More important than all the political, economic and legal debates, however, is the attitude toward achievement that is expressed in the literature of the Palestinian apologists. Most of it echoes the view of Arab leader Musa Alami, meeting with Ben-Gurion in 1934. When Ben-Gurion told him that Zionism “would bring a blessing to the Arabs of Palestine, and they have no good cause to oppose us” Alami replied, “I would prefer that the country remain impoverished and barren for another hundred years, until we ourselves are able to develop it on our own.” This sentiment continues today under Hamas. In 2005, when Israelis actually relinquished their advanced greenhouses and irrigation equipment in Gaza, the leaders of Hamas ordered many of these facilities destroyed. Some things never change. On April 9, 2011 the PLO’s chief representative in the U.S., Maen Areikat, told the Jewish
This concept of economic self-sufficiency is the chief cause of poverty in the world. No one can be rich alone. Wealth is an effect of sharing and collaboration between an elite of capitalists and the insurgent new businesses rising up around them. It is an effect of the willingness of the young and less-educated or less talented to work for the educated and able. It is a by-product of apprenticeship and learning followed by entrepreneurial rivalry. The success of the Israeli economy is not an imbalance that creates invidious gaps. It is a gap — that is, an opportunity — that summons new energies and new wealth.
All capitalist advance generates imbalances and disequilibrium. Growth is an effect of the disequilibrating activities of entrepreneurs, the creative destruction unleashed by rare feats of extraordinary achievement. It is the fallacy of perfect competition and convergence that leads most of the global media and academic
Emerging today is yet a fourth era for the Palestinian economy. The immediate prospects look grim. After the Gaza war of early 2009, the response of the international community was to mobilize some $4 billion in new foreign aid, including $900 million from the United States. Most of the money will tend to gravitate toward governmental institutions, increasing their relative power and discouraging the private economy of entrepreneurial energies. Dominant in Gaza and bristling with weapons, Hamas captures the bulk of these funds, regardless of how they are intended to be distributed. Hamas accepts the money as a well-earned reward for its missile attacks on Israel and will bask in their glow as the cycle of Western appeasement and Western pelf for terrorists continues.
Nonetheless, the long-term possibilities illuminated during the second era of Palestinian prosperity between 1967 and 1987 have become even more inviting with the new global ascendancy of the Israeli economy. Israel’s current administration, under the business-savvy leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, is committed to the economics of collaboration and prosperity. When the violence abates, he is resolved to open up new opportunities for Palestinian entrepreneurship and growth.
As always, the choice remains clear between the ascent of capitalism and freedom and the economics of dependency and the politics of national socialism.
So what does this history have to do with the Worldwatch alarms about a rising threat of water exhaustion in the Middle East? A few simple statistics suggest that the Israeli settlers (and, after all, to the Palestinian Authority, all Israelis are settlers) are the solution rather than the problem in the region. Since the foundation of the state of Israel in a land that is half desert with no rain six months of the year, the population has risen tenfold. While the amount of land under cultivation has nearly tripled, agricultural production has increased 16-fold, producing some $800 million worth of Israeli farm exports in 2010. At the same time, industrial output has surged some 5 0 -fold. Meanwhile, Israeli use of water has
Israelis now purify and recycle some 95 percent of the nation’s sewage, including imports of
Israel’s settlers are far less a problem than a solution to all the most acute problems of the Middle East. Progress toward peace would be expedited if the U.S. government recognized this supreme and basic fact of life in the region and understood the sources of the economy of hate.
CHAPTER FIVE
In a great prophetic work, “A Draft of Guidelines for the Reconstruction of Austria,” written in May 1940 as a report for Otto von Hapsburg, the former archduke of Austria, economist Ludwig von Mises predicted the effects of the banishment of Jews from Austria after the Nazi annexation in 1938. By implication, he also explained the predicament of the Palestinians today.
Presenting the facts of life for small countries without oil or other valuable natural endowment, von Mises wrote:
As a mountainous country with poor soil and few natural resources, Austria must rely on industrial activity to feed a population of six and a half million people. As an agrarian nation, [it] could at best eke out enough food for a population of one to two million… To be an industrial country requires being predominantly an importer of raw materials and food and an exporter of industrial products…
The mainstays of such an organism,” von Mises pointed out, “are the entrepreneurs of the export industry who have the know-how to produce [competitive] goods for the world market. The industrial and commercial genius of these entrepreneurs creates work and livelihood for all the other citizens…
By von Mises’ estimate, “Old Austria produced about one thousand men of this kind.” Von Mises recognized what David C. McClelland saw in America in his
Not only Jewish entrepreneurs were driven out of the economy. The hatred of Jews epitomizes a general resentment of excellence and creativity. “Tax offices [as instruments of redistribution] were filled with a blind hate against ‘plutocrats’” of all races and creeds. Moreover, technical talent and middle management are a crucial complement to entrepreneurial genius. Much of the most productive middle management of Austrian companies was also Jewish. Of the some 250
Von Mises concludes: “The so-called Aryanization of firms was based on the Marxist idea that capital (resources and equipment) and labor… were the only vital ingredients of an enterprise, whereas the entrepreneur was an exploiter. An enterprise without entrepreneurial spirit and creativity, however, is nothing more than a pile of rubbish and old iron.” Austria was left with many piles of rubbish and old iron. Its newly
Growing up in Austria during the period described by von Mises was Adolf Hitler, whose original surname was Schicklgruber. Explaining this Austrian catastrophe and similar disasters in Hungary is the set of ideas and assumptions in Hitler’s personal manifesto,
