PHILIP GREENSPUN
Israel
THIS ARTICLE IS INTENDED for people who’ve grown weary and confused after exposure to the relentless media coverage of the conflict in and around Israel, often referred to as a “crisis.” The questions to be answered include the following:
Why does the United States support the State of Israel?
Why do Arabs reject the State of Israel? (sub-question: “Are Arab Leaders Crazy?”)
Why do Muslims hate Jews?
Why do Muslims hate the United States?
Why are the governments of the Middle East so unstable?
Why are the Palestinians so violent?
How have the Israelis survived for so long?
Is there really a crisis?
What can we, as average American citizens, do?
For answers we look back at history and at original sources where possible.
(I wrote this article because friends keep asking me for answers and opinions and it seemed better to lay it out in a coherent essay than provide piecemeal responses.)
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 volksdeutscheliving 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.
WHY DO MUSLIMS HATE JEWS?
Before we address the question of why Muslims hate Jews let us work on nomenclature and the broader question of why so many non-Muslims have also hated Jews through the centuries.
We will not use the term anti-Semitism in this article. The word was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr to replace the then-current term Judenhass, which translates literally as “Jew-hatred.” Marr hated Jews and conjectured that middle-class Germans were turning away from the practice of Jew-hatred because the term for the activity sounded ugly. The neologism anti-Semitism was intended to sound more scientific and therefore make hatred of Jews more appealing to educated people in an industrial age.
Before considering why so many non-Muslims hate and have hated Jews, let’s look at basic psychology research that has been done in this field. The classic experiment in this area is reported in Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (Muzafer Sherif et al., 1954; full text at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Sherif/). In 1949, Sherif divided 22 boys into two groups and took them to a 200-acre camp surrounded by Oklahoma’s Robbers Cave State Park. The groups were set up in competition with one another and soon resorted to fighting and negatively stereotyping each other. Hating an out-group seems to make it easier for an in-group to function together. Moreover, inciting hatred can be beneficial to leaders.
For an example that is close to home, consider George W. Bush and his constant talk of a “war against Iraq.” Militarily the term “war” does not make much sense. Using 5 percent of the American nuclear arsenal, Iraq could be wiped off the planet in five minutes. Limited to conventional bombs, the U.S. Air Force could reduce every Iraqi city to rubble within a few months, at little greater expense or risk to American lives than is currently entailed in the Air Force’s training missions over Nevada. It doesn’t make linguistic sense to talk about a “war” if there is no possibility of losing, but it does make political sense. If a president is in the middle of a war it is difficult to mount political opposition to that president without appearing disloyal and unpatriotic. Focusing media attention on a war prevents reporters from asking questions such as “How come William T. Esrey and Ronald LeMay, the two top executives at Sprint, deserved to get paid $311 million for their services to shareholders when the company’s business and stock are in tatters? And then why is it fair that Joe Sixpack has to pay income tax but Esrey and LeMay didn’t have to pay tax on their $311 million income? Would it have been fairer to divide the $311 million—equal to half of Sprint’s 2002 profit—among the 13,000 workers that these guys laid off—$24,000 per worker— or possibly to the shareholders(!)?” (These gentlemen did pay a few million dollars to the accounting firm of Ernst and Young to participate in a tax shelter that the Internal Revenue Service is currently investigating and considering disallowing, in which case presumably Esrey and LeMay will join the folks in the February 7, 2003, New York Times story “Wealthy Suing Accountants Over Rejected Tax Shelters.”) After the U.S. military crushes Iraq, a country that in 1990 had the same gross domestic product as West Virginia, George W. Bush will get a big boost in popularity for winning the war. Having Iraq as an enemy is apparently somewhat useful to the American people and very useful to America’s leaders.
Why have the Jews through the centuries made such good all-purpose targets for hatred? It is difficult to understand how Jew-hatred started so let’s focus on the factors that have made it endure: (1) concentration in residence, (2) concentration in occupation, (3) smallness in number, (4) military weakness.
Factor 1: concentration in residence. Until the early nineteenth century, when they were emancipated by Napoleon, the Jews of Europe were required to live in ghettos, separate from gentiles, by order of the Catholic Church. After emancipation, the Jews still tended to clump together if for no other reason than the requirement that at least ten men be assembled for morning prayers. In the United States, real estate covenants prohibiting the sale of property to Jews kept them to some extent separate from other Americans, at least from those in the ruling class (these covenants were gradually dismantled through legal action just before and after World War II). It is easier and more convenient to hate people if you don’t have to live with them.
Considerably strengthening the effects of Factor 1 is the fact that people don’t change their prejudices without direct personal contact with the object of those prejudices. For example, suppose that you’ve been taught negative stereotypes about black people. If you move into a middle-class neighborhood where half of your neighbors are black you’ll probably begin to change your mind. But if you never meet a black person face-to-face, why would you ever change your mind? The phenomenon has also been demonstrated by those Europeans who express hatred of Jews in opinion polls despite the fact that they live in countries where all the Jews were killed in 1944. An Anti-Defamation League (ADL) study in 1998 concluded “The current survey shows that the most anti-Semitic Americans tend to have less contact with Jews in their day-today life than do other Americans.”
Factor 2: concentration in occupation. Jews in Europe were prohibited from owning land or farming and encouraged to take up a variety of trades including money lending, an activity prohibited by scripture for Christians. This made it easy for Europeans to believe that Jewish bankers controlled the financial markets. Jews in the United States were excluded from universities by quotas. Jews weren’t welcome in traditional industrial enterprises. For example, in the early 1920s Henry Ford was the most respected businessman on the planet, sort of like an über Bill Gates. He demonstrated his commitment to diversity in the workplace by publishing The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a book that was a great inspiration to Adolf Hitler and early Nazi converts (if you Google the title you’ll find the full text available on many Muslim sites worldwide). Jews looking for opportunity turned to new industries such as Hollywood and publishing. This made it plausible for Americans to believe that Jews controlled their media. Concentration in occupation among Jews reduces the likelihood that the average gentile will encounter a Jew at work and thereby have his or her prejudices contradicted.
Factor 3: smallness in number. Jews today number roughly 13 million worldwide. The peak of Jewish population was 1939 when the estimate was between 16 and 18 million. Close encounters, the only antidote to prejudice, are unlikely when the hated group is only 0.21 percent of the world population.
Factor 4: military weakness. Between the rise of the Roman Empire and 1948 the Jews were unable to achieve sovereign power in any region of the world and therefore were unable to build a military force. If you’re going to hate a group and periodically inflict violence on them, it is best to pick a group that cannot retaliate.
The inherent virtues of hating an out-group plus these four factors were sufficient to fuel anti-Jewish violence throughout Christian Europe sponsored by the ruling class of the time. In medieval times this was primarily the Catholic Church and its local officials with secular authorities in the background. In modern times, up through the Holocaust, the primary sponsors of violence against Jews were secular officials with the Christian authorities in the background. The experience of Jews in the Islamic world was similar to the experience in Europe. State-sponsored murders of thousands of Jews were common in North Africa between the eighth and twelfth centuries; Arab mobs were responsible for most of the killings after 1800.
It is difficult to reach back through the mists of time to determine whether or not stirring up Jew-hatred was truly beneficial to the Catholic Church or various secular rulers. So let’s start with Nazi Germany. Jew-hatred was one of the most successful programs of the Nazi party. Hating Jews galvanized the German people and helped in creating an economic boom through the 1930s. The Jews of Germany were pauperized, their wealth and property transferred to German gentiles, and profits spread among the government contractors who helped smooth the process along (see the book IBM and the Holocaust for just how willing American companies were to assist the German government, up to December 1941 and beyond). Foreign governments did not object to anti-Jewish measures such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Germany’s military and territorial ambitions ultimately resulted in negative consequences but her experience with Jew-hatred was almost entirely positive.
(Even those Germans directly involved in exterminating Jews were seldom punished. Participants in the Wannsee Conference, for example, where the Final Solution was planned, generally spent less than four years in prison—compare this to the minimum of five years in federal prison that you’ll get today if you are caught with five grams of crack cocaine.)
Let us consider Jew-hatred in modern Europe. Opinion polls in countries such as Poland reveal that hatred of Jews has survived even where the Jews have not. British and French academics propose a cultural and scientific boycott against Israel, an echo of 1930s Germany in which university professors joined the Nazi party at a rate double that of the general population. What purpose does Jew-hatred serve in modern-day Europe? Nearly all European countries were home to enthusiastic participants in the murder of the Jews of Europe. This is a source of a certain amount of shame and bad publicity for Europeans. Suppose, however, that it were possible to demonstrate that Israel is the worst of the 300 nations on this earth? This justifies the killing of Europe’s Jews to a large extent: “Just look at the rogue nation these Jews created when left to themselves.” (The reasoning is a bit flawed because the vast majority of Israel’s Jews come from Arab countries or Russia; the Europeans did such a thorough job of killing their Jews that we’ll never know what kind of country they would have created.) A side effect of this desire to show how evil the state created by the co-religionists of the Jews whom they murdered is the European focus on Palestinians as a humanitarian cause. There may be billions of people in the world who are poorer and more oppressed than the Palestinians but they can’t be held up as examples of how horrible Jews are and therefore get no mindshare and no assistance.
Jew-hatred in America is less prevalent and less violent than in Europe. As noted in the first section, a 2002 ADL study found that 17 percent of Americans were solid Jew-haters and 52 percent held some anti-Jewish beliefs. These numbers compare to 21 percent of Europeans holding the full range of stereotypes and a variable number by country proving mildly anti-Jewish, with the Spaniards topping the list at 71 percent. Americans generally are able to hold anti-Jewish stereotypes without feeling the need to take action. For example, the author has encountered quite a few Harvard Ph.D.s who express the belief that a conspiracy of Jewish financiers manipulates the U.S. economy (their doctorates are in humanities, not business). These university professors and non-profit organization administrators would not want to be seen at a Ku Klux Klan rally nor participate in a lynch mob but they’d be happy to join a boycott of the State of Israel. That only about half of Americans hold some of the same beliefs about Jews espoused by the Nazi party is comforting until one one reflects that Hitler was able to hold power in Germany with only 33 percent of the vote in 1932 and 44 percent in 1933.
We come finally to the original question of why Muslims hate Jews. These days it is mostly because they’re taught to by their governments. The standard grade school curriculum in Muslim countries includes a healthy measure of Jew-hatred, much of it translated from materials first developed by Nazi Germany. State-run television in Muslim countries keeps the public fed with a constant stream of images of Israeli troops beating up Palestinians in the West Bank. Saudi-funded mosques complement the government-supplied material to the point that the average Malaysian Muslim, who has never been within five hundred miles of a Jew, might easily ascribe any of his problems to an international Jewish conspiracy and the rogue state of Israel.
A declining standard of living contributes to anger among the populace and the consequent search for scapegoats. The vast majority of Muslims live in Third World countries where any economic surplus is appropriated by the ruler’s family and friends. Rather than investing the money in new machines for factories or productivity-enhancing technology, rich people in the Third World tend to sock money away in Swiss bank accounts or build themselves fabulous villas with fleets of imported cars and jets. The family that owns Saudi Arabia, for example, has reportedly transferred $1 trillion into foreign bank accounts, an amount nearly equal to the $1.1 trillion invested in capital goods during 2001 by all U.S. businesses; King Fahd spent $300 million on his August 2002 family vacation in Spain. Lack of re-investment of surplus results in slow or negative economic growth. Meanwhile the population in Muslim countries generally grows rapidly, e.g., 2 percent per year for Egypt, 2.5 percent for Jordan, and 2.9 percent for Saudi Arabia, compared to 0.1 percent per year for the average rich country (source: www.prb.org). If the Canadian economy grows 2 percent next year, for example, and the wealth is spread equally, the average person will have 1.7 percent more money to spend because the wealth need only be shared with 0.3 percent more people. If the Saudi economy were to do as well as it did in 2001 and grow 1.6 percent, the average Saudi would have a standard of living that was 1.3 percent lower, even if the new wealth were distributed equally.
(There is evidence that growth in the U.S. economy is governed by similar forces. In the late 1920s the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent of Americans rose to 45 percent. They built a lot of big fancy houses for themselves and the Great Depression followed. Between 1979 and 1997 the share of wealth for the top 1 percent of Americans rose from 20 percent to 40 percent. All of these rich people bidding against each other for waterfront property and Impressionist paintings has led to tremendous inflation in beach house prices and Sotheby’s auctions while nobody can give away machine tools or improved information systems. In the 1950s a CEO made five to ten times the salary of the average worker and a company could pay out some of its profit in dividends, thereby encouraging further investment, and internally invest the rest in productivity improvements. In the 1990s a typical large company employed a long list of top executives earning one hundred to one thousand times the salary of their average worker. As in the case of the Sprint managers mentioned earlier, these amounts were often comparable to the company’s total profits and therefore public corporations had a lot less to invest. The result was the recession that started in late 2000.)
Muslims have a Jew-hatred tradition that dates back at least a thousand years. Most Muslim countries expelled their Jews more than fifty years ago and consequently 99 percent of the world’s Muslims will never meet a Jew face-to-face. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that Muslims will go on believing what they’ve been taught by their governments and mullahs. The worldwide Muslim population is estimated at between 1.2 and 1.4 billion. If we assume that the percentage of Muslims who really buy into what their leaders are telling them about Jews is equal to the percentage (33) of German voters who opted for Hitler in 1932, that works out to more than 400 million Jew-hating Muslims. This population constitutes an inexhaustible source of financial and physical support for anti-Jewish violence.
WHY DO MUSLIMS HATE THE UNITED STATES?
As with the preceding question we should step back and ask the more general question “Why does everyone hate the United States?” Everyone hates the United States because everything that goes wrong in the world today is the fault of the United States. Our military consists of 1.5 million highly trained people and tens of thousands of machines capable of getting them very quickly to where they are needed. Yet though we claim to be interested in justice and human welfare we generally don’t bother to act to protect non-citizens. For example, impending genocide in Rwanda elicited the following quote from then-President Bill Clinton: “. . . I mention it only because there are a sizable number of Americans there and it is a very tense situation. And I just want to assure the families of those who are there that we are doing everything we possibly can to be on top of the situation to take all the appropriate steps to try to assure the safety of our citizens there.” In other words, “We could use all of our airpower and troops to stop the Hutus from killing the Tutsis but instead we’re going to airlift American citizens out and then move on to the next issue.” An estimated one million people died.
Nobody is going to blame the Rwandan genocide on Ireland. They’ve only got 17,000 troops and a limited number of ships and cargo planes. Nobody is going to blame Denmark, with its 35,000 troops. But the U.S. military is strong enough to intervene anywhere in the world. People can blame, with some justification, anything that makes them unhappy on the United States.
Ask Joe Foreigner what upsets him most about the United States. Top on the list is the fact that the United States is too interventionist, swaggering cowboy-like with military power into complex international situations. Complaint #2, however, is that the United States failed to intervene in a particular situation that is near and dear to Joe’s heart. They hate us because we are too interventionist . . . except when we’re not interventionist enough. They also hate the United States because they’re so weak and their government essentially serves at our government’s pleasure. Consider how annoying it is to be an American voter, knowing that because you don’t have $50 million you don’t have any political power. Imagine how much more annoyed you’d be if you were a citizen of one of the European nations. Not only are your politicians corrupted by the local rich, but if your society wants to do something that is contrary to a sufficiently important U.S. desire, the U.S. military might invade and turn your country into a possession, ruled by a colonial viceroy.
Joe Third World Foreigner has even more reason to hate the United States than Joe European Foreigner. Most Third World governments have no plausible claim to legitimacy. They have power because they seized power and because the United States has chosen not to overthrow them. If Joe Third World Foreigner hates his rulers, who are presumably skimming whatever they can take out of his pocket, it is only natural for Joe to hate the United States for enabling his rulers to remain in power.
If Muslims hate the United States more than average it is probably simply because they have a longer than average list of things that are making them unhappy. Most Muslims are poor, getting poorer, and living under dictatorships in which they are essentially the personal property of the rulers. Most Muslims are exposed, at least via television, to a world in which women are permitted to show their heads in public, drive cars, and defy orders from their fathers and husbands. Most Muslims live in societies that lack the technological wherewithal to manufacture lightbulbs, much less the advanced weapons that will be necessary to overpower the infidels. And it can all be blamed on the United States.
WHY ARE THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE MIDDLE EAST SO UNSTABLE?
Today’s most volatile Arab nations occupy land that was once part of the Ottoman Empire. The Sultan allied himself with Germany in World War I and as a consequence lost Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Mesopotamia in the Treaty of Versailles (1919). France and Britain took possession of these territories and tried to make them into European-style nation-states. Note that the idea of a nation-state was relatively new at the time. Bismarck unified Germany in 1871 but most older Germans still identified more strongly with their principality, e.g., Bavaria, than with the German nation. The national anthem Deutschlandüber Alles (“Germany over all”) was intended to encourage people to submerge their local affiliations. Italy was unified in 1870. Germany and Italy spent centuries on the path to unification, aided by literacy among their citizens, mass communications, railroads, and telegraphs.
The vast nation-states carved out in the Arab world by the British and French had very primitive communication infrastructures and a largely illiterate population. If you were friends with a European diplomat you might find that you and your family were given absolute power over an area one fifth the size of the United States (Saudi Arabia) or twice the size of Idaho (Iraq) and you could even ask that your new country be named after your family (“Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” and “Saudi Arabia”). These regions might contain lots of mutually antagonistic tribes with linguistic, religious, and ethnic divisions. The first source of instability is that the nation-states of the Middle East in general did not encapsulate groups of people that had any real affinity for each other or common identity. Sudan, for example, contains a northern group of Muslim Arabs and a southern group of animist and Christian blacks. The primary interaction between these groups over the centuries has been the Arabs sweeping down to capture and enslave blacks. The British in 1956 decided that these two groups should be yoked together forever in one country and the result, according to BBC News, has been [that] “Unstable governments, civil war and widespread human rights abuses have afflicted the country ever since.” The CIA Factbook notes that “Sudan has been embroiled in a civil war for all but 10 years of this period (1972– 82). Since 1983, the war and war- and famine-related effects have led to more than 2 million deaths and over 4 million people displaced.” The country is one quarter the size of the United States, the people lack a common language, religion, or race, the literacy rate is 46 percent, yet nobody is willing to say “Hey, maybe it was a mistake to carve this big a chunk out of the African continent as one country.”
(Nigeria was a similar arbitrarily carved-out country with an Arab north and a Christian-indigenous south that has achieved a measure of stability. Muslim mobs killed thousands of Christians in the mid-1960s, leading the Christian Ibo [or “Igbo”] tribe to secede in the late 1960s, forming a new country called Biafra. The Muslim tribes controlled the Nigerian army and were therefore successful in overpowering the Ibo, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated one to three million Christians and the permanent exclusion of the Ibo from political power in the reunified nation. Muslim-Christian violence continues to claim hundreds of lives each year in Nigeria but the government and military have a firm grip on power and hence Nigeria is considered a successful example of decolonialization.)
A second factor contributing to instability is the fact that any tribal leader or military commander could claim just as much legitimacy to rule as the European-appointed dictator. No ruler sought or had the consent of his subjects. Iraq, originally granted by the British to the Hashemite family that also got Jordan, provides a typical example of coups and counter-coups.
A third factor contributing to instability is that agreements among peoples are impossible where there is no representative government. If the democratically elected government of the United States signs an agreement with the democratically elected government of Canada, one presumes that this agreement represents the will of both people. The agreement ought to survive even if the leaders who signed it have been replaced. This presumption does not make sense in the Arab world where every country is ruled by a dictator. The Ayatollah Khomeini did not feel bound to honor the deposed Shah’s various treaties. If you seized power in Iraq tomorrow would you feel bound to honor Saddam Hussein’s agreements with neighbors? An agreement in the Arab world is only good for as long as the two guys who signed it are still in power. (Note that this has painful implications for those Israelis who yearn for a negotiated peace; they could sign deals with every living Arab dictator but face a new war the instant that one of those signatories dies or is overthrown. For example, if they signed a peace treaty with Yasser Arafat today and Hamas took over the Palestinian leadership tomorrow, the war would be back on.)
WHY ARE THE PALESTINIANS SO VIOLENT?
If you want to know why Palestinians are violent, look in the mirror. Ask yourself if you’d be spending ten minutes thinking about the State of Israel or the disposition of Palestinians if not for their violence.
Most of the nations within the Middle East contain conquered people and conquerors. For an example right next door to the Palestinians, consider that the rulers and bulk of the population in Egypt are Arab conquerors who swept in from the southeast. The conquered indigenous people are the Copts, the descendants of the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids and temples so familiar to tourists. The Copts converted to Christianity during the Roman Empire and have suffered from religious, political, and economic oppression for 1,300 years, ever since the Arab conquest. Copts are periodically murdered by Arab-Muslim mobs and generally the Arabs are not prosecuted for the killings. You could read about this in www.copts. net but you probably won’t because the Copts are not violent.
At the Potsdam Conference the Allies granted Eastern European nations the right to expel their ethnic German citizens, i.e., people who had been living in these areas for generations but whose forebears were German and who spoke the German language. Roughly 12 million of these volksdeutsche were in fact expelled, their property confiscated, and as many as two million may have been killed in the process. The surviving volksdeutsche settled in crummy houses in Germany and Austria and integrated themselves with those societies. If there were a Volksdeutsche Liberation Army murdering Czech, Polish, and Hungarian civilians the world might pay some attention to the injustices suffered by this group.
The 870,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries in the 1940s and 1950s similarly settled quietly in the United States, Europe, and Israel. They aren’t out there blowing up Iraqi, Moroccan, and Algerian embassies or airplanes, which is why you probably never think about them.
The list of people who were displaced by the events of World War II and decolonialization is endless. The only group that anyone pays attention to is the Palestinians. If the Palestinians were to stop blowing up airplanes and pizza shops people would stop paying attention.
Arab leaders don’t care about non-violent Palestinians. As noted earlier, if you were an Arab leader there is no reason to care about your own subjects, much less members of very distant tribes. The only Arab nation that has ever offered Palestinians citizenship is Jordan; a Palestinian family that has lived in Egypt or Saudi Arabia for several generations will still be aliens with no right to permanent residence. Thus there are more than 4 million people officially classified as Palestinian refugees despite the fact that the final British census before the 1948 war found only about one million people of all religions living in Palestine. The primary agency for these stateless souls is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). If you visit their Web site, http://www.un.org/unrwa/, you’ll see that the United States and European nations provide almost all of the funding. Historically in fact the Western nations provided 100 percent of the funding for UNRWA, but in recent years Saudi Arabia has been shamed into chipping in. For 2002 the Saudis contributed $5.8 million, compared to a U.S. contribution of $120 million and Britain’s $30 million. Most Arab countries contribute less than the cost of a new Mercedes automobile.
Violent Palestinians, by contrast, have no trouble getting support from fellow Arabs. In April 2002 the Saudi state television network ran a telethon that raised more than $100 million to aid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (Associated Press, April 13, 2002). Iraq, which contributes nothing to UNRWA, has been donating roughly $10 million per year to the families of suicide bombers. Iran, another state that contributes nothing to UNRWA, sends weapons and money to anti-Israel groups such as Hezbollah and Yasser Arafat’s army, most notably a 50-ton shipment of rockets and plastic explosives in January 2002 (notable because it was in violation of the agreements that Arafat had signed and because it was discovered and intercepted by the Israeli Navy).
The only way that a Palestinian can get his or her hands on a share of Arab oil wealth is by becoming a suicide bomber. “[Izzidene al Masri] lived with his 12 brothers and sisters and his parents in a neat, tile-floored house” (Knight-Ridder, April 1, 2002, on the Sbarro pizza shop bomber). If you lived in poverty it might make sense to trade your life for the knowledge that Saudi Arabians would support your parents, grandparents, and eleven siblings in comfort for the rest of their lives.
This kind of poverty is likely to endure because Palestinians combine a low level of education and a high level of illiteracy (30 percent) with perhaps the highest birthrate of any world population, estimated for 2001 at 5 percent per annum by passia.org. This means that Palestinians need to generate economic growth of 5 percent per year, and preserve that growth from kleptocratic politicians, merely to maintain their standard of living. For comparison, the most rapidly growing population with which most Americans are familiar is Mexico; its population is growing at an annual rate of 1.47 percent (CIA Factbook 2002). In the 1990s, according to the World Bank, the average country enjoyed a 2.5 percent annual growth rate. Even if they succeeded in liberating all of Palestine, the Palestinians would have a difficult time growing at any rate close to 5 percent per year. They’d have one of the most densely populated countries in the world, one of the poorest in natural resources, especially water, and a complete lack of industry.
It may be a mistake to look too deep into Palestinian poverty for the roots of Palestinian violence. For most violent Palestinians we need not conjecture as to the motivation for their violence because they’ve explained it in their own words. Here is an excerpt from the Palestinian National Charter, July 1–17, 1968:
Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.
Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit. [Note that this would include the present-day country of Jordan, 70 percent of the land of the original British Palestine, split off and handed to Emir Abdullah in 1923.]
Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.
Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war.
The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to their natural right in their homeland, and inconsistent with the principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations; particularly the right to self-determination.
Source: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/mideast.htm
Hamas has a Web site where they explain their goals:
Hamas is a Jihadi (fighting for a holy purpose) movement in the broad sense of the word Jihad. It is part of the Islamic awakening movement and upholds that this awakening is the road which will lead to the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.
[Settlement with the State of Israel] should not be allowed to happen because the land of Palestine is a blessed Islamic land that has been usurped by the Zionists; and Jihad has become a duty for Muslims to restore it and expel their occupiers out of their land.
Hezbollah also has a Web site (www.hizbollah.org) where they explain their objectives:
. . . Because Hezbollah’s ideological ideals sees [sic] no legitimacy for the existence of “Israel” a matter that elevates the contradictions to the level of existence. And the conflict becomes one of legitimacy that is based on religious ideals. . . . And that is why we also find the slogan of the liberation of Jerusalem rooted deeply in the ideals of Hezbollah. Another of its ideals is the establishment of the an [sic] Islamic Government. . . .
Hezbollah also used one of its own special types of resistance against the Zionist enemy that is the suicide attacks. These attacks dealt great losses to the enemy on all thinkable levels such as militarily and mentally. The attacks also raised the moral [sic] across the whole Islamic nation. . . .
Hezbollah also sees itself committed in introducing the true picture of Islam, the Islam that is logical. Committed to introduce the civilized Islam to humanity.
Note that if we take seriously the words of the Palestinian fighters we can ignore 99 percent of the journalism and punditry to which we are exposed. The guys with the guns have explained very clearly why they are fighting and under what conditions they will lay down their arms. Their reasons for fighting and their conditions for peace have nothing to do with day-to-day events.
HOW HAVE THE ISRAELIS SURVIVED FOR SO LONG?
The Arab war on Israel is now in its fifty-third year and the fact that the Israelis have hung on for so long is primarily a testament to spectacular Arab incompetence. Relying on an opponent’s military incompetence is not a viable long-term strategy. The U.S. military exhibited spectacular incompetence at the beginning of World War II, losing battles where we outnumbered the Germans ten to one. Our enemies were not able to enter North America and prevent us from regrouping. Consequently we ultimately learned how to fight and prevailed. The Arabs are gradually moving into the modern age and learning how to use Western technology. Every year the Arabs sell a bit more oil and grow a bit wealthier. Additionally there are one billion non-Arab Muslims worldwide happy to devote a portion of their wealth and energy to the challenge of killing or otherwise removing the Jews in Israel. Every time an Arab army is defeated it can simply retreat back across the border and regroup to fight another year or another decade. At first glance, it is difficult to see how the Arabs have failed thus far and how they can continue to fail in the long run.
The last real fight between Arabs and Jews was the 1973 Ramadan War. In this war, called the “Yom Kippur War” by Westerners, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, backed up with money, troops, tanks, and airplanes from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Morocco, Lebanon, and Jordan, and came very close to winning. All of these countries have much larger economies and militaries than they did in 1973. All, except for Egypt and Jordan, remain in a state of declared war with Israel. In light of the example of the Ramadan War, the willingness of Anwar Sadat to sign a peace treaty with Israel back in 1978 seems either insane or an enormous triumph for the diplomacy of American President Jimmy Carter.
Perhaps there is a military and rational explanation for the 1978 peace treaty, however. The Israeli nuclear weapons program was in its infancy in 1973 when the Arabs launched their big war. The best estimates are that Israel had enough material to make three bombs. By 1978, however, Israel was estimated to have built between 100 and 200 atomic bombs, enough nuclear power to wipe out every town in Egypt, whose population is densely concentrated along the banks of the Nile River. Anwar Sadat, in command of a military without nuclear weapons, could no longer realistically hope to prevail in a conflict with Israel.
The nuclear balance of power has been shifting since 1978. Pakistan has the Bomb and long-range ballistic missiles. Wealthy Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia have been buying missiles from the Chinese and anyone else who will sell them. Ironically the Palestinians may save the physical lives of the Jews. If an Arab dictator were to succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons, dropping the Bomb on Israel would seem to be a quick and easy path to everlasting glory. The fact that the Palestinians are living in and among the Jews and would be killed alongside them might be the only thing that gives a nuclear-capable Arab pause. In 2002 there were 1.26 million Arabs who held Israeli citizenship and who lived within the 1948 boundaries of Israel, nearly 20 percent of the population. Most of the remainder of those officially classified as Palestinian refugees live in the West Bank, in Gaza, or in nearby Jordan.
Are the Palestinians adequate protection for the State of Israel? Islamic terrorists have demonstrated a willingness to kill co-religionists in the service of larger goals, e.g., when they brought down the World Trade Center and the Muslims working inside. Secular Arab leaders going as far back as Anwar Sadat have pronounced themselves willing to lose millions of their own soldiers in exchange for a victory over Israel. Given the lack of interest in Palestinian welfare by fellow Arabs over the decades it seems reasonable to conclude that the deaths of even several million Palestinians might come to be considered acceptable as the price of liberating the land.
Israel’s nuclear arsenal is small and weak. The Israelis might be capable of wiping out neighboring capitals such as Cairo and Amman but not of surviving a first strike, deterring an Osama-bin-Laden–style foe, or of reaching a faraway enemy such as Saudi Arabia. On balance it would seem that the presence of the Palestinians amidst the Jews is currently the main deterrent against an Arab nuclear or biological attack.
Currently it seems as though Israel and its enemies have arrived at a standoff. However, taking the long view and keeping in mind that the Muslims can afford to lose a thousand battles while the Israelis cannot afford to lose even one, it seems worth considering what would transpire if the Muslims were to win. The published post-victory plans of the Arabs call for deporting all the Jews who weren’t in Israel prior to 1947 back to where they came from. The most problematic subgroup therefore are the 600,000 Israeli Jews, and their descendants, who were expelled from Arab countries. Would the Arabs want them back in their homelands? Would a population that has grown up on a steady diet of Jew-hatred in their schools, mosques, and media accept Jews back in their midst?
CONCLUSION
Day-by-day newspaper accounts of violence in Israel are constructed to provide entertainment between advertising, not to illuminate. Fundamentally the facts are the following:
Jews are not wanted in Europe or in Islamic countries.
Although initially settled by some idealistic Zionists, Israel has become primarily a dumping ground for the world’s unwanted Jews and this is its principal significance to non-Muslim countries.
For dictators in Muslim nations, inculcating mass hatred of Jews has substantial political value; Israel’s principal significance to Muslim countries is as a focus of popular hatred.
For the dictators and subjects of Arab nations, the State of Israel takes on an additional significance as a place whose successful conquest would signify a resurgence of Arab power as exciting as the Arab conquests circa A.D. 700.
Palestinian violence continues because it is yielding substantial material support from Arab and European nations, support that should lead to a gradual victory over the Jews and the liberation of all of Palestine.
Taking the long view, the State of Israel is most simply explained as a concentration camp for Jews. Starting in the 1930s the Europeans expropriated the property of their Jews and collected the physical bodies of those Jews in camps where they could be worked to death—the Nazis did not put healthy Jews into gas chambers but only those who had become exhausted by slave labor. In the 1940s and 1950s the remaining Jews of Central Europe were by and large sent to Israel while at the same time Arab nations expropriated the wealth of their 1,000-and 2,000-year-old Jewish communities and sent the physical bodies of the Jews to Israel (except for some thousands who were killed by mobs). In the last decades of the twentieth century the former Soviet Union began to export its Jewish population, though without the violence and confiscation that had accompanied Jewish migrations from Europe and Arab nations.
Historically most concentration camps for Jews have eventually turned into death camps and certainly there is no shortage of people worldwide trying to effect this transformation.
IS THERE REALLY A CRISIS? (PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS)
This article’s primary practical value is intended to be in freeing you from the tyranny of the daily news. If there is a big news story from Israel, feel free to watch The Simpsons. Elected governments will come and go in Israel. Dictators will rise and fall among the Arab nations. Terrorists will kill civilians. The Israeli army will kill terrorists. American and European university professors will vent their Jew-hatred on Israelis and the Israeli government. Politicians and diplomats will negotiate. Peace agreements will be signed when a military stalemate is reached. War will resume when the Arabs believe that they have a new and useful military tactic. All of these events are insignificant against the larger background of history painted above and compared to the major events that will transpire when the Arabs score a major military breakthrough.
Referring to an Israeli-Palestinian “crisis” in a headline is a good way to sell newspapers but not an accurate description of a conflict that will enter its second century soon. The last significant event was the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty on March 26, 1979. You could have missed every news report for more than two decades and yet be fully up to date on this crisis.
Events that would qualitatively change the situation in Israel include the following:
Palestinian takeover of Jordan or establishment of a Palestinian state elsewhere.
Islamic revolution in Egypt.
Acquisition of nuclear weapons by a country ruled by Islamic fundamentalists (or a powerful independent group such as Al-Qaeda).
To build a strong military force for the ultimate liberation of all Palestine, the Palestinians must have their own sovereign state in which heavy weapons can be accumulated and large armies trained. This fact has not been lost on the neighboring governments. Between 1948 and 1967 the state of Jordan occupied the West Bank and prevented the Palestinians from forming their own state. Between 1967 and the present day the State of Israel has occupied the West Bank and prevented the Palestinians from forming their own state. Lacking sovereignty the Palestinians have been unable to stop the Jordanian and Israeli armies from periodically rolling through their neighborhoods confiscating weapons and arresting terrorists, thus capping the number of effective fighters.
Start following the news if you hear that a sovereign Palestinian state has been established on the West Bank, because that is a required first step in any larger effort by Palestinians.
What would be the logical second step? Jew-haters worldwide like to cheerlead for a Palestinian takeover of the present State of Israel, but the reality is that a takeover of Jordan would be much easier and in fact this is where most Palestinian efforts to achieve sovereignty have been focused. Jordan offers five times the land area of Israel defended by a military that is considerably weaker. The majority of Jordan’s citizens are Palestinian yet the country is ruled by foreigners, the Hashemite family of Mecca, who were defeated in their native land by the Bedouins under Ibn-Saud and were granted ownership of most of Palestine by Britain. Relations between Palestinians and the family have been strained ever since. A group of Palestinians organized King Abdullah’s assassination in 1951 at the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount. King Hussein, who was wounded in the attack that killed his father, fought a civil war with Yasser Arafat’s PLO in 1970 resulting in the deaths of many thousands of Palestinians and the expulsion of all armed Palestinians to southern Lebanon (these fighters sparked off a fifteen-year civil war between Muslims and Christians in their new host country; more than 100,000 people were killed by their neighbors [plus a few thousand more when Israel invaded from 1982 to 1985]).
After Palestinian sovereignty the next important event to watch for is an Islamic revolution in Egypt, a country with a population of 70 million and an economy twice the size of Israel’s. Currently the population is kept under control by a 500,000-man military that has modernized its capabilities with $38 billion in U.S. military aid between 1978 and 2000. The army spends much of its time finding, torturing, and killing Islamic fundamentalists but still has plenty of energy left over to train for a big battle with Israel. If the Muslim Brotherhood manages to seize power in Egypt, the Israel Defense Forces could face their toughest challenges since the 1973 Ramadan War.
WHAT CAN WE, AS AVERAGE AMERICAN CITIZENS, DO?
Terrorism is funded by wealth. There are plenty of poor people in this world who hate the United States but we never hear from them because they can’t afford airplane tickets, weapons, training, etc. When people get richer they buy more of all the things that they enjoy. If you give extra money to a group of French people you’ll see that some is spent on fancy wine and cheese. Flip on the TV and watch Muslims worldwide celebrating the collapse of the World Trade Center or the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia . These are folks who will spend a portion of any new wealth on the killing of Americans. The principal source of Muslim wealth is oil. As a society the most effective way that we can protect ourselves from Muslim violence is by reducing our consumption of oil. They may still hate us but they will have less money to put their hatred into action.
Oil is an especially bad thing to buy and burn. Any country that earns most of its income from natural resource extraction is a place where it is easy for a ruling elite to transfer that income into its pockets. You don’t need the consent or assistance of your subjects to strike a deal with a foreign oil company and watch them extract the product. Burning oil contributes to air pollution and atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus leading to global warming. “Roughly half the oil consumed in the U.S. goes for cars and trucks,” noted The Wall Street Journal on March 18, 2003. The same article quotes Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, in 1981: “If we force Western countries to invest heavily in finding alternative sources of energy, they will. This will take them no more than seven to ten years and will result in their reduced dependence on oil as a source of energy to a point which will jeopardize Saudi Arabia’s interests.”
If we were to tax oil to reflect its true military and environmental cost, it would encourage investment in more fuelefficient technology. Half of our oil is burned up in cars and trucks whose powerplants are scarcely different from the engine in a Model T Ford. One can build an engine with precise computer-controlled solenoid-lifted valves rather than a sloppy camshaft, but when gas is cheap it isn’t worth the extra capital cost (see “Why Not a 40-mpg SUV? Technology exists to double gas guzzlers’ fuel efficiency. So what’s the holdup?” in the November 2002 Technology Review). Toyota and Honda show-rooms offer hybrid cars that get fifty miles per gallon but at current gas prices it takes years to recover the higher initial investment. High-tech windmills are good enough that Denmark is able to generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind power; in the United States it is slightly cheaper to take a fossilized dinosaur from Venezuela and light it on fire so that’s what we do. Would you invest in genetic engineering of bacteria that could separate hydrogen fuel from water if you knew that a Sheik in Riyadh could wipe out your company with the stroke of a pen?
If you want to know who is funding terrorists, look in the vanity mirror as you turn the key of your SUV. If you want to stop funding terrorists, work for a $20-per-barrel tax on imported oil and a $10-per-barrel tax on domestic oil, which doesn’t require an expensive military to defend but we still want to discourage its use to curb pollution. The tax should be phased in over five years, thus giving businesses and consumers time to replace inefficient older machines.
Terrorism is theater. Terrorism will taper off if people lose interest in news coverage of acts of terror. It is tough to ignore a spectacular event such as the destruction of the World Trade Center, but we can do our share by ignoring newspaper and television stories about run-of-the-mill terrorism. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like a traffic accident on Interstate 95: a tragedy for the handful of people involved that wouldn’t have affected the rest of us if we hadn’t slowed down to gawk. The last couple of years have been the most violent and even so the number of people killed on both sides has been about 1,000 per year. Shouldn’t this many deaths provoke our sympathy and interest? If we’re motivated by humanitarian concerns, there are richer opportunities for saving lives right here at home. For example, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 Americans are killed every year by medical malpractice (To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, Kohn et al., 2000). The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration reports that 41,821 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2000, at a cost to the economy of $230.6 billion, not including intangibles such as physical pain or reduced quality of life. Many of these deaths could be prevented with simple engineering, information system, and procedural improvements. If we want to be unselfish and help foreigners we might look at malaria, a preventable disease that kills between one and three million people each year.
