So the good guys always wear white hats, and the bad guys black hats, right?

As some of you may know I'm an avid follower of current events and fancy myself as a fairly decent (amateur) historian.  Contrary to many of my contemporaries, I don't see things as just black or white, all good or all bad.   Very few things in life fall into those nice, neat pigeon holes.  Life just isn't that simple.

Case in point: Israel.  I admire what they've had to go through just to survive as a nation, and what they've accomplished in their short history.  They certainly aren't a lilly white faultless society, but compared to any of their neighbors IMO they look pretty damn good, and they deserve our support. Many here, however, seem to think otherwise, that Israel is the big bad bully from whom we should withhold our support, while the Palestinians and other Mid East nations are always the oppressed.  That's much too black and white for me. 

 

Look at what Israel has done:  They've taken a barren, some would even call it worthless, piece of crap real estate and made it bloom.  Israel has become an international powerhouse in agricultural research and technology.

While fresh water has always been in critically short supply in much of the arid Mid East, Israel has developed and built new, ultra-efficient state-of-the-art desalination plants.  They will soon be water self-sufficient and are in a position to export their technology to others in similarly dry environs.

Israel is a R&D leader in medical technology.  Much of the technology we take for granted here today originated in Israel.  Considering their small size (8.522 million people:  6.4 million Jewish, 1.8 million Arab, and .322 million "other"), their achievements in the field of medicine are impressive.

Tel Aviv is a modern cosmopolitan city....

...and their rural agricultural collectives (kibbutz) are generally modern and efficient.

Compare any of this to what their neighbors offer their citizens.  "Well, yes, Israel is modern and progressive because they receive Billions of $$$ in aid every year."  True, but so do most of the other nations in the region.  In reality the other Mid East countries collectively receive much more US aid than does Israel.  So what do they do with theirs?

According to Time magazine in 2014, Yasser Arafat before his death controlled a personal fortune of $3 Billion dollars, money that was sent to the Palestinian people by the West, but was embezzled by the PLO leader. While it's difficult to pull off such a Grand Heist in a democracy, it's a fairly easy thing for dictators to skim off as much as they want, whenever they want.

Look at Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the Arab Emirates, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc....their educational institutions, their medical technology, their agriculture, the overall "quality of life" they deliver to their citizens.  A few of the Petro-Elites do well, but everyone else is living in essentially third world conditions.  They had many, many centuries to develop and they did virtually nothing.  Israel has blossomed in just the past 68 years since their independence.

"But the Jews stole much of their land from the Arabs."  Yes, the early Zionists bought some of their land, but later simply ran some Arab owners off theirs.  That was wrong, but how is that any different from the way virtually every other country in the world, including the United States, developed? (Hello....Native Americans?)  I'm hearing the pot calling the kettle black.  It was unjust to be sure, but so is much of life.  At some point in history we have to just accept reality.

And then we come to the military balance of power in the region.

(These are Merkova IV tanks, developed and built completely in Israel.)

To this day Israel's neighbors still hold a numerical military advantage over them in men and equipment.  

Israel has to be smarter and tougher because their neighbors (except Egypt and Jordan) have vowed to wipe them off the face of the earth.  They are in a state of perpetual war, literally, against Israel.  Israel has made no such threats against them.

In fact, while Israel is believed to possess 100 or more nuclear weapons, and have since the 1970's (?), they have never once threatened to nuke their neighbors.  They don't even admit they have nukes (the world's worst kept secret).   

Military trivia:  Israel requires women to serve 2 years in the military (3 years for men), and 51% of all Israeli military officers are women.  Seems like a fairly equal society to me.

circa 1967 Six Days War

Those Israeli tanks and aircraft are not American made.

 

"Israel wouldn't even exist if the US hadn't recognized and armed them back in 1948."  Not true at all.  The US recognized the state of Israel only after the United Nations had already voted for a separate Jewish state in Palestine.  And the arms Israel used to fend off Arab attacks from all sides the instant they raised their flag were not provided by the US, but were arms mainly of British and French origin that the Jews had hastily scavenged.

A historical fact:  When Israel joined with England and France to invade Egypt in 1956 after Egyptian President Nasser nationalized the Suez canal (until then a British property), President Eisenhower backed the three countries down and sided with Egypt.  It was only after the Arab Mid East countries cast their lot with the USSR at the height of the Cold War that the US saw Israel as a tool to block Soviet expansion in the region and began to arm them.  

And even then it wasn't all US give/Israel take.  Many of the weapons we have protecting us today were joint ventures between the US ($$$) and Israel (technology).

So the Israelis are all good, and the Arabs are all bad, right?  Hardly!  For the life of me I don't understand why Israel insists on building new settlements in the occupied West Bank.  Isn't there anywhere else they could build them?  And the stranglehold/embargo they have around Gaza seems IMO to be unnecessarily harsh.  

I believe the Jews deserve their own homeland, and so do the Palestinians.  But I also understand that will only happen when the Palestinians drop their demand for Israel's annihilation.  While Israeli Arabs (yes, there are Israeli Arabs) have constitutional rights, I'm sure there is still plenty of inequality that exists.  Much of the criticism of Israel is no doubt for just cause.

For the record, I'm not Jewish, only have a couple of Jewish friends, and have no vested interest in Israel in any way.  I just feel they are by-and-large doing a great service for their people and are preserving a delicate balance of power in the region, something their neighbors can't say.  Whenever I hear a politician say we ought to back away from Israel and then heap praise on Israel's poor oppressed neighbors, I can't help but think how ignorant they are of the facts.

These are my opinions.  If my facts are somewhere in error please correct me and provide documentation. I'm not too big to admit my mistakes.  

Just always remember, there is a lot of gray in a black and white world.

S  

Square peg, round hole

So Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is in the US to address Congress, and the pro/anti battle lines are drawn.  As much as I pride myself on my knowledge of the goings on in the world, I'll admit my understanding of Israel is like that proverbial mile-wide, foot-deep river.  Somebody please throw out some positions for me to ponder.

Generally I'm a supporter of Israel.  Pretty strong, actually.  I admire their tenacity, their vigilance, the fact they keep their eye on the prize....namely never again letting themselves get into a position where they can be annihilated.  They seem to have taken a pretty nasty looking piece of real estate, land that the former Arab landlords had done virtually nothing with during their stewardship, and made it bloom.  Now some of it at least is green and productive.  

Their relatively tiny defense force routinely kicks the ass of combined Arab armies many times their size and potential power.  Israel doesn't seem to be a serial rattler of their nuclear sabre.  They have nukes, and everyone knows it, but they never talk about them.  

Nukes seem to be Israel's unspoken ace in the hole.  In contrast, Iran (which isn't Arab, BTW) wants nukes, but they've stated publicly what they will do with theirs, and it doesn't have a pretty ending.  Israel just seems smarter than their adversaries.

My understanding is that the Palestinians are upset with Israel because they want a homeland of their own where they can run their own lives without interference.  I don't blame them.  It is also my understanding that Israel offered them that IF they could show they were capable of policing their own people.  

When they could crack down on the forces that lob missiles at Israel and otherwise plot to kill Israelis, then Israel would back off and adopt a "live and let live" policy.  But Yassar Arafat (the PLO leader at the time) realized that if that happened, he would be without a job, so he scuttled the offer.  Yes...No?

Egypt accepted Israel's offer (and it cost Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat his life) and kept their hot-heads relatively in line, Israel ceded the Sinai back to them, and all has been quiet on that front for decades since.  It can work.

That will apparently still not happen with Gaza and the West Bank because the thugs Israel wants the authorities to crack down on are the very thugs in power....Hamas.  I can't say I blame Israel for maintaining a strong upper (iron) hand.  When a neighbor's avowed policy is to kill you, you can't unilaterally let down your guard.

On the flip side, I don't understand why Israel keeps allowing new settlements to be built on "disputed" land in the West Bank.  Why?  Is that the ONLY land left to build on?  I don't think so.  This just seems like pouring salt on an open wound.  Why go out of your way to piss off your opponent?

At the heart of it all is the fact that the Arabs are miffed that Israel still controls land captured during the Six Day War back in 1967.  (Arabs don't want Jews on ANY land in the region, period.)  They need to get over it.  

Look at history: most countries today, in every part of the world, include land that at one time or another was part of another country.  The entire Mideast is land taken from the Ottomans (Turkey) after WWI, who earlier stole it from...uh...I can't remember.  My state of Texas is in fact land that was claimed by "Texians" who kept it as a war prize after the defeat of Mexican strongman Santa Anna back in 1836.  And do we need to talk about how the first Europeans in the New World seized lands from Native Americans?  Shit happens, OK?

So on the surface my sympathies are with Israel 90% of the time.  Am I missing something?  Are there some material facts I'm not considering?  Why can't cooler, more reasonable heads sit down and work things out?  

'Course, following that reasoning, why can Democrats and Republicans sit down and work things out?  *sigh*

S

Drill, baby, drill...

I get so sick of opening the news every morning and seeing almost every world news article datelined Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, the PLO, etc.  They're nuts!  I think the Brits opened a can of worms a hundred years ago when they found oil in the mid-east and began transitioning the industrial revolution from coal to oil.  (Well....it's a tough call.  Coal is pretty nasty stuff.)


I'm encouraged that we're making real progress, although almost accidentally, towards energy independence.  It comes with strings attached, and we'll have to be very careful extracting it, but it'll be worth it to be able to thumb our noses at that region.  Shame we didn't take all that money that we've dumped into that black hole over the years and instead used it to develop a way to burn political promises or manure (same thing) or cat hair balls.


They can Shiite all over each other for all I care. 


S