The News Behind The News
March 12, 2001
Sharon's Aid InstinctIsrael's financial daily, Globes, reporting the first official news of Mr. Sharon's newly formed Unity Government, explains that "approval of the US special aid package to Israel stuck in Congress is likely to be raised in talks Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will hold with US President George W. Bush in Washington on March 20."
An Oped on this site, which will appear tomorrow, explains how Israel's aid-based socialist system and economy, gathering steam since 1974, has at last withered Israel's deterrence. It is unlikely that anyone including much counter-touted "right-winger" and "anti-peace process" Sharon can reverse Israel downward demographic slide and its vehicle, the peace process. But in following in the footsteps of all of his predecessors who supported the peace process while Sharon opposes it, Sharon's immediate call for outside money or what prepared the peace process signals, at least, that he has given up on treating the peace process at its source but will settle for treating only its symptoms: the strategic aspects or so-called terrorism by the Arabs and, at the Israeli level, the political effects of the peace process.
Instead of arriving in Washington with a declaration (see "Israel's Number One National Security Interest: Aid") that Israel is stopping all US aid, economic and military, at the same time announcing a series of economic reforms that will bring about Israel's growth and, incidentally, end the peace process which is in everyone's interest, including the US, Mr. Sharon is going to do what every Israeli prime minister since Rabin has done (and, of course, since 1974 when US aid began). The false view that aid is a source of support that has created dependency and, if now bad, must be cut gradually -- and must not cut off "military" support -- is not the view of this Institute. (see OPED and IASPS Research Papers in Strategy on the subject).
Readers should be clear on this main point: Aid and all free money is Israel's number one enemy. Israel's "socialist" state is not just any socialist state. It is an aid-based Jewish socialist state. The socialist state Israel has built on aid is for all practical purposes the one Zionism's socialist founders, the main founders of Israel, would have built in Russia had they not been expelled from the communist effort and forced to take up Jewish communism instead.
The main point this site has made about aid, that it destroys Israel's chances for growth and brought about a demographic decline, was not easy to see or "prove" in 1988 when we first predicted it. But it has a tangibility now it didn't have then: the Arabs following the terrorist strategy are in the neighborhoods of Gilo and Ramot and they have just proclaimed they will kill any Jewish journalists who come to Ramallah.
The demographic decline that began shrinking Israel in the early 1970s could be disguised or missed then as "merely economics." Today's terrorism at the gates, while it can be dismissed, too, as having no economic and socialist cause or as a symptom of legitimate Arab aspirations (see NBN "Ben-Ami's Change of Heart"), is directly the result of earlier Israeli socialist policy. Still, Sharon's intinct for aid and free money amounting to 10% of GDP, has for its part an equally direct effect on Israel's deterrent.That effect is negative: US aid, in addition to its role in supporting the socialist policies that prepared the demographic decline which made the peace process the only way Israel could camouflage its retreat from land and other terms of national existence, has now undermined deterrence. The Jewish state cannot defend its people.
Sharon is different from Mr. Barak and still more spectacularly from such men as former Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami and Mr. Peres before (and now again after) him. Sharon proposes seriously to provide this deterrence and not to make the murder of Jews a "sacrifice for peace" by waving the police from protecting Jewish citizens or providing Arabs guns. But can he do it? Not if he insists on aid.
The News Behind the News Archive