philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel -> philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel/
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. Conventional wisdom in international politics is "Nations do not have friends. 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. 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. During the 1930s the average European Christian had the following preferences: 1. However it is worth pointing out that Hitler original plan was not to kill Jews; 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. Today the average American would probably express the following preference list: 1. How happy would the 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. 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. In the 1940s and 1950s Arab governments and civilians emulated German policies from 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. You could say the same for the more than 1 million Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel between 1989 and 2002. France is home to 5 million Muslims, a rapidly growing community whose native sons include Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th September 11th 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 ( 16 "French Jews leave home for Israel", BBC News, January 7, 2003). Israel has no practical value for the nations of Continental Europe. The surviving descendant's of Germany's 500,000 pre-war 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 WWII were murdered by mobs). Let's start with Article 22 of the 19 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 55-year-long war it therefore becomes necessary to engage in a bit of analysis. 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. 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 2500 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. 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 ...
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