion for Mexico, and $345 billion for Canada.

Supporting Israel in an effort to win over Jewish voters in the United States is not an obviously good strategy for a politician. The United States Department of State estimates that “by the year 2010, America's Muslim population is expected to surpass the Jewish population, making Islam the country's second-largest faith after Christianity” (
http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/islam/fact2.htm
). The Jews of America have declined in number to 5.2 million or less than 2 percent of the population. Politicians like rich people so you'd think that the fact that American Jewish households had a median income of $50,000 per year might give them more clout than the average American household with its $42,000 income (source: National Jewish Population Survey 2000–2001). However, the income differential fades into insignificance when you adjust for the fact that the median age among American Jews is 41 against 35 for the general population. Older people of any race or religion are more likely to have advanced degrees and career experience that lead to higher salaries. The bottom line is that an American political strategy of winning over Muslim voters by promising to liberate Palestine would seem to be roughly as effective as promising to support Israel.

Israel is not a sympathy case. Conventional wisdom in international politics is “Nations do not have friends. They have interests.” Nonetheless the United States occasionally tries to help suffering people in foreign countries where it serves no apparent U.S. interest. Could Israel be one of these places? Compared to the average person on Planet Earth, Israeli citizens, including the 1.2 million Arabs (2000 census), live in a paradise of economic prosperity and equality with representative government with a functioning and powerful legal system. Looking just within the region we could find many folks more deserving of sympathy, starting with the slaves held in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (
www.iabolish
. com). Or we could decide that charity begins at home; one can certainly find a lot more folks begging in the streets of Seattle and San Francisco than in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

What then has Israel done for the United States? The only concrete benefit that the State of Israel has provided to the United States is the absorption of millions of Jewish refugees from Europe, Arab countries, the former Soviet Union, and miscellaneous states such as Ethiopia. Most of these Jews would have preferred to live in the United States and in fact applied for admission to the United States. We were able to turn down their applications for immigration in good conscience. As long as the State of Israel exists, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew who shows up, we can turn Jews away from our borders without risk of an embarrassing mass killing.

It was not always this way. During the 1930s the average European Christian had the following preferences:

[most preferred] Jews alive and well but living somewhere far away, e.g., North or South America

Jews dead

[least preferred] Jews living in Europe or somewhere else that would inconvenience Europeans

It is currently fashionable to demonize Adolf Hitler and the Germans who voted for him and his policies. However, it is worth pointing out that Hitler's original plan was not to kill Jews; he wanted to take their property and then kick them out of Europe. The United States and Britain, which together controlled the seas, were the largest obstacle to the German plan of expelling Jews. The United States would not accept Jewish immigrants. The British White Paper of May 1939, backed up by the British Navy, closed off Palestine. Under the White Paper no more than 75,000 Jews would be admitted to Palestine during the succeeding five years and after that all immigration would be at the discretion of Arabs. Nazi Germany's “Final Solution” was a solution to the problem of “there are no countries that are willing to accept Europe's Jews,” not to the problem of “we really enjoy killing Jews and how can we kill as many as possible?”

Following the war, Americans changed their minds about Jews. Today the average American would probably express the following preference list:

Jews alive and well but living somewhere far away

Jews living in the United States

[least preferred] Jews dead

If the Arabs were to conquer Israel and fail to kill all of its citizens, there is a high probability that the Jewish survivors of that war would wash up on American shores. How happy would the average American gentile be to live alongside Russian and Middle Eastern Jews who don't share his culture, language, and values? A 2002 Anti-Defamation League study found that 17 percent of Americans agreed with a long list of classical anti-Jewish statements and an additional 35 percent agreed with “Jews have too much power in the business world” or “Jews have too much control and influence on Wall Street.” Slightly more than 50 percent of Americans therefore are uncomfortable with the Jews that are already here. Rather than get into a national debate on whether more Jews can be tolerated on our shores, we send money and weapons to the Israelis. Imagine that you had a fat drunk cousin named Earl living in a trailer park in Louisiana. Would you rather send $250 every month to keep him in beer and pork rinds down there or let him come up and move into your guest room?

This preference shift occurring in America but not in Europe explains why the Europeans provide no financial support to the State of Israel. This is not because Europeans are stingy. European nations are the largest financial supporters of the Palestinian cause, providing more cash than the United States and far more than wealthy Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia (source: the “Building the State” section of
www.pna.net
). Europeans expect Jews fleeing Israel either to be killed or to settle in non-European countries.

Note that Europeans have demonstrated a willingness to pay money to keep immigrants out. Under German law ethnic Germans living in certain other countries (
volksdeutsche
) have the right to return to Germany and claim citizenship and various welfare benefits. There are approximately 300,000
volksdeutsche
living in Kazakhstan. These are the remnants of a large ethnic German population that were once prosperous farmers in the Volga and who were exiled by Stalin to Kazakhstan in 1941. Their descendants do not speak German and don't have the skills or education to succeed in the German economy. So the German government tries to keep them happy right where they are through aid programs. Quoting from http://
www.gtz.de/minderheiten/english/index.htm
: “The aim of the programme is to improve the living conditions of the German ethnic minority in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It wants to provide an alternative to emigration and to encourage the German minorities to remain in their resident countries.”

Israel's primary practical value to the United States is as a place that will accept immigrant Jews, of which the past decades have produced quite a few. In the 1940s and 1950s Arab governments and civilians emulated German policies from the 1930s. Rioting Muslims killed enough of their Jewish neighbors that the remainder fled. Arab governments required that the Jews leave any wealth or property behind. More than 600,000 Jews from Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, and other Arab countries sought asylum in the State of Israel. These folks spoke no English, had no money, lacked a modern education, and had no experience of participating in a democracy. Most Americans would not have wanted them as neighbors. You could say the same for the more than 1 million Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel between 1989 and 2002. Between the founding of Israel in 1948 and 2002, Israel absorbed a total of 2.93 million Jews from other countries (source:
http://www.jafi.org.il/aliyah/aliyah/clock/table.htm
).

(Nor would the United States want to accept the forthcoming waves of Jewish emigrants. France is home to 5 million Muslims, a rapidly growing community whose native sons include Zacarias Moussaoui, the “twentieth September 11 hijacker.” A rising tide of Muslim violence against Jews has sparked a growing percentage of French Jews, Europe's largest community at 600,000, to think about emigration [“French Jews leave home for Israel,” BBC News, January 7, 2003]. Jewish population statistics show nearly one million Jews remaining in Russia and Ukraine, countries with histories of anti-Jewish violence. On balance it is probably reasonable to expect at least 1.5 million Jews to become refugees within the next fifty years.)

Israel has no practical value for the nations of Continental Europe. The surviving descendants of Germany's 500,000 prewar Jews are not going to attempt to return to Berlin. Jews who escaped from Morocco with the clothes on their back are not going to want to try their luck in Poland (many of those Polish Jews who tried to return to their homes following World War II were murdered by mobs).

WHY DO ARABS REJECT THE STATE OF ISRAEL?

In the Web age it isn't necessary to speculate on why the Arabs reject Israel. We can simply read what they've written on the subject. Let's start with Article 22 of the Palestinian National Charter [Covenant]:

Zionism is a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods. Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress. Israel is a constant source of threat vis-a-vis peace in the Middle East and the whole world. Since the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence and will contribute to the establishment of peace in the Middle East, the Palestinian people look for the support of all the progressive and peaceful forces and urge them all, irrespective of their affiliations and beliefs, to offer the Palestinian people all aid and support in their just struggle for the liberation of their homeland.

Note that this is essentially the governing constitution for the Palestine National Authority, amendable only by a two-thirds vote of the Palestinian Congress. Not all Arab nations call for the destruction of Israel in their constitutions and yet most Arab countries have maintained a continuous declared state of war with Israel since 1948. To understand this fifty-fiveyear-long war it therefore becomes necessary to engage in a bit of analysis.

Israel occupies 20,330 square kilometers of land or roughly 0.23 percent of nearby Arab territory (see table at the end of this article). This percentage would be slightly larger if we excluded Iran, which is technically non-Arab but which has been at the forefront of the fight against Israel by training, financing, and arming Palestinians. This percentage would be much lower if we included the Arab states of North Africa such as Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, etc. To put this into perspective, 0.23 percent of the Lower 48 United States is roughly equal to the southeastern corner of Florida (about one eighth of the state).

In some sense the State of Israel represents a tremendous achievement for the Arab countries. In exchange for a fraction of one percent of their territory they managed to expropriate the property of their Jewish citizens (estimated at between $13 and $30 billion in 1950 dollars) and expel approximately 870,000 Jews from their territories. Without incurring any of the bad publicity that afflicted Hitler, the Arabs managed to accomplish one of Nazi Germany's primary goals: creating a vast empire that was free of Jews. For the first time in 2,500 years an Arab could walk down the streets of Baghdad without encountering a Jew. Morocco and Algeria rid themselves of hundreds of thousands of Jews.

As impressive an achievement as concentrating the Jews from all the Arab countries into a tiny corner of the Arab world is, it would be yet more impressive to dump the Jews off somewhere in Christian territory, or perhaps to kill them all. This then becomes the challenge facing the modern Arab political leader.

Are Arab Leaders Crazy?

Let's step back for a moment and look at Arab political leadership. Americans tend to be smug about the superiority of our political system. We don't have politicians killing everyone in a town because they think the townsfolk won't vote for them (Syrian dictator Hafez Assad, Hama 1982; official government death toll 20,000 but human rights organizations estimate closer to 40,000), beheading citizens for expressing dissenting points of view (Saudi Arabia), declaring 40 percent of the government budget “missing” while building new villas and buying new Mercedes for their cronies (Yasser Arafat), etc. Does this make us morally superior to Arabs? Let's consider first that Arab leaders are not elected. People who live in an Arab country are
subjects
of the rulers. The job of an Arab leader is to figure out how the people can be made to serve him, not vice versa.

The closest analog in American society is the public corporation. The textbooks and some legal statutes say that the CEO and the Board are supposed to serve the interests of the shareholders. In practice the directors and top executives of American corporations siphoned off hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder wealth into their personal bank accounts during the 1990s. Jack Welch in
Straight from the Gut
proudly states that during his twenty years as General Electric CEO the “employees, ” by which he means himself and some other top managers, went from 1 percent to 31 percent ownership of GE. Rephrased, Jack and his golf partners stole 30 percent of GE from the investors who owned the company in 1980. (The most notorious Third World kleptocrat was Mobutu Sese Seko, estimated to have diverted as much as $5 billion in funds during thirty years of rule in Zaire [now the Congo]. Measured against Congo's current annual GDP of $32 billion it would seem that Mobutu's slice was much smaller than the GE executives'.)

There is no reason to expect an Arab dictator to behave more altruistically than an American business executive. In fact, the Arab leader who behaves out of self-interest violates no trust or law, unlike his American CEO counterparts.

Suppose that you managed to seize power in an Arab country. What would your first order of business be? Dictatorship is never a guaranteed long-term gig and therefore most people have started by transferring all the money that they could find into their personal Swiss bank accounts. Your second order of business is ensuring the happiness of your subjects. You don't actually care whether or not they're happy but you don't want them rioting in the streets and interfering with the flow of cash to Switzerland. Unless a subject is one of your cronies you can't make him happy with money or improved material conditions because you're moving all of the country's wealth into your own pockets. What you
can
offer your subjects is pride. By continuing the fight against Israel your subjects can feel that they are part of a noble effort that goes back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. and that has been, on balance, a tremendous success.

Starting from their homeland in present-day Saudi Arabia around the time of the death of Mohammed in A.D. 632, the Arabs managed to conquer about half of the known world by A.D. 750.

Islamic power and territory spread more gradually until the fifteenth century when it began to decline relative to European Christendom. The Industrial Revolution in Europe reduced Arab power to a low point in the late nineteenth century when most Arab lands became colonial possessions of Britain and France. With the withdrawal of the Europeans and the rise in oil prices and production, Arabs have enjoyed a surge of increasing power throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Destroying the State of Israel would be a glorious milestone indeed in the Arab march of progress and your subjects will be happy to focus their attention on this goal rather than on the year-to-year economics of the nation.

Do you suppose that you would behave differently in this situation of absolute power? That you'd be unable to shake off your bourgeois roots and Western idea that government should serve the people? That unlike every Roman Emperor except Marcus Aurelius, you'd respond to absolute power by continuing to be a kind, generous, self-denying sort of human being?

Suppose that you made peace with Israel and withheld support from terrorists? In your country, as in every Muslim nation, there is a mosque funded by the Saudi Wahhabi sect where teenage boys are trained for the jihad. If they don't see you as part of the solution (war on the Great Satan [U.S.] and the Little Satan [Israel]) they will probably come to see you as part of the problem. Like Anwar Sadat, you may find yourself a target for assassination by an organized Islamic movement.