<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">[I had a representative of the local Democrats explain to me at the market today that the problem in the Mideast is that "There need to be peace makers on both sides [sic]." (The USG role was not mentioned.) But that's not quite the point. --CGE]<div><br></div><div>From <<i><a href="http://www.maxajl.com/israels-miracle-economy/">http://www.maxajl.com/israels-miracle-economy/</a></i>>:<br><div><br></div><div><div>Israel’s Miracle Economy </div> <div><div></div><p align="">I saw Dan Senor speak last year at Cornell when he
was on book tour for his well-timed intervention about Israel’s
miracle economy. Jewish groups on campus which I didn’t even know
existed popped out to paste their names onto posters as sponsors of his
talk. Senor was a spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional
Authority in Iraq, and an adviser to the Bush II administration, and
so almost certainly culpable for war crimes, but for the organized
campus organs of American Jewry, mobilizing Jewish identity behind
state aggression and the murder of millions is nearly reflexive.</p><p align="">Be that as it may, one student at the talk, after hearing Senor
pontificate about the smoothly-oiled machine that is the Israeli
economy, and taking in his allusions to the high-tech economy as an
off-shoot of the defense-industrial base, asked an unusually
perceptive question: “would true peace be bad for the Israeli
economy?” Senor fumbled and fidgeted, offered some patently dishonest
figure about defense spending only being five percent of Israeli GDP,
and then said: “Of course they want peace. It’s so hard though!”</p><p align="">For sure.</p><p align="">Eyal Press reviews four books on the Israeli economy and Israeli Palestinians in a recent NYRB piece, a reaction to the #J14 protests which recently convulsed Israeli society.
Press politely demolishes Senor’s ridiculous tract, writing that “a
miracle is not how most Israelis would describe what has happened to
their economy in recent years,” and juxtaposing Israeli
unemployment and economic dysfunction against the unemployment
rate in Gaza: 45 percent. Pretty good, and better still when Press
writes of the reluctance of the Labor Party parastate institutions to
accept the Mizrahi immigrants into their channels for Israeli social
advancement – although better yet would have been mention of the racist
disgust the European Jews harbored against the Arab Jewish immigrants
from the outset, as leaders like Ben-Gurion fretted about the
“Levantization” of Israeli society.</p><p align="">Press goes on to write of anger at the families who have sequestered
for themselves much of the fruit of Israeli settler-colonialism, making
Israel the country with the highest poverty rate in the OECD. And then
the lack of anger at Israeli-settler-colonialism itself: “The leaders of
the movement calling for “social justice” did not draw attention to the
daily injustices taking place across the Green Line, in part to avoid
alienating potential supporters on the Israeli center and right.”</p><p align="">He goes on to discuss Shir Hever’s fine study
of the political economy of the occupation, which I will be reviewing
elsewhere, and goes on to conclude, after noting the 100 billion
dollars that Israel spent in the occupied territories between 1970
and 2008, that “Were expenditures on settlements more explicitly
recognized, the protesters who took to the streets this summer could
potentially achieve something the left has failed to do: convince
mainstream Israelis that the occupation is unsustainable,”
something which strikes me as untrue, given the way that the benefits
from the settlements, which include material benefits such as
subsidized settlement housing are differentially distributed
over Israeli ethnic groups: large numbers of Mizrahi live in
settlements and serve in the army, while support for the occupation
and Israeli militarism enables them to prove their “Israeliness” in a
society which never wanted them in the first place and in which one
competes for symbolic capital through hatred of the Arab.</p><p align="">As Smadar Lavie
writes, “The left almost always chants the slogan, ‘Fund the ‘hoods,
not the settlements,’ in the context of the military occupation of
the West Bank and Gaza without acknowledging the fact that the
Mizrahim are the silent majority of the West Bank and Gaza settlements.”</p><p align="">Furthermore, the occupation also provides a built-in excuse for
the militarization off which the elite directly or indirectly
feeds, while also hardening the nationalism which holds together
Israeli society from bottom-to-top by maintaining the specter of the
Arab threat. Press overstates the ease with which protesters could
have raised the occupation by focusing on its costs rather than the
benefits it provides in various ways to varied social groups within
Israel.</p><p align="">Press also writes of Israeli Palestinian participation in the
tent protest movement, managing to capture the nuance and truth of that
participation with considerably more grace than the dishonest, opportunist, pandering polemics some saw fit to provide:</p> <p align=""><i>No group in Israel stood to benefit more from the
emergence of a movement dedicated to social justice. But the Israeli
Arabs had good reason to wonder whether the vision guiding the
protesters this summer included them, which is why some hesitated to
participate. “Many say we shouldn’t join this struggle because it’s
the Israeli middle class and we’re not part of the Israeli middle
class,” Shahin Nasser told me. A journalist from an Arab
neighborhood of Haifa called Wadi Nisnas, Nasser was among the
founders of a tent encampment established in the community despite
such misgivings. He saw the protests as “an opportunity to raise our
voices,” he told me when I visited one night, which is why he’d been
paying visits to encampments in Haifa’s Jewish neighborhoods. “I want
them to know what it’s like for Arabs here.” I asked him if he thought
people were listening. “Yes,” he said, “they are very open.”</i></p><p align=""><i>The openness was not always on display. At a tent on Rothschild
Boulevard one night, I heard a man denounce some Muslim women from
neighboring Jaffa who had been invited to talk about the problems in
their community (the man, who spoke in Arabic, was an Iraqi Jew). One of
the women later told me she’d walked the length of Rothschild
Boulevard shortly after the protests began, and come away feeling that
there was no place for her there. Yet by mid-August, it was no longer
unusual to hear of an Arab speaker talking of injustice at a
demonstration and receiving a rousing ovation from a predominantly
Jewish crowd. At one protest, poor Arabs from the Jaffa neighborhood
of Ajami marched together with poor Jews from a traditionally
pro-Likud neighborhood in south Tel Aviv, something few could have
imagined back in June.</i></p><p align="">Press writes elsewhere of moves to the center amongst working-class
Mizrahi, traditional supporters of the right, and the meager
offerings of the Trajtenberg Commission: an 8 billion dollar
spending package and some shifts in tax rates. One can hope that this
will not be enough to buy off the protesters. Last week, a friend
tells me 100,000 gathered in squares across the country. But for the
moment the mobilization has stalled.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Meanwhile, Netanyahu has re-charged with militaristic energy an atmosphere already crackling with the static of war: first,
punishing the PA for pushing the Palestinian membership in UNESCO
by delaying transfers of funds and acceleration the construction of
2000 housing units, thereby hoping to placate the right and secure his
coalition by shoring up his support amongst the Mizrahi voters, a
support that had been buckling under the intense social pressure
generated by the Israeli protests wave, second, pushing talk of war with Iran, and third, lashing out at Gaza in the recent round of murders.</p><p align="">As Yacov Ben Efrat writes,</p> <p align="">"While taking pity on the Jewish population and
understanding the dire straits of the Jewish middle class, it is
cruel, hardhearted and racist towards the Arab population. This is a
Knesset which seeks peace at home while undermining the foundations
of peace abroad. This is a Knesset which the protest leaders have
decided to lobby and “supervise,” showing their faith in its parties, no
matter how right-wing they are, as long as they adopt a social agenda."</p><p align="">The question is where now. Ben Efrat argues that “a real protest must
raise the peace flag as well as the social flag.” If that occurs, it
will not occur because the protesters suddenly “realize” that they are
being racist and that the occupation is wrong, but because they see
it in their interest to do so. As indeed they should. The question is if
they will.</p><div><br></div></div></div></div></body></html>