Now and then, the politicians are
good enough to make explicit what we at the
Institute argue are their constant but usually
implicit motives. So it is with the case of aid and
the peace process. Regular readers of this page are
surely familiar with our contention, supported
constantly by events and the statements of
office-holders, that Israel pursues the peace
process in order to get aid.
The Institute has argued this point
for years, framing it in economic policy papers, op-eds,
a Research Paper in Strategy, and countless NBNs.
Rarely, however, do we find examples so clear and
distinct as the one pointed out in a recent
NBN by Alvin Rabushka, director of the
Institute's Division for Economic Policy Research.
As Rabushka points out, The Jerusalem
Post recently reported that half of the $800 million
Israel has asked of the United States has now been
made contingent on Israel's implementation of the
steps outlined in the report of the Mitchell
Committee. That committee, our readers will recall,
demanded that Israel resume the sort of behavior
that undermined its security for eight years and
that led to the war on the ground that broke out in
the fall. The Mitchell report demanded that Israel
continue to do what it has been doing, and insisted
that this time the results will be different. As the
Institute's President, Robert J. Loewenberg, recently
pointed out, doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting a different result is more or
less the definition of insanity.
Now that Israel's most recent aid
request has been, in large part, made contingent on
Israel's continued complicity in this insanity, the
case we at the Institute have been trying to make
for years has become easier to see than it has been
before: Israel is being paid to behave madly and
self-destructively, and it is willing to behave that
way in order to get the money it needs to allow its
statist system to survive another day. As Alvin
Rabushka put it in the NBN mentioned above, Israel
has explicitly accepted a tradeoff of "lives
for bucks."
In truth, of course, Israel accepted
this trade-off years ago, but that acceptance was
masked (even from many Israelis, including some in
power) by the notion that Israel needed the aid
funds, that they were helpful, even essential, and
that the peace process served Israel's interest
independent of other considerations. Events have, we
hope, finally dispelled the latter unfounded notion;
and the Institute has done its best to prove that
the former ones are patently untrue as well.
The latest news acts to bring all
this into sharp focus. The U.S. and Israel have now
said it clearly: aid will come if Israel proceeds
with the process; and Israel proceeds with the
process so that aid will come.
Soon enough, the clouds of
obfuscation will again close off this truth from
easy view. We are grateful for this moment of
clarity, and we will be sure not to let our readers
or the policy community forget it.
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