Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 17 

 

Israel is the only country that regularly attracts psychotic criticism

 

When I was a naive young medical student, I was sent to interview a patient on a psychiatric ward. I couldn’t find anything wrong with him. At the debriefing session, I was staggered to learn that he was a paranoid schizophrenic: he believed he was the resurrected Jesus and that they were trying to kill him. I had missed a diagnostic symptom known in the trade as a circumscribed delusion. 

My diagnosis of much of the egregious criticism that is heaped daily on Israel is not that the critics are misguided, misinformed or prejudiced, nor that they are swept up in a form of groupthink that merges at times into mass hysteria – though all of that is true up to a point. I believe that some, at least, suffer from a circumscribed delusion, and that their skewed perception of that tiny Middle Eastern democracy is so detached from the real world that it amounts to a mass psychosis.

A psychosis is a mental disturbance characterised by cognitive and/or emotional loss of contact with reality. This is an apt descriptor of the delusional suite of malevolent accusations launched against Israel on a daily basis. 

Cary Nelson [1] has documented several high-profile sufferers of this psychopathology among US academics. Judith Butler, a philosophy professor at the University of California, is a woman with a politicidal vision for Israel. Her ardent desire is for Jews to relinquish their hard-won state and return to a position of an ineradicable alterity – pretentious language for the restoration of the homeless “wandering Jew” (a phrase of medieval origin implying punishment for the supposed crime of killing Christ) or the “rootless cosmopolitan” of Soviet propagandists’ imagination.  

Butler’s unconscionable opinions are moderate compared to those of Jasbir Puar [2], professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey, who takes anti-Israel rhetoric to a higher level. As well as accusing Israel of apartheid and pinkwashing (the trumpeting of gay rights as a means of distracting attention from the state's criminality), she writes: “Through debilitating practices of maiming and stunting, Palestinians are further literalised and lateralised as surface, as bodies without souls, as sheer biology, thus rendered nonhuman.” Faced with the IDF’s efforts to minimise civilian fatalities, she opines that, for Israelis, “the Palestinians are not even human enough for death.” 

Then there is the late Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago [3] who updated and amplified the old blood libel: “What is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz,” a view enthusiastically supported by Israeli writer Yitzchak Laor [4]: “Gas chambers are not the only way to destroy a nation, it is enough to develop high rates of infant mortality.”

To describe such fulminations as irrational would be an understatement. And yet these voices have found welcoming platforms throughout the world to disseminate their crackpot theories and many occupy senior positions at prestigious universities. The UK hosts several: Ilan Pappé, of the University of Exeter, is one of those “historians” who lacks interest in historical veracity (“who knows what the facts are?”); another is his Oxford University colleague, Professor Avi Shlaim (“the job of the historian is to judge”). Many of these so-called experts, who cavalierly ignore evidence to promote their narrative of a brutal, bigoted and illegitimate Israel, receive lavish praise from peers and have become global celebrities.

Human rights organisations such as Amnesty and Oxfam have never been slow to criticise Israel but they turned poisonous in 2001 after the NGO Durban “antiracism” conference that was effectively an anti-Israel hatefest that spawned the BDS (boycotts, divestments, sanctions) movement. Many BDS supporters proclaim their devotion to universal human rights yet appear to have no problem with founder Omar Barghouti’s call to “euthanise” Israel. Demanding the destruction of a state and condemning most of its inhabitants to homelessness is both ethically despicable and patently unworkable. It is also a recipe for large-scale bloodletting as most Israelis, having nowhere else to go, would resist. 

Much of the modern discourse about Israel is infected with bizarre delusions and conspiracy theories about the way Zionists dictate US foreign policy, control the media, manipulate global finance, and plot to dominate the world. The IDF, it is alleged, is not a conventional army but an instrument of mass murder and terrorism; Israeli troops shoot Palestinian children for fun or target practice or to harvest internal organs, or because Jews are conditioned – according to award-winning British playwright Caryl Churchill [5] – to regard all non-Jews as unworthy of empathy. In this narrative, Zionism, by its nature irredeemably evil, has always sought the ethnic cleansing and ultimately genocide of the Palestinians. 

 

This is not normal criticism of the kind that is directed at other countries. It’s deranged.

 

Social media, in the words of Israeli writer Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll [6], have added a new dimension to the disease: “What we see online is a mass of misinformation…. The result is that masses of people around the world think that Israel feeds on the blood of Palestinian babies just as the Nazis – and Christians before them – believed that we fed on the blood of their babies.” 

 

“When people of sound mind display clear signs of deviation from reality it demands of us to examine the symptom and expose the defect,” wrote Barry Shaw [7] in 2016.

 

The defect is a form of collective insanity. If you think this judgement is harsh, consider the alternative – that the proponents of grotesque fabrications are liars. I suggest that, while some probably are, others may actually believe their own fantasies. In either case, the end result is the demonisation of Israel that, in turn, attracts an unsavoury following of antisemites who are all too willing to join the fray. 

 

Does antisemitism itself lie at the root of the vilification of Israel? The evidence is compelling. Antisemitism is a kind of psychosis that has never disappeared. Post-1945, the expression of Jew-hatred, while no longer acceptable in polite society, had to find an outlet; so it may have mutated not just into antiZionism but into psychotic belief systems about the Jewish state.

 

In one sense, the cause of the disease is less important than its outcome – the normalisation of falsehoods. Ben-Dror Yemini [8] puts the matter starkly: “When these statements are circulated in an atmosphere that is antagonistic to Israel, created as a result of similar lies made by other lecturers and journalists, the lies become truth.” Wider public opinion, shaped by ill-informed or malicious journalistic filtering of extreme ideas into the mass media, inevitably follows suit. That is every bit as dangerous to Jews as previous incarnations of classic antisemitism.

 

The widespread dissemination of a warped view on Israel relentlessly drags moderate opinion towards extremism that increasingly appears acceptable. What should be an unimportant lunatic fringe has wormed its way into mainstream institutions including churches, trade unions, charities and political parties.

 

In 2003, at the height of Arafat’s terrorist campaign against Israelis, a European survey found that 60% of respondents regarded Israel as the greatest threat to world peace [9]. In 2005, Clare Short [10], a UK cabinet minister, asserted that “the oppression of the Palestinian people is the major cause of bitter division and violence in the world.” There we have it – the classic Nazi trope of the Jewish threat to all of humanity has morphed into the scapegoating of Israel as the root of all evil. 

 

An especially damaging consequence of this delusional mindset is a dysfunctional international response to the Middle East. The UN condemns Israel more than any other country thereby contributing nothing to conflict resolution [11]. The UN Human Rights Council appointed the infamous Richard Falk as its special advisor; there he exploited his position to accuse Israel of genocidal intent towards the Palestinians. The same brand of obsessive, baseless attacks on Israel occurs in other branches of the UN such as UNESCO, that erases any Jewish historical connection to Judaism’s holiest sites, the Economic and Social Council, that accuses Israel of being the world’s foremost violator of women’s rights, and the World Health Assembly, that claims Israel systematically denies Palestinians basic healthcare.

 

This process is clearly pathological. Yet most consumers of world news have no idea that the phenomenon even exists. All who genuinely care for human rights have a duty to banish this ignorance and hold the facilitators of the malaise to account. 

 

I often wonder what became of the schizophrenic patient I met in the psychiatric unit all these years ago. Treating psychotic patients is challenging. Dealing with psychotic populations is even harder. That’s not an excuse for inaction as they are capable of inflicting serious harm on themselves and others. We can’t confine them to locked psychiatric wards but we can and must isolate them intellectually and politically to preserve historical accuracy, to counter their antisemitic incitement and, above all, to enhance the prospects of peace. 

 

1.        Nelson, C. Israel Denial. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2019

2.       Puar, J. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, Duke University Press, 2017

3.       Saramago, J. The militant magician. Guardian, 28 December 2002 

4.       Laor, Y. After Jenin. London Review of Books, May 2002

5.        https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/seven-jewish-children/

6.       Keats Jaskoll, S. The Whack-A-Mole model of Israel advocacy. Jewish Chronicle, 3 December 2020 

7.       https://israelseen.com/2016/02/07/barry-shaw-how-the-western-media-and-world-leaders-have-israeli-blood-on-their-hands

8.       Yemini, BD. Industry of Lies. New York, ISGA, 2017

9.       https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/nov/03/eu.israel

10.    https://weepingskies.blogspot.com/search?q=clare+short

11.     https://www.newsweek.com/un-palestinian-package-resolutions-only-fans-flames-conflict-opinion-1550821

 

 

 

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 16 

 

The notion that Israel owes her existence to the United States is a myth rooted in antisemitism

 

How many times have you heard or read a journalist explaining that Israel’s actions – or even survival – are, to a large extent, a product of unwavering American backing? That perception has long been a feature of much media and academic commentary throughout the world. 

 

It is, and always was, nonsense. And it arises from a racist assumption. To help us identify its origin, let’s rewind to the Six Day War.

 

On 9^th June 1967, Egyptian President Nasser broadcast these words to his people: 

“In the morning of last Monday, 5^th June, the enemy struck. If we say now it was a stronger blow than we had expected, we must say at the same time and with complete certainty that it was bigger than the potential at his disposal. It became very clear from the first moment that there were other powers behind the enemy.” [1]

 

Nasser was referring to the UK and, especially, the USA. In the jargon of his political backers in Moscow, who had exploited dysfunctional authoritarian regimes throughout the Middle East for their own geostrategic purposes, the Arab defeat was result of the intervention of the “imperialists” in the early hours of the war. That scenario was, of course, pure fiction. It had been invented to save the faces of both the Soviet and Arab leadership.

 

The Soviet Union viewed Israel as a US outpost, a colonial creation of the capitalist West, and one that had severely embarrassed their Arab allies to whom they had supplied state-of-the-art weaponry for many years. Israel’s victory in 1967 compromised the reputation of the USSR itself and so any alibi, however implausible, was useful. 

 

But the speech was revealing in another way: it exposed the contempt with which Nasser, schooled in all matters Jewish by the antisemitic Muslim Brotherhood, viewed Israelis. That contempt had deep roots. For most Arabs, it was axiomatic that Jews – an inferior dhimmi minority throughout the Muslim world for centuries – were cowards who couldn’t fight and were therefore incapable of winning a war without the help of a powerful ally. To this day, the “Arab street” believes two specific fabrications: that America, forced into action by the Jewish lobby, won the Six Day War for Israel and that, as a result of American hesitancy, Egypt and Syria won the 1973 (Yom Kippur) War for the Arabs. 

 

In the twenty-first century, the idea of Israel and the US scheming in lockstep to dominate the Middle East is a core belief of the “progressive” left that seeks to apply the intersectionality principle to Zionism, imperialism, slavery and other forms of oppression. On this issue, ideologists of the far left and far right, cheered on from the sidelines by Islamists, are of one mind – that Jews control the US government through the dark arts of a near-invincible pro-Israel lobby. In their racist paranoia, they are aided and abetted by a coterie of western academics such as Mearsheimer and Walt [2] who invoke the classic antisemitic trope of a Zionist conspiracy manipulating American foreign policy to serve Israel’s interests. 

 

But surely, I hear my reader protest, the US is indeed a staunch ally of Israel? Well, yes and no. US friendship for Israel is far from the unshakeable constant that is widely assumed. As so often, the historical evidence points to the need for a more nuanced view. 

 

Although the US supported both the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the subsequent League of Nations Mandate – that instructed Britain to re-establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine – it declined, at the Evian conference of 1938, to offer the trapped Jews of Europe sanctuary from the murderous Third Reich. 

 

As for Jewish efforts to reverse the British betrayal of the Mandate and establish a safe haven for the remnants of their people after the Holocaust, the US was unenthusiastic about the UN partition plan of 1947 and offered no assistance whatsoever to Israel during her War of Independence. 

As historian George Simpson [3] explains: “Washington’s actual support for the Zionists was ambiguous, halting, and limited. Its support for partition followed that of Moscow and was virtually confined to the White House, which acted against the staunch opposition of the Department of State and the Pentagon. Indeed, not only did the State Department collaborate with the British to exclude the Negev from the territory of the prospective state of Israel (only to be foiled by Truman), but in late 1947, State [Dept] orchestrated a regional arms embargo that left the Palestine Jews highly disadvantaged.”

 

After an unpropitious start, the American posture towards Israel lurched back and forth in the succeeding decades. Yet the much-touted economic, military and diplomatic US-Israel alliance is often regarded as the ultimate secret weapon in Israel’s armoury. The facts suggest otherwise.

 

Middle East analyst Sean Durns [4] sets the record straight. “It is a common, albeit false, assumption that the United States and Israel closely cooperated since the Jewish state’s recreation in 1948. The State Department and the Pentagon had argued that US support for Israel would be a strategic liability. America, in turn, often kept Israel at arm’s length, both forcing the Jewish state to give up territory won in the 1956 Suez War against Nasser and prohibiting weapon sales until 1962.” 

 

The US remained pointedly cool to Israel throughout the fifties, when first Czechoslovakia and then France provided most arms at a period of greatest danger to the renascent Jewish state. In a stunning revelation by Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien [5], the US abandoned Israel at least three times in the face of threats by the Soviet Union to annihilate the tiny country – in 1956, 1970 and 1973 – by declining to offer Israel protection under its nuclear umbrella. This alarming fickleness on the part of her “ally” must have been a major factor in Israel’s decision to develop and retain an independent nuclear deterrent. 

 

In the 1980s, the pro-Israel Ronald Reagan publicly criticised Israel’s actions in Lebanon and annexation of the Golan Heights. He punished Israel by temporarily holding up arms deliveries and suspending strategic cooperation. Reagan also clashed with prime minister Menachem Begin over the sale of AWACS (an airborne early warning system) to the Saudis. 

 

As for formal alliances, Israel’s claim on US support in times of crisis is weaker than that of Montenegro or Albania, both NATO members, unlike Israel. Bizarrely, if Turkey, an increasingly Islamist and anti-Western NATO country, is threatened with attack, the US is obliged to help her. Israel has no such protection. 

 

US diplomatic support for Israel in the UN is often characterised as permanently protective of Israel and obstructive to the reaching of a fair settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. This is demonstrably false.

 

When President Barack Obama, one of the most pro-Palestinian US leaders, refused to veto the harshly anti-Israel UNSC resolution 2334 in 2016, it was followed by no discernible progress towards peace – if anything, Palestinian positions hardened. Obama may have been influenced by the growing culture of anti-Zionism in his academic circles. In this respect he resembled his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, whose stridently expressed policy of creating “daylight” between the US and Israel led to his rejection by a majority of Jewish voters, whom Carter falsely blamed for his 1980 re-election defeat. According to former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren [6], Obama (like Carter) saw Israel as persecutor rather than victim. And (also like Carter), he blamed US peace-making failures on Israel – despite the previously hawkish Begin’s agreement to withdraw from all of Sinai, to secure a peace treaty with Egypt, at Carter’s behest.

 

What about economic support for Israel’s armed forces? We keep hearing that the US Treasury virtually underwrites Israel’s purchases of advanced weaponry to maintain her qualitative military edge. That’s another half-truth, at best. The US only provided substantial financial support to Israel after 1978 – and then it was conditional on recycling most aid back to the US. Currently 75% of US military aid to Israel must be spent in the US – a figure that will rise to 100% in a few years – and thus supports the American rather than the Israeli economy. Much of the rest is spent in joint projects (e.g. the Iron Dome missile defence system) that benefits US as well as Israeli security. 

 

Few are aware that US military support to the Arab and Muslim world dwarfs (by a factor of around six) that given to Israel. [7] Even Donald Trump, said to be the most pro-Israel president in US history, insisted on selling a massive package of F-35 fighter jets and MQ-9 unmanned systems to the United Arab Emirates as part of the 2020 Abraham Accords – with more lucrative arms sales to Arab states in the pipeline – riding roughshod over the Israeli defence establishment’s explicit opposition. 

 

In summary, while many US presidents have been sympathetic to Israel, US foreign and defence policy is generally moulded by the State and Defence departments that have been consistently indifferent and at times openly hostile to Israel’s predicament. 

 

Those who mistakenly believe that the US is and always has been the final guarantor of Israel’s security will, if they have been genuinely misinformed, revise their opinions in the light of the evidence presented here. But those who continue to peddle the Nasserian myth of an unbreakable US-Israel axis, forged by the hidden tentacles of a global Zionist conspiracy and sustained by an irresistible American pro-Israel lobby, should be called out for what they are: purveyors of an antisemitically motivated falsehood.   

 

1. Laqueur W, Rubin B (eds). The Israel-Arab Reader. London, Penguin Books, 2008

2. Mearsheimer JJ, Walt SM. The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

3. Simpson GL. Revisiting the US role in three Middle East crises. Middle East Quarterly, Summer, 2018 

https://www.meforum.org/7242/revisiting-the-us-role-in-three-middle-east-crises

4. Durns S Black September remembered: how the PLO forged the modern Middle East. The National Interest, 21^st August 2020. 

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/black-september-remembered-how-plo-forged-modern-middle-east-167531

5. O’Brien, CC. The Siege. London, Paladin Books, 1988

6. Oren M. Ally. New York, Random House, 2015

7. Shindman P. Understanding US foreign aid to Israel. Honest Reporting, 2019 https://honestreporting.com/us-foreign-aid-israel/

 

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 15  

Israel’s world-class humanitarian programmes are an expression of the country’s core values 

 

A quiz question: who said this? Whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare will react powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity.”
 
It’s the final (clunkily translated) line of Theodor Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State [1], widely regarded as the foundational document of modern Zionism.
 
Herzl was a secular Jew. Yet his statement resonates powerfully with Jewish religious aspirations of Tikkun Olam – repairing the world – a notion that translates into a highly contemporary ideal of improving society through individual and collective action. According to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, the Jewish injunction to act as an Or Lagoyim – a light unto the nations – should be the “guiding star” of Israeli behaviour.  
 
David Kramer [2] has written that Israel’s extensive humanitarian efforts, at home and abroad, are a manifestation of the modern Zionist vision as imagined by Herzl long before the State was established. It may also be interpreted as a practical response to the historical Jewish experience of marginalisation and abuse at the hands of colonial powers.
 
While Jewish and Zionist ethical values undoubtedly motivate Israel’s commitment to extending aid and succour to those in need around the world, that generosity of spirit is frequently greeted with disbelief, cynicism and contempt. Abir Kopty [3], writing in Middle East Eye, informed her readers that it amounted to a monstrous deception designed to conceal Israel’s inhumanity: “The use of humanitarian aid to whitewash Israel's record of occupation and human rights violations is not new. From Nepal to Haiti, Uganda to Fiji, this humanitarian aid is always followed by a propaganda effort to tell the world how ‘Israel is human’, something that is far from reality.” 
 
That’s the view of a hate-filled extremist, of course, but it nevertheless contains a tiny kernel of truth. Providing aid to people in need unquestionably assists the desire of donor countries to project a positive image. There’s no shame in that. The UK government’s British Council, an organisation that says it “builds connections, understanding and trust between people in the UK and other countries,” openly asserts that national self-interest should inform policy in this sphere. A House of Lords Select Committee [4] goes further: “the promotion of British values through the funding of international development projects can yield significant soft power gains.” 
 
The strategy of providing aid in the hope of reaping at least some political dividends worked for a while during the first two decades of Israel’s existence. It came to an abrupt halt when developing countries in Africa and Asia succumbed to pressure from the Arab League to sever diplomatic and commercial links with the Jewish state in the wake of the 1967 and 1973 wars. But that didn’t damage this strand of Israeli foreign policy for long though it did generate a degree of cynicism in the political leadership. It may partly explain why Israel’s official aid budget accounts to a mere 0.1% of GNP, well short of the 0.7% recommended by the UN. The former figure is misleading, however, as it seriously underestimates the totality of Israel’s aid efforts across multiple governmental, civil society and private sectors, often in conjunction with third parties or with Jewish groups abroad. 
 
The main official Israeli channel for delivering foreign aid is Mashav [5], the Hebrew acronym for the Agency for International Development Cooperation​​​​. Launched in 1958 by foreign minister Golda Meir following her return from Africa, it represented Israel’s defiant response to the Bandung Afro-Asian conference of 1955 from which Israel had been pointedly excluded. The agency coordinates Israeli agricultural, educational and medical programmes in developing countries, particularly those that suffered under the yoke of colonialism and foreign exploitation. Since its establishment, around 300,000 professionals from more than 132 countries have participated in Mashav's training courses. 
 
Other notable sources of Israeli aid include IsraAID [6,7], an NGO that has delivered extensive programmes to more than 50 disaster-affected countries since 2001, and Save A Child’s Heart [8] that has provided free lifesaving cardiac care to over 5,000 children (half from the Arab world, including the Palestinian Authority) in 62 countries since 1995. SACH was awarded the UN’s Population Award in 2018. 
 
A key provider of overseas aid is the military. The IDF was a pioneer in eliding humanitarian and military objectives. Its first formal humanitarian operation was in 1953, when an earthquake had cost over 1,000 lives in Greece. Although Israel was struggling for survival, physically and economically, Israeli navy ships were diverted from an exercise to assist the survivors and give them necessary medical care. Since then, teams from the IDF Medical Corps and Home Front Command have provided rescue and medical services across the globe, including after an earthquake in Turkey in 1999, an earthquake in Haiti in 2010, a typhoon in the Philippines in 2013 and an earthquake in Nepal in 2015.
 
The Mexican Ambassador to the United Nations [9] spoke of Israel’s immediate response to two devastating Mexican earthquakes in 2017: “Other countries can absolutely learn from Israel’s rapid reaction time and its ability to be on site, build field hospitals and have the necessary human resources and infrastructure in place mere hours after a natural disaster occurs around the world.”

Israel’s emergency assistance has even extended to her enemies. For around two decades from 1978, the IDF ran a medical unit near the Lebanese border where victims of the prolonged civil war were treated - it became known as The Good Fence. And for many years, including during the most recent full-scale conflict with Hamas in 2014, Israel has permitted essential supplies such as food, clothing, medicines, fuel and electricity to be transferred daily from Israel into Gaza. Despite repeated rocket attacks from that territory, she has continued to facilitate the entry of Gazan patients (including two relatives of the Hamas prime minister) to Israel for specialist medical care, and established clinics near the Gaza border to enable injured Palestinians to be treated by experienced trauma surgeons.

The horrific Syrian civil war prompted the army's Northern Command to launch Operation Good Neighbour in 2016. This bold initiative served 200,000 residents of south-western Syria via a coordinated programme of medical and civilian humanitarian aid that had actually started in secret several years earlier. Its central feature was the establishment of a field hospital at a military post in the Golan Heights near the Syrian border where 7,000 patients received care in the day clinic. More than 4,900 injured Syrians, including 1,300 children, were treated there then transferred to Israeli hospitals. The operation was forced to close down when Assad’s forces took control of southern Syria. 
 
In the same year, the World Health Organization [10] recognized the IDF’s expert emergency medical team, as “number one in the world.” That’s high praise indeed from an organisation not generally known for its friendliness to Israel.
 
Just as Herzl prophesied the rebirth of the Jewish state by the mid-twentieth century, he was equally prescient about its benign role in the world thereafter. That the world too often fails to reciprocate with a commensurate appreciation of Israel’s impressive contribution to humanity doesn’t change the reality. Nor will it deter future Israeli governments of all hues from continuing to assist those in need wherever they live or however hostile their regimes. This powerful philanthropic impulse is a national characteristic around which all Israeli citizens can unite with genuine pride.
 

1. Herzl T. The Jewish State. London, Penguin, 2010 (originally Der Judenstaat, Vienna, 1896).

2. Kramer, D.  https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/my-state-of-the-heart-with-coronavirus/

3. Kopty A. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/there-nothing-genuine-about-israels-humanitarian-aid-syrians, July 2018.

4. House of Lords Select Committee on Soft Power and UK's Influence, London, UK, 2014. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldselect/ldsoftpower/150/15008.htm#n338

5. Mashav https://mfa.gov.il/MFA/mashav/AboutMASHAV/Pages/Background.aspx

6.IsraAID  https://www.israaid.org/about

7. Gradstein L, Jerusalem Post, 27 September 2020 https://www.jpost.com/magazine/israaid-fixing-the-world-one-disaster-at-a-time-643412

8. Save a Child’s Heart https://saveachildsheart.org

9. Wurtman R. Honest Reporting, 20 January 2020 https://honestreporting.com/idf-humanitarian-aid-missions-saving-the-world/

10. Gross JA. Times of Israel, 13 November 2016 https://www.timesofisrael.com/un-ranks-idf-emergency-medical-team-as-no-1-in-the-world/

 

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 14 

 

Israel is the world’s most contractionist state

 

In the course of an otherwise sober discussion about Iran’s politicidal threats against Israel on BBC radio’s Today programme, former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw startled listeners with a Tourette-like outburst: “When will Israel stop stealing Palestinian land?” he snarled. Straw knew that he was way off-topic but his anger was clearly so intense that he just couldn’t help himself.

Straw wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to hurl an allegation at Israel that is based on a false premise but I have a sneaking sympathy for him. Underlying his outrage lies a powerful belief system. Many millions of people around the world accept the following as gospel truth: that Israel is always continuously extending its borders through a combination of illegal foreign conquest, blatant theft of Palestinian territory and ethnic cleansing. Many also believe that this reflects its underlying Zionist, colonialist nature that is infinitely, ravenously hungry for more and more real estate. That none of the above is true is neither here nor there as their opinions are more akin to religious conviction than to political judgement.

Spare a thought for the faithful, for they must be more than a little perplexed by recent developments.

In August 2020, Israel’s government reversed its policy decision of some months earlier to extend its sovereignty into just under a third of the West Bank (half of area C where about 400,000 Israelis live) in exchange for signing a peace treaty with a relatively small, if wealthy, Gulf state, the United Arab Emirates. Why would Israel, a country allegedly hell-bent on expansion, desist from the opportunity presented by an unprecedentedly friendly White House, to absorb into Israel all the major settlements plus a slice of strategically important acreage in the Jordan Valley?

To find an answer, I suggest that we look at a few key facts.

Although Israel is one of the smallest countries in the word (1/600th of the size of the Arab world), she once held or aspired to hold a much larger land mass. The Herut movement, founded by Menachem Begin in 1948 and forerunner of Netanyahu’s Likud, trumpeted the slogan Both Sides of The Jordan – meaning that Israel should extend its borders eastwards into today’s Hashemite Kingdom to try to match those of its ancestral homeland. It didn’t happen, and not only because Begin was rejected by the Israeli electorate for three decades, but because Zionist and Israeli leaders (including Begin himself) have always sought territorial compromise in their efforts to achieve peace.

Few realise that these early Herut activists, widely denounced as fanatics by their socialist Zionist colleagues, weren’t merely spouting messianic fantasies of a return to biblical boundaries. The original Jewish National Home, as embodied in international law by the San Remo Resolution of 1920 and confirmed by the Treaties of Sèvres and Lausanne (that disposed of the Ottoman empire), comprised two of today’s countries, Israel and Jordan. In 1922, the British unilaterally carved Transjordan [1] out of 78% of the Mandate (east of the Jordan river) to which mainstream Zionist leaders promptly (if reluctantly) renounced claims.

So Mandatory Palestine was partitioned into a prospective Jewish state and a much larger Arab state – and the Jewish leadership accepted it. The future Jewish state had contracted to 22% of the Jewish National Home.

In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed a further partition, in which the Jews would have been granted a derisory 20% of Western Palestine [1] or under 5% of the original Jewish National Home. Unsurprisingly, the Jewish leadership was unhappy with the idea but accepted it as a basis for negotiation if it would lead to peace.

In 1947, the UN Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) offered the Yishuv a more reasonable 55% of Western Palestine. This was denounced as unfair by the Arabs on demographic grounds. But that’s nonsense: based on their population in the former Ottoman Empire, the Jews should have been granted seven times that offered by UNSCOP [2]. Nevertheless, the Jewish leadership accepted a plan that would have deprived them of their historical heartlands of Judea and Samaria and of Jerusalem, their most sacred city and the focus of two millennia of yearning.

Following the 1967 Six Day War (the declared aim of which was to destroy Israel), Israel gave up vast swathes of territory (much of which was strategically important and in which she had invested substantial resources), dismantled hundreds of settlements – in Sinai, Gaza and West Bank – and offered to relinquish even more in an attempt to achieve peace. In returning the whole of Sinai to Egypt, Israel (under the arch-expansionist Menachem Begin) relinquished close to 90% of the land she captured in 1967. This was equivalent to almost three times Israel’s pre-1967 land mass. And she did it in exchange for nothing more than a paper agreement. The “cold peace” between Israel and Egypt has held – just – but relations between the two countries have never approached the level that most Israelis had hoped (and had been promised).

Such a move was unprecedented. All countries that take territory in the course of a defensive war have been permitted to retain a substantial part of it – except Israel. Even the Temple Mount – the holiest site to Jews – is not under Israeli jurisdiction today, despite being located in the country’s capital city, but remains under the supervision of the Jordanian-Islamic Waqf. Moreover, for the sake of promoting peace, Israel has agreed to the Arab demand that only Muslims should be permitted to pray there.

In 1994, Israel withdrew from parts of the northern West Bank to clinch a peace treaty with Jordan. Again, peaceful relations have been uneasily maintained. The Jewish state had contracted again, this time giving up historically and militarily important territory that had been part of the Jewish National Home, as enshrined in international law. 

In 2000, prime minister Ehud Barak ordered the withdrawal of the IDF from all of South Lebanon in 2000, since re-occupied by Hezbollah, an organisation sworn to the obliteration of Israel. Barak also offered to trade the Golan (that was also part of the original Mandate) for peace with Syria, and East Jerusalem (from which Jews were ethnically cleansed in 1948) for peace with the Palestinians. 

In 2005, prime minister Ariel Sharon – in a breathtaking reversal of his hawkish political past – pulled all Israeli troops, along with 9,000 civilian settlers, out of the Gaza Strip, instantly creating a power vacuum. It was gratefully filled by Hamas, the genocidal Iranian-backed terrorist organisation, that has been attacking Israeli civilians ever since with a panoply of lethal weapons including rockets, tunnels, and incendiary balloons.

Fast-forward to 2020: the suspension of the “annexation” moves in the West Bank (by a supposedly hard-right government) to secure a peace treaty with UAE was another example of Israel’s willingness to concede territorial claims for the sake of peace.

But the issue of Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank will return to the agenda at some point as there is a consensus across the mainstream Israeli political spectrum that it is vital to Israel’s security, a view endorsed as long ago as 1967 by the UN Security Council. Let’s assume that Israel’s maximalist claim today, under a nationalistically inclined Likud-led government, is as follows: pre-1967 Israel or 20,796 sq km plus 30% of the West Bank or 1,696 sq km equals a total of 22,492 sq km. This is 19.4% of the original Mandate (115,766 sq km).

Even that rump state on less than a fifth of the Jewish National Home isn’t contraction enough for Israel’s enemies.

Why were these repeated and severe territorial shrinkages, both actual and potential, met with continued hostility by most of Israel’s neighbours? The answer is simple. Israel’s enemies have never wanted the hated “Zionist entity” to relinquish territory or to minimise her territorial claims; they want Israel to disappear. Abba Eban memorably said that this was the only conflict in which “the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.” He was being polite. In this context, unconditional surrender required Israel to commit national suicide.

History reveals that Israel is the opposite of expansionist. The reality, as opposed to the fevered imaginations of her many critics – Jack Straw amongst them – is that Israel, far from being expansionist, is the world’s most contractionist state.

But there’s a limit to her willingness to cede territory indefinitely. She won’t, under any circumstances, agree to her own demise. And Israel’s enemies won’t agree to anything less. That’s why the conflict remains unresolved after a century of bloodshed.

Israel’s disappearance would nevertheless yield one outcome that many would welcome. A Middle East without Israel would, finally, be enough for Israel’s enemies.

 

1. Laqueur W, Rubin B. The Israel-Arab Reader. New York, Penguin, 2008

2. Wilf E, Schwartz A. The War of Return. New York, All Points Books, 2020

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 13 

Israel has one of the world’s most successful economies despite bearing the world’s heaviest military burden

It’s the economy, stupid was Bill Clinton’s winning campaign mantra in 1992. Politicians around the world have followed it religiously, often with great success. In Israel, things are a little different. “It’s security, stupid,” has as much or greater resonance with Israeli voters. 

Not that Israelis are comfortable with soaring unemployment, hyperinflation or crippling taxes. Far from it – they’ve regularly had to cope with all three and complain bitterly about them. There’s a strong collective memory of the desperate, poverty-blighted years of austerity (Tzena) in the 1950s when the young country teetered on the verge of bankruptcy and depended on German reparations to pay for her army as well as her unwieldy Soviet style bureaucracy. The problems were compounded by the huge debt incurred by the war of independence, and the doubling of her population through immigration in her first three years of statehood. 

Over the subsequent decades, an economic miracle occurred. In 1960, the per capita income of Israelis was just over $1,000 per year; by 2019 it was $40,000 – a growth rate comparable to the world’s highest income countries including the oil-rich Gulf states. All Kuwaitis had to do was to dig a few holes in the desert, while the wealth Israelis generated was won through their blood, sweat and tears. Israel today has a vibrant mixed economy that has raised living standards beyond recognition. She proved more resilient than most in the face of the global economic crash of 2008-9 and was rewarded with an invitation to join the club of the world’s richest nations, the OECD, in 2010 [1]. (Whether that resilience will stand up to the even greater stress-test of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 remains to be seen). 

Known as one of the most innovative countries in the world, especially in the fields of hi-tech, science and healthcare, Israel – the Start-up Nation [2] – has attracted massive inward investment. The recent boom in tourism, the discovery of vast gas reserves off her coast, the expansion of the green energy sector, notably solar power, and the increasing strategic cooperation with her Eastern Mediterranean and even some Arab neighbours, has set the country on course for further spectacular success. Israelis are understandably keen for those trends to continue. 

It’s widely believed that the buoyant Israeli economy has been the secret of Binyamin Netanyahu’s prime ministerial longevity. But that’s only part of the story. When Israelis find themselves, as they frequently do, inside that voting booth, the physical safety of their family, community and country tends to trump all other considerations. That’s hardly as surprise for a nation that hasn’t experienced a moment of real peace in the more than seven decades of her existence. Crucially, Netanyahu is viewed as a safe pair of hands in confronting the country’s numerous murderous foes. In most countries, elections focus on the economic outlook; in Israel they are also about life and death.

This is no abstract anxiety. Terrorism, war and threats of annihilation are inescapable facts of Israeli life. If you’ve spent any time in the country, you’ll be aware of the extensive network of public bomb shelters as well as the protected spaces that are a required featured of all buildings. You may also have had the unpleasant experience of running to safety with the crowd on hearing the sirens warning of an impending rocket attack by Hamas or Hezbollah. Living with ever-present menace of violence exerts a corrosive effect on collective morale, on individual mental health, and economic well-being. 

Protecting Israelis against those who would do them harm costs money, shedloads of the stuff. Billions of shekels have been expended on maintaining an army, shoring up civil defence, deploying Iron Dome anti-missile batteries, and all the other paraphernalia of effective security. Israel spends more per person on her armed forces than any other country [3]. Per capita military spending is now well over $2,000 per annum – double that of the UK and about the same as the US [4]. That equates to 5% of GDP – far higher than most democracies – but even that has come down from the eye-watering peaks of 30% in the 1970s (coinciding with the Yom Kippur War) and 25% three decades later (during the Second Intifada). 

But let’s look at these figures through the other end of the telescope, as it were, for they conceal a truth that is tragic in its dimensions. 

Putting aside the lives destroyed, the families broken, the children traumatised by this endless and avoidable conflict (and we shouldn’t, of course, do any of that), let’s ask a related question: how much more productive, prosperous and contented might Israelis have become had they not had to shoulder this colossal burden? That’s a difficult question to answer, given the irony that much of Israel’s entrepreneurial talent was nurtured in the army. What we can do is calculate roughly the extra finance that would have been available to the Israeli treasury had peace prevailed for the last seven decades. 

Think of the resources swallowed up directly by the conflict, as well as the astronomical debts incurred as a result, plus the enormous financial obligations of running the West Bank and Gaza Strip from 1967 to 1995 and 2005 respectively. Think also of the indirect economic damage wrought by the disruption to normal life caused by plucking hundreds of thousands of workers from their jobs every year to serve in the reserves. And think of the millions of tourists who are deterred from visiting a war zone or, at best, a country that is constantly pilloried in the media and elsewhere, thereby depriving Israel of much-needed foreign income.  

Taking the earlier cited figure for current military spending of $2,000 per capita – a relatively low one, in real terms, in the country’s history – and applying it to the total population in 1984 of just over 4 million (the mid-point between 1948 and 2020), comes to $8 billion per year or $576 billion over 72 years. (That’s a conservative estimate as it doesn’t take account of the conflict’s indirect costs – but let’s discount them on the assumption that the savings from those would have been needed to run a “normal” army).  

That impressive sum could have been spent on meeting Israel’s numerous domestic challenges – an underperforming educational system, below average GDP per capita, low worker productivity, lack of skills (especially in the Charedi and Arab sectors), poor public transport, and an inefficient government bureaucracy. All of these are being addressed but it’s a huge struggle in the context of Israel’s unrelieved military obligations, and one that could have been mitigated by the diversion of funds from the defence budget. 

The frustration at being unable to unleash her full economic potential is a key reason (along with the desire to save lives) why Israel has been trying to reach a peaceful accommodation with her neighbours since 1948. Her citizens know it and so do her enemies. That’s why they target her economic wellbeing, first through the Arab League boycott (launched before Israel’s establishment) and then the BDS movement, as a first step towards her destruction. To date, they have failed but one thing is certain: they will keep trying. Having deployed conventional warfare and multiple terrorist campaigns, they may resort to even more extreme tactics, up to and including the nuclear option. In response, Israelis will do as they have always done: prepare for the worst and hope for the best. That will involve combining a high level of military expenditure with a can-do, anything’s possible mentality. 

Bill Clinton’s advice has been heeded by Israeli governments of all political hues in the past and will likely do so in the future. Yet all Israelis know that their economic future is severely constrained by the conflict. 

Reflecting on all this the other night, I reached a startling conclusion: if only Israel’s enemies felt the same, a peaceful Middle East could usher in an era of prosperity for all the peoples of the region. 

And then I woke up. 

[1] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): accessed 21/7/20

 https://www.oecd.org/israel/israelsaccessiontotheoecd.htm

[2] Senor D, Singer S. The Start-Up Nation. The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. Boston, Twelve, 2009

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditure_per_capita

 Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute; accessed 27/7/20. 

[4] Our World in Data, University of Oxford; accessed 21/7/20  https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/military-expenditure-per-capita-constant-2015-us?country=CAN~IRL~DNK~ITA~BRA~ISR~FRA~IND~PAK~ESP~GBR~USA