[Marxism] Amira Haas - Israel Knows That Peace Doesn't Pay

[Dennis Brasky <dmozart1756@xxxxxxxxx>]

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> Israel Knows That Peace Doesn't Pay
> Haaretz, May 11th, 2009
> Amira Hass
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> http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1084656.html
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> Successive Israeli governments since 1993 certainly must have known what
> they were doing, being in no hurry to make peace with the Palestinians. As
> representatives of Israeli society, these governments understood that peace
> would involve serious damage to national interests.
>
> Economic damage:
>
> The security industry is an important export branch - weapons, ammunition
> and refinements that are tested daily in Gaza and the West Bank. The Oslo
> process - negotiations that were never meant to end - allowed Israel to
> shake off its status as occupying power (obligated to the welfare of the
> occupied people) and treat the Palestinian territories as independent
> entities. That is, to use weapons and ammunition at a magnitude Israel could
> not have otherwise used on the Palestinians after 1967. Protecting the
> settlements requires constant development of security, surveillance and
> deterrence equipment such as fences, roadblocks, electronic surveillance,
> cameras and robots. These are security's cutting edge in the developed
> world, and serve banks, companies and luxury neighborhoods next to
> shantytowns and ethnic enclaves where rebellions must be suppressed.
>
> The collective Israeli creativity in security is fertilized by a state of
> constant friction between most Israelis and a population defined as hostile.
> A state of combat over a low flame, and sometimes over a high one, brings
> together a variety of Israeli temperaments: rambos, computer wizards, people
> with gifted hands, inventors. Under peace, their chances of meeting would be
> greatly reduced.
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> Damage to careers:
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> Maintaining the occupation and a state of non-peace employs hundreds of
> thousands of Israelis. Some 70,000 people work in the security industry.
> Each year, tens of thousands finish their army service with special skills
> or a desirable sideline. For thousands it becomes their main career:
> professional soldiers, Shin Bet operatives, foreign consultants,
> mercenaries, weapons dealers. Therefore peace endangers the careers and
> professional futures of an important and prestigious stratum of Israelis, a
> stratum that has a major influence on the government.
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> Damage to quality of life:
>
> A peace agreement would require equal distribution of water resources
> throughout the country (from the river to the sea) between Jews and
> Palestinians, regardless of the desalination of seawater and water-saving
> techniques. Even now it's hard for Israelis to get used to saving water
> because of the drought. It's not difficult to guess how traumatic a slash in
> water consumption to equalize distribution would be.
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> Damage to welfare:
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> As the past 30 years have shown, settlements flourish as the welfare state
> contracts. They offer ordinary people what their salaries would not allow
> them in sovereign Israel, within the borders of June 4, 1967: cheap land,
> large homes, benefits, subsidies, wide-open spaces, a view, a superior road
> network and quality education. Even for those Israeli Jews who have not
> moved there, the settlements illuminate their horizon as an option for a
> social and economic upgrade. That option is more real than the vague
> promises of peacetime improvements, an unknown situation.
>
> Peace will also reduce, if not erase entirely, the security pretext for
> discriminating against Palestinian Israelis - in land distribution,
> development resources, education, health employment and civil rights (such
> as marriage and citizenship). People who have gotten used to privilege under
> a system based on ethnic discrimination see its abrogation as a threat to
> their welfare.
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> "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."- *Voltaire*
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