30-12-2008, 04:49 AM
Mark Stapleton Wrote:From Syd Walker's blog, an article by Diane Mason which, with great clarity and brevity, answers the title of this thread better than any article I have ever read.
http://sydwalker.info/blog/2008/12/30/no...omment-550
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Thanks very much for that link Mark.
Here's what Naomi Klein has to say about the subject in The Shock Doctrine (I know, I quote her a lot), Chapter 21 "Losing the Peace Incentive: Israel as Warning." Her focus is more contemporary, starting with the 1990's.
"The extraordinary performance of Israel's homeland security companies is well known to stock watchers, but it is rarely discussed as a factor in the politics of the region. It should be. It is not a coincidence that the Israeli state's decision to put "counterterrorism" at the center of its export economy has coincided precisely with its abandonment of peace negotiations, as well as a clear strategy to reframe its conflict with the Palestinians not as a battle against a nationalist movement with specific goals for the land and rights but rather as part of the global War on Terror--one against illogical, fanatical forces bent only on destruction.
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What makes Israel interesting as a guns-and-caviar model [wherein fighter jets=guns and executive jets=caviar both sell well] is not only that its economy is resilient in the face of major political shocks such as the 2006 war with Lebanon or Hamas's 2007 takeover of Gaza, but also that Israel has crafted an economy that expands markedly in direct response to escalating violence. The reasons for Israeli industry's comfort level with disaster are not mysterious. Years before U.S. and European companies grasped the potential of the global security boom, Israeli technology firms were busily pioneering the homeland security industry, and they continue to dominate the sector today. The Israeli Export Institute estimates that Israel has 350 corporations dedicated to selling homeland security products, and 30 new ones entered the market in 2007. From a corporate perspective, this development has made Israel a model to be emulated in the post-911 market. From a social and political perspective, however, Israel should serve as something else--as stark warning. The fact that Israel continues to enjoy booming prosperity, even as it wages war against its neighbors and escalates the brutality in the occupied territories, demonstrates just how perilous it is to build an economy based on the premise of continual war and deepening disasters.
Israel's current ability to combine guns and caviar is the culmination of a dramatic shift in the nature of its economy over the past fifteen years, one that has had a profound and little-examined impact on the parallel disintegration of prospects for peace. The last time there was a credible prospect of peace breaking out in the Middle East was in the early nineties, a time when a powerful constituency of Israelis believed that continued conflict was no longer an option. Communism had collapsed, the information revolution was beginning, and there was a widespread conviction inside Israel's business community that the bloody occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, compounded by the boycott of Israel by Arab states, was putting Israel's economic future in peril. Seeing the explosion of "emerging markets" around the world, Israeli corporations were tired of being held back by war; they wanted to be part of the high-profit borderless world, not penned in by regional strife. If the Israeli government could negotiate some sort of peace agreement with the Palestinians, Israel's neighbors would have to lift their boycotts, and the country would be perfectly positioned to the Middle East's free-trade hub.
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Shimon Peres, then foreign minister, explained to a group of Israeli journalists that peace was now inevitable. It was a very particular kind of peace, however. "We are not seeking a peace of flags," Peres said, "we are interested in a peace of markets." A few months later the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman, Yasser Arafat, shook hands on the White House lawn to mark the inauguration of the Oslo Accords. The world cheered, the three men shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize--and then it all went horribly wrong.
Many factors contributed to the subsequent breakdown....However, two factors that contributed to Israel's retreat into unilateralism are little understood and rarely discussed, both related to the unique ways that the Chicago School free-market crusade played out in Israel. One was the influx of Soviet Jews, which was a direct result of Russia's shock therapy experiment. The other was the flipping of Israel's export economy from one based on traditional goods and high technology to one disproportionately dependent on selling expertise and devices related to counterrorism. Both factors were greatly disruptive to the Oslo process: the arrival of Russians reduced Israel's reliance on Palestinian labor and allowed it to seal in the occupied territories, while the rapid expansion of the high-tech security economy created a powerful appetite inside Israel's wealthy and most powerful sectors for abandoning peace in favor of fighting a continual, and continuously expanding, War on Terror.
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Len Rosen, a prominent Israeli investment banker, told Fortune magazine, "It's security that matters more than peace." During Oslo, "people were looking for peace to provide growth. Now they're looking for security so violence doesn't curtail growth." He could have gone much further: the business of providing "security"--in Israel and around the world--is directly responsible for much of Israel's meteoric economic growth in recent years. It is not an exaggeration to say that the War on Terror industry saved Israel's faltering economy, much as the disaster capitalism complex helped rescue the global stock markets.
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Clearly, Israeli industry no longer has reason to fear war.
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This recipe for endless worldwide war is the same one that the Bush administration offered as a business prospectus to the nascent disaster capitalism complex after September 11. It is not a war that can by any country, but winning is not the point. The point is to create "security" inside fortress states bolstered by endless low-level conflict outside their walls. In a way, it is the same goal that the private security companies have in Iraq: secure the perimeter, protect the principal. Baghdad, New Orleans and Sandy Springs provide glimpses of a kind of gated future built and run by the disaster capitalism complex. It is in Israel, however, that this process is most advanced: an entire country has turned itself into a fortified gated community, surrounded by locked-out people living in permanently excluded red zones. This is what a society looks like when it has lost its economic incentive for peace and is heavily invested in fighting and profiting from an endless and unwinnable War on Terror. One part looks like Israel; the other part looks like Gaza.
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This discarding of 25-60 percent of the population has been the hallmark of the Chicago School crusade since the "misery villages" began mushrooming throughout the Southern Cone in the seventies. In South Africa, Russia, and New Orleans the rich build walls around themselves. Israel has taken this disposal process a step further: it has built walls around the dangerous poor."