Harry Targ
Global Economic
Context
Looking at the last third
of the twentieth century, Canadian economist James Davies, in a study prepared
by the World Institute for Development Economics Research, wrote “income
inequality has been rising for the past 20 to 25 years and we think that is
true for inequality in the distribution of wealth.” In 2000 the study showed
that the top 1 percent of the world’s population accounted for 40 percent of
its total net worth, with the bottom half owning 1.1 percent. Edward Wolff,
another economist participating in the study, wrote “With the notable exception
of China and India, the third world has drifted behind.” (New York Times,
December 6, 2006).
The starkest interpretation of this kind of data was reflected in a 2003 article by Egyptian economist Samir Amin. He asserted that the global economy is creating what he called “the precarious classes.” Both in agriculture and manufacturing they cannot count on day-to-day remunerative activity to survive. Amin estimated that 2/3 to 3/4 of humankind are among the “precarious classes.”
Relevance to the Middle
East in the 21st Century
A financial publication
entitled “Arab Banker” printed a summary of a 2007 World Bank study, “Two Years
After London: Restarting Palestinian Economic Recovery.” The World Bank, the
Arab Banker, and other sources presented the following alarming data:
-The percentage of Gazans
living in poverty steadily increased from 1998 (21.6%) to 2006 (35%).
-Israeli policies barring
imports and exports which isolated Gaza from the Israeli and global economy
made matters worse; a 90 % decline in Gaza’s industrial operations occurred
between the 2006 parliamentary election victory of Hamas and 2007.
-Industrial employment in
Gaza declined from 35,000 in 2005 to 4,200 in 2007.
During the first decade
of the new century, comparative economic data on Israel and the occupied
territories indicated that West Bank and Gaza gross national product per capita
was about 10 percent of that of Israel.
More recently, the United
Nations issued a report entitled “Socio-Economic and Food Security Survey 2012:
West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestine.” This report was produced under the
auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations Relief
and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, and the World Food
program. It documented a connection between food insecurity in Palestine and
external constraints on the economies of the West Bank and Gaza imposed by
occupation and blockades. Among their findings were the following:
-34 percent of
Palestinian households, comprising over 1.5 million people, live in situations
of food insecurity (19 percent in the West Bank and 57 percent in Gaza).
-Food insecurity
increased since 2009, derived from growing unemployment, declining purchasing
power, and slowed or abandoned aid thus decreasing jobs, income, and
consumption.
-Food insecure households
(often with larger families) are more likely to experience disabilities and
chronic illnesses.
The report made three
general recommendations: lift the embargo on Gaza, increase West Bank access to
the Israeli economy, and support efforts to increase economic productivity in
the West Bank and Gaza.
The Middle East Wars
The contested land of
Palestine had been largely populated by Muslim peoples from the 7th century
until the mid-twentieth century. In 1947, the year that the United
Nations recommended the partition of Palestine into two states, only 1/3 of the
land’s inhabitants were of Jewish background. On May 14, 1948, David
Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization and the
chairman of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, declared the establishment of a new
state of Israel, and the first Middle East war between the new Israeli army and
Arab states ensued. Palestinians and Arab neighbors regarded the creation of
the new state as an occupation of the historic residents of the land. Over the
course of this first Middle East war and those that followed hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians became a displaced population.
Subsequently wars
occurred in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and intermittently from the 1980s until
today. (In the 1967 war Israel occupied, the West Bank, Gaza, the Old City of
Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, formerly Syrian land).
These wars were fought between Israelis, Palestinians and states neighboring
Israel. Disputes involved multiple issues including the legitimacy of the state
of Israel; Israeli expansion, particularly its continuing construction of
settlements in the West Bank and the displacement of Palestinian people; the
rights of Palestinians inside Israel, and control of water and land throughout
the region. Various organizations challenging the Israeli state and land
expansion emerged over the last fifty years including the Palestine Liberation
Organization, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Several nations supported contending
parties to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict such as the United States and the
former Soviet Union during the Cold War, former European colonial powers such
as Great Britain and France, and neighboring Arab and other Muslim states.
The United States became
Israel’s main ally during all these years. Since 1979 Israel has been the
largest recipient on a per capita basis of foreign assistance from the United
States of any of the latter’s clients. In addition, Israel has become the best
equipped and most powerful military force in the region, largely due to the
billions of dollars of US military assistance. Israel is the only state with
nuclear weapons in the region. In a recent budget decision, the United States
has agreed to provide military assistance totaling $3.8 billion per annum for
ten years to Israel beginning in 2019.
Finally, pro-Israel lobby
groups in the United States support continued military and economic aid to
Israel. Israel, with United States support, opposes serious negotiations with
what is now the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza. It
is expected that recent West Bank/Gaza Palestinian agreements will harden
Israeli opposition to serious negotiation.
Of course, Israel opposes
initiatives from peace groups in the US and the international community.
Currently, militant pro-Israel lobby groups as well as the Israeli government
are pressuring Congress to pass legislation overturning Obama administration
accords with Iran on nuclear weapons. Many also advocate US-led military
action against Iran.
Violence and instability
in the region, the tragedy of 9/11, worldwide terrorism directed against US
targets, and insurmountable and spreading conflicts have been directly related
to Israel’s economic isolation of and military actions toward the Palestinian
people and the continuing US support of Israel’s policies. Within the United
States, critics of US support of Israel are excoriated and politicians are
intimidated such that policy debate on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians
inside Israel as well as economic embargoes and military attacks on interim
Palestinian institutions and people in Gaza and the West Bank are largely
censored from public discourse.
The particular mantra of
rightwing groups, including Christian nationalists and Republicans and Democrats alike, label any critics of Israeli policy as “anti-Semitic.”
Some of the strongest voices opposed to the total United States military and
economic support for Israel come from progressives in the Jewish community.
More Jewish people are becoming critics of Israel’s inhumane treatment of the
Palestinian people. Many of these people proudly identify with their historical
heritage of support for social and economic justice all around the world and
are outraged by recent disingenuous claims of sympathy for the Jewish people
from Conservative politicians in both political parties, think tanks and
religious lobby groups, and sectors of the mainstream media.
Politics and Economics of
the Middle East Today
Nar Arafeh, a Rhodes
scholar at Oxford University, challenges the idea that economic development in
the West Bank and Gaza alone could bring peace to the region. She argues that
unless economic change is coupled with increased Palestinian political rights
in the region resistance to Israel’s political/military domination will
continue.
As to economics, although
Palestine is expected to experience 3.5% growth in GDP in 2017, that growth is
largely based on construction, presumably rebuilding housing units destroyed by
Israeli bombs. She points out that the boost in construction in recent years in
the West Bank and Gaza is coupled with economic stagnation including low growth
and inadequate wages, increased unemployment, and declining foreign assistance.
Israel controls the flow of labor from the West Bank to production sites as
needed and limits more substantially Palestinian labor from Gaza. Arafeh says
that “The ‘Palestinian Economy’ is a political construct, shaped to
serve the more powerful player: Israel.” (Nar Arafeh, “Palestine’s Economic
Outlook-April, 2017. Al Jazeera).
And on the human rights
front, an Amnesty International report entitled, “Israel and Occupied
Palestinian Territories Report 2016/2017” stated that:
Israeli forces unlawfully killed Palestinian civilians,
including children, in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories
(OPT), and detained thousands of Palestinians from the OPT who opposed Israel’s
continuing military occupation, holding hundreds in administrative detention.
Torture and other ill-treatment of detainees remained rife and was committed
with impunity. The authorities continued to promote illegal settlements in the
West Bank, including by attempting to retroactively “legalize” settlements
built on private Palestinian land, and severely restricted Palestinians’
freedom of movement, closing some areas after attacks by Palestinians on Israelis.
Israeli forces continued to blockade the Gaza Strip, subjecting its population
of 1.9 million to collective punishment, and to demolish homes of Palestinians
in the West Bank and of Bedouin villagers in Israel’s Negev/Naqab region,
forcibly evicting residents.
What Does This Mean?
First, violence and
political instability in the world is intimately connected to the absence of
economic well-being. The economic crises faced in recent years in the
industrial capitalist world are small compared to the punishing crises of
survival that some countries of the Global South still experience in the 21st
century; countries and territories of the Middle East are prime examples.
Second, data suggests
clearly that in the occupied territories (the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan
Heights, all conquered in the 1967 Middle East war) the notion of
“precariousness” (joblessness, land theft, food insecurity, grotesque economic
and political inequalities) is an apt way to describe the condition of the
Palestinian people.
Third, shifting currents
in Palestinian politics have been connected to patterns of economic growth and decay.
In the 1950s and 1960s, secular leaders in the Arab world, including
Palestinians, offered a vision of economic change and political autonomy for
their people that was processed in Washington and European capitals as
threatening to dominant economic interests. President Nasser of Egypt who
opened relations with the Soviet Union and began to talk about Arab Socialism
was a prime target of concern. Paradoxically, the US began to support political
actors in the region with a religious agenda, countries such as Saudi Arabia
and later in the 1980s followers of Osama Bin Laden who were fighting Soviet
forces in Afghanistan. In the 1980s also the United States supported Hamas in
Palestine.
There is no easy solution
but the United States and other wealthy countries have an obligation to
participate in a disinterested economic reconstruction of the occupied
territories and support for complete political autonomy of the Palestinian
people. Only that will break the back of anger, hatred, and political instability.
The United States should stop fueling the violence in the region by ending
military aid to Israel. Economic reconstruction requires negotiation toward the
creation of a viable secular Israeli state in which all participate or a
separate Palestinian state with land repatriation and guarantees of security
from Israeli military attack. In addition, Israeli settlements in the West Bank
need to be dismantled. Economic development must be coupled with economic
justice.
In the United States, the
political climate needs to begin to change so that a resumption of frank
dialogue can proceed concerning foreign policy toward Israel, ending the
violence in the region, and supporting economic justice and political rights
for the Palestinian people. For example, is it wise and humane for the United
States to commit $3.8 billion annually in for military aid to Israel for the
next ten years?
Labeling those who
propose different United States foreign policies toward Israel as anti-Semitic
do a disservice to peoples of the region and defame US activists, including
Jews, who support peace and justice for the Palestinian people.
