Capitol Ideas/On the Road to Jerusalem
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS ON THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM A s we drove from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (about the same distance as Washington to Baltimore) Daniel Doron pointed out that the highway actually crosses the...
...Daniel Doron recently wrote in the Jerusalem Post...
...When the spiritual leader of the Gaza uprisings [i.e., the beginning of the intifada] was asked on Israel television what his major grievances were he quickly answered: taxes and working conditions," Doron wrote in the Jerusalem Post in February 1988...
...That was in 1969...
...CAPITOL IDEAS ON THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM A s we drove from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (about the same distance as Washington to Baltimore) Daniel Doron pointed out that the highway actually crosses the "Green Line," going through the West Bank for a few miles...
...But we comfort ourselves with the rationalization that this is a necessary sacrifice, for reasons of state security, social justice, etc...
...later he made some money in the New York art market and founded the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, based in Tel Aviv...
...Western political thought today seems unable to go beyond legislative majoritarianism, sanctified as "democracy," in which 51 percent of the people can transfer into their own pockets the wealth of the minority, unrestrained by constitutional considerations...
...Is it just a coincidence that desert terrain and Arab domain overlap as much as they do...
...He might do so, Scalia went on to say, "if we still lived in 1791...
...This is perhaps not surprising, as it is less well understood in the U.S...
...Powerful people are able to exempt themselves from the law's application, and so impose their will on others...
...But in an age of rampant legislative activity, what is needed-both here and in Israel-is a judiciary assertive enough to check the redistributive enthusiasm of the people's representatives...
...Almost certainly war between the two adjacent states would ensue...
...The most powerful of all get to run the country, send ambassadors to the U.N., and so on...
...Being mainly unorganized laborers and small entrepreneurs, they lack the defenses we have to protect ourselves against these hardships: protektzia and the old boys' network...
...In a socialist system, Doron went on, citizens (whether Jew or Arab) are reduced to the status of petitioners, forever in need of licenses, permits, exemptions, planning permission, tax breaks, and privileges...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 13...
...It prevails in Israel with even less restraint...
...It is so called, Doron pointed out, because from an airplane the political line dividing Israeli and Arab territory was geographically clear...
...An important reason for their growing bitterness and frustration .. . 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 is the repressive economic regime we have imposed on them...
...Hence they are less likely to accept passively the hardships we have become inured to...
...To a large extent, they adopted socialism...
...Rainwater would build up and then burst through, washing away soil and stones and accumulated labor...
...Economic life was subjected to central control and direction...
...And the tremendous difference that this makes, in encouraging the creation and maintenance of wealth, is now visible for all to see in the Middle East...
...Thus the society is mired in a competition of ruthlessness, and property cannot be secure within it...
...Arab Israelis (about 800,000 out of 4.5 million) are not eligible for military service (there is a three-year compulsory draft for Jewish men), and yet completion of military service is a condition for receiving many social benefits...
...than it was, say, 200 years ago...
...The "Jordanian Arabs were peacefully going about their business," he wrote...
...The military, Friedman noted, "are in Israel the strongest supporters of free markets and non-intervention...
...The Green Line marks Israel's boundaries up to June 1967...
...Doron was born in Israel...
...In fact it has driven Israelis abroad—a "tight-lipped subject," according to Julian Simon, a demographic expert whose Economic Consequences of Immigration' was recently published...
...He said it was difficult to get figures on emigration from Israel because the authorities often make the (questionable) assumption that those who leave will return...
...ence on Israel's economic problems...
...Max Singer, the author of Passage to a Human World and a policy analyst who (with Herman Kahn) founded the Hudson Institute, lived in Israel from 1973 to 1977...
...In any event, these economic changes may explain why the intifada did not begin until twenty years after the occupation...
...A week before we drove to Jerusalem, Doron had presided over a four-day conferTom Bethel...
...This is basically the system that we now have in the U.S...
...Likewise in the nineteenth century, when laissez-faire dominated in Europe, economic cooperation was accompanied by international peace: "trade unites and politics divides...
...Some requests are granted, most are inevitably denied...
...this is a misnomer as in most cases he is the Father of the Desert, having created it himself, and the arid waste in which he lives and on which practically nothing will grow is the direct.result of his appalling indolence...
...One mechanism is the draft...
...This, alas, is one of the less admirable features of our age...
...In the next twenty years, however, the level of state control in Israel proper steadily increased (as it undoubtedly also did in the West Bank and Gaza...
...T srael's rigidly regulated economy has 1 not only made life difficult for all who live there, it has aggravated the political conflict between Jews and Arabs...
...Yoash Tsiddon-Chatto, a member of the Knesset, told me that no more than twenty (out of 120) members would support the creation of what he called "a second Palestinian state" (the first being Jordan...
...He added that "most Israelis don't think very much about the economy, because they're so busy thinking about security and/or religion...
...Conservatives have been instructed recently that there is nothing worse than "an activist judiciary...
...They can see that "the anonymous market frees them from burdensome tasks," and helps to reduce conflict...
...After the creation of the state of Israel the Jews began to restore the old terraces...
...Evidently, between 1967 and 1987 laissez-faire gave way to a more rigid economic control, just as Moshe Dayan gave way to Ariel Sharon...
...Shortly after the intifada began, Doron wrote in the Jerusalem Post: When we Jews permit our government to distort our economy so badly, we pay for it with stagnation and lack of growth...
...None of which is to suggest that anything constructive is likely to emerge from the vaunted "peace process" which Secretary of State James Baker and the Bush Administration have so recklessly been pressing upon Israel, leading to the recent downfall of the government...
...At the outset of the occupation, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan had "laid down a policy of laissez-faire," the term to be construed both politically and economically...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...This in turn has not only impeded the creation of wealth, it has discouraged Jewish immigration...
...Something of an original, with side interests in Shakespeare and the causes of the Industrial Revolution, he is a leading exponent of the view that Israel's problems are as much economic as political, and that there is an unappreciated connection between the two...
...Writing in 1963, C. Northcote Parkinson quotes a writer named C. S. Jarvis as saying in Three Deserts (1936): "The Arab is sometimes called the Son of the Desert, but...
...This neglected point is one that Doran loves to talk about, and he did so as we drove up to Jerusalem...
...Arabs in all walks of life are sending us a message that we keep ignoring...
...Israel was "green...
...by Tom Bethell Unfortunately, the Israelis made a bad mistake in 1948 and they have persisted in it...
...By the time of the 1967 war, there was a visible Green Line...
...But I fear that modern democratic times are not terribly receptive to constitutional proposals that place restrictions upon the redistribution of wealth...
...It was beautiful country and as you approach Jerusalem, you really do feel at the top of the world...
...In attendance were Milton Friedman of the Hoover Institution, Roger Starr of the New York Times, George Melloan of the Wall Street Journal, and many others...
...The elimination of economic barriers would foster "the economic integration of the West Bank with Israel without requiring political integration...
...Government spending grew from 35 percent of GNP in the first half of the 1960s to consume 72 percent of GNP during the first half of the 1980s," Alvin Rabushka and Steve Hanke note in their monograph, Toward Growth: A Blueprint for Economic Rebirth in Israel (published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies...
...These imposers in turn are constantly threatened by even more powerful groups, or tribes...
...thus, had there not been other factors to radicalize them, our economic system would do so, just as it radicalizes less advantaged Jewish groups...
...Twenty years later much had changed...
...But with the arrival of the Arabs, everything began to deteriorate...
...We turned off the main road and drove up to Jerusalem by a back road, Daniel pointing out the flowers and shrubs already coming into blossom...
...Jordanian functionaries kept their jobs, both Jordanian and Israeli money circulated side by side, West Bank farmers could grow whatever they wanted, and could sell their produce "at any price they can command, not only in the West Bank but also in Jordan itself...
...Goats would uproot young trees and vegetation, thereby inadvertently damming the terraced hills...
...Once, he said, he invited Thomas Friedman of the New York Times to attend a conference on the economy but Friedman told him that he knew nothing about economics and didn't want to...
...Transfer payments tripled between 1967 and 1987...
...Doron's great-grandfather was an early Zionist, traveling to Israel from England in the 1860s, when the land was still under Turkish rule...
...For most Arabs, this is cold comfort...
...In either event, the wealth that he accumulates will be placed at the disposal of his superiors or of his enemies, In such an environment the goat is a useful beast—portable property, which can be unleashed to scavenge on the property of others and hidden under the bed at night...
...The Jews not only have the rule of law but can be said to have invented it...
...I would never have known it because the territories of Judea and Samaria (whether "occupied" or "liberated," depending on your political point of view) are not marked by highway signs, and Israeli road maps (including the maps provided by rent-acar companies) do not mark the boundaries of the West Bank...
...Not unnaturally, however, the rise of statism in Israel has encouraged Palestinians to believe that the acquisition of economic wealth depends on the prior acquisition of state power...
...In Arab practice (if not theory), law is subordinate to force...
...Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to disparage constitutional checks to unbridled majoritarianism when he addressed an august gathering in Jerusalem including the president of the country and members of the Knesset and Israel's supreme court: "Now I know a bill of rights is an issuehere in Israel, and perhaps you think I am urging you, if you want judicial assistance for a deregulated or privatized economic system, to adopt a written, judicially enforceable constitution...
...More importantly, such a "political solution" is inappropriate to what is, in part, an economic problem...
...Will we wake up after Romania but before Albania...
...Alan Wurtzel, chairman of the board of Circuit City and a former president of Operation Independence, which promotes the economic independence of Israel, worries that the country will be "the last 'Reviewed by Gregory A. Fossedal in the February 1990 TAS...
...Moreover, they add, this "explosion in the public sector's share of the economy has been the result of soaring non-defense expenditures...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 11 socialist economy in the hemisphere...
...the West Bank, then under Jordanian rule, more closely resembled a desert...
...Initially (as Friedman suggests) it was more liberating than oppressive...
...Milton Friedman visited the West Bank in 1969, describing his impressions in a Newsweek column entitled "Invisible Occupation" (May 5, 1969...
...A system which by design discriminates against many Jews, will readily discriminate against all Arabs...
...In his campaign of destruction, the Arab has been most loyally supported by his animals, the camel and the goat...
...In fact, the concept is not really understood...
...I had no feeling whatsoever of being in occupied territory...
...Nor is it to suggest that the "peace process" will in fact culminate in the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank...
...In my view that is not going to happen...
...He described the economic system there as one of "polite, non-violent Bolshevism," its huge Labor and Histadrut (union) organization creating immense frustration: "It's difficult to get ahead there...
...But he believes the economy does act as a "substantial" deterrent to immigration, "and is the reason that some leave...
...We live, he said, "in the age of the full-time legislature...
...This accounts for the "indolence" and "fatalism" of the Arab who does not choose to compete for power (i.e., the great majority...
...Fr he great problem in Arab societies is that they do not enjoy the rule of law...
...In Biblical times, according to Doron, the hills of Judea and Samaria were terraced and cultivated so that the rain didn't just sluice away the top soil...
...In an economy where all resources are ultimately divided according to political spoils, [Arabs] cannot advance far without getting their share of the political spoils...
...Disappointing, then, that U.S...
...T nitially, I suspect, the Arabs on the I West Bank experienced the Israeli presence as a relief from the systematic oppression of Arab society...
...He must join one gang or be enslaved by another...
...Moreover, most Arabs are not public sector employees, immune to economic constraints...
Vol. 23 • May 1990 • No. 5
