Back in March, I wrote in this CSM column about some Israelis “sip[ping] lattes in lavish shopping malls as conflict with the Palestinians seems comfortably distant.” Some commenters here on JWN grew intriguingly apoplectic about that, which was an honest description of something I saw in several places, especially in greater Tel Aviv.
I think, though, that I was getting close there to remarking on something significant about the change in Israel’s values and self-image over the years. Long gone, apparently is the self-image Israelis used to like to project of being hardy, egalitarian “pioneers” committed to building a new and better society there. Instead, we have this report in today’s HaAretz, indicating just how far the erosion of that image has gone:
- Senior sources in the Israel Defense Forces General Staff and field officers who took part in the war in Lebanon said on Tuesday that Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, who went to his bank branch and sold an NIS 120,000 investment portfolio only three hours after two soldiers were abducted by Hezbollah on the northern border, cannot escape resignation.
The sources say there is a clear ethical flaw in the chief of staff’s behavior during the hours when soldiers were killed in Lebanon and others were attempting to rescue wounded. Halutz should resign the moment the military completes its pullout from south Lebanon, they said.
At this stage, it does not appear that Halutz intends to resign of his own accord.
Several hours after the July 12 abduction, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared war on Hezbollah and Israeli warplanes began bombing targets deep inside Lebanon.
But as the country’s political and military echelons met urgently to discuss the possible declaration of war, Halutz went at 12:00 P.M. to sell an investment portfolio, the Ma’ariv newspaper reported on Tuesday…
Personally, I don’t have anything against Israelis, individually or collectively, becoming rich and living a west-European-style lifestyle. I do, however, have considerable objections to my government giving the largest swathe of the “aid” dollars it gives to any country, to Israel– at a time when the GDP per capita there is already well over $20,000. And I do have an objection to Israelis continuing (many of them) to live off reparations that they received for properties that were seized from their families in the early 1940s in Europe, at a time when they still refuse to discuss giving any reparations, themselves, for properties seized from Palestinians in 1948 and indeed for all the considerable material damage Israel has visited on Palestinian and Lebanese civilians over the decades since then.
Anyway, if Israelis want to focus on getting rich, and spend their time sipping lattes in malls, that’s great. Just let them finish concluding their unfinished business with their neighbors, first. Like, they should get out of all (or darn’ nearly all) of the lands they occupied during the war of 1967 and have been exploiting and benefitting from heavily ever since… Like, they should settle up the many other claims still outstanding against them since 1948… Once they’ve done all that, sure, partying and making money on both sides of the present “Green Line” would be good.
(And meantime, they should know that the privations they are continuing to visit on their neighbors will ensure that these neighbors’ claims on Israel can never be simply wished away, however much many Israelis might want to do that.)
Actually, one could be pretty hopeful about the desire that many Israelis now have to live relatively luxurious, European- or US-style lifestyles. After all, in Portugal, back in 1970s, it was the desire of the new generation of army officers to be free of the constraints of conscription, and the constant waging of colonial wars that made that system necessary, that finally persuaded those officers to go home from their colonial outposts and lead the country’s peaceful, democratic, anti-Salazar revolution.., And as a collateral benefit of that desire the younger Portuguese had for a Carnaby Street lifestyle, the rapidly democratizing Portugal shucked off its vast colonial holdings like an uncomfortable old skin. Maybe the new generation of Israelis could be like that, too? Wouldn’t that be interesting?
I have read that Israel’s economy does not need the vast amounts of US aid it recieves to survive.
However, would the aid still come at these levels if Israel was not such a willing and uniquely positioned tool of US foreign policy? Does that US policy act to create peace and stability among the ME nations, or to increase American control and influence through conflict?
If you subtract a few billion from the treasury, will the Israeli economy not at least immediately thereafter be less condusive to relatively luxurious, European- or US-style lifestyles?
Israel has one very very big rich and invinceable friend who spoils her rotten and she is otherwise an institutioanalised victim-state surrounded by percieved mortal enemies. Try to grab the lollypop from her hand. I’m afraid greed is more part of the problem than the answer.