A
manual worker at the settlement-based factory that sparked the Scarlett Johansson
controversy, Nahida Fares of Ramallah earns triple the pay of her husband, an
officer in the PA.
MISHOR
ADUMIM, West Bank — The SodaStream factory, situated just off the highway
leading down from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, was abuzz on Sunday with journalists
from across the globe trying to get a glimpse of the action.
The
tour of the carbonated beverage-maker plant was organized especially for
curious foreign correspondents on the eve of the Super Bowl, which featured an ad starring its glamorous spokeswoman Scarlett Johansson. The factory,
SodaStream’s charismatic US-born CEO Daniel Birnbaum proudly declared, used to
produce munitions for the Israeli army. It was bought in 1996 by the fizzy
drink start-up, seeking to better the world by doing away with polluting
plastic bottles.
A
statue at the entrance to the plant, Birnbaum pointed out, encapsulated the
company spirit with the immortal words of the prophet Isaiah: “And they shall
beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation
shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
SodaStream’s
business has grown exponentially since Birnbaum was hired by the private equity
firm that bought the company in 2007. Under the previous management, SodaStream
manufactured 20,000-30,000 counter-top soda machines a month. Now it produces
that number every day.
As
SodaStream’s global market expanded, so did its need for manual laborers.
Today, the Mishor Adumim plant — the first of eight Israeli locations and 22
worldwide — employs 1,300 workers; 950 Arabs (450 Israeli and 500 Palestinian)
and 350 Israeli Jews. Salaries and work benefits — management asserts and
workers confirm — are equal for all workers in comparable jobs, regardless of
ethnicity or citizenship. The factory secures Israeli work permits for its
Palestinian employees as well as rides from their home and back, SodaStream’s
Chief Operating Officer Yossi Azarzar told The Times of Israel.
Proponents
of the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanction) campaign posit that any Israeli
business located beyond the 1949 armistice frontier known as the Green Line is
by definition exploitative, in addition to being illegal under international
law. They castigated Johannson for representing the firm; she rejected the onslaught — declaring that “SodaStream is a company that is not only committed to
the environment but to building a bridge to peace between Israel and Palestine”
— and resigned as an ambassador for British-based charity Oxfam when they
critiqued her role.
Birnbaum,
the CEO, was clearly cognizant of the dispute. He spoke of Jewish-Arab
coexistence as he stood next to a veiled young Arab woman working on the
assembly line across from an older woman with a black head covering who
immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union in 1993.
Zooming
in on Birnbaum and the two women, the camera crews and microphone-holding
reporters overlooked another young Palestinian woman standing nearby, fitting
plastic valves into a large metal tray. Nahida Fares, 28, graduated Nablus’s
A-Najjah University in primary school education. She began working for Israeli
companies two years ago, when she could find no work in her field in Ramallah,
where she lives with her husband and infant child.
“There
are no job opportunities in the West Bank,” Fares told The Times of Israel.
“Even the jobs that do exist pay no more than NIS 1,500-2,000 ($430-570) a
month.” Fares now earns triple those sums.
Many
educated women like Fares were forced to seek work outside the home following
the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 to support the household as the
Palestinian economy collapsed, she explained.
Fares’s
husband, a first lieutenant in the Palestinians’ prestigious Preventive
Security Force, earns NIS 2,000 ($570) per month after 10 years of service.
Given
the relatively low levels of political violence in recent years, the Israeli
Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) has increased
the number of work permits granted to Palestinians by some 37% between 2010 and
2012. Still, Palestinian men must be above the age 24 and married with a child
to be eligible for work permits within Israel. Israeli workers’ unions do not
protect Palestinians from exploitation by employers, critics note.
To work
in a settlement, however, a Palestinian man need only be older than 18 and have
no negative security record. To work in Israel, Palestinians must apply to the
Israeli Population and Immigration Authority; to work in an Israeli settlement
in the West Bank (like the Mishor Adumim industrial zone) they must apply to
the Civil Administration, the branch of COGAT entrusted with Palestinian
civilian matters. A COGAT spokesman told The Times of Israel in a written
response that 24,000 permits are given to Palestinians wishing to work in the
settlements on average every month. More than double that number (49,250) were
allowed to work in Israel in January, mostly in the construction industry.
Fares,
for instance, first began working at a laundromat in the Mishor Adumim
industrial zone (where SodaStream is located), but left because of management
mistreatment. At SodaStream she is much happier, working a 12-hour shift from 7
a.m. to 7 p.m. and receiving a 15-30 minute break for every two hours of work.
Food in the cafeteria is great, she said, as she showed me the valve that she
boasted is “the most important component of the soda dispenser.”
Another
employee, Sa’ida, 28, began studying Hebrew in her hometown of Jericho but only
started using it at the plant, where she first came in contact with Israeli
Jews. Jews and Arabs mix freely here, she noted; “they even change clothes
together,” she said, and blushed.
While
declining to discuss the political ramifications of her sensitive employment at
Mishor Adumim (working in settlements is illegal under Palestinian law), Sa’ida
said she and her colleagues were wondering why SodaStream had been singled out
by the media from all the other companies in the industrial zone.
“It’s
because of Scarlett Johansson,” she was told.
Plosker:
When
asked about the effect of the BDS campaign on SodaStream’s business, Birnbaum
pointed to 30-40% growth over the past five years. The people who pay the price
for boycotts are the Palestinian workers themselves. Some Scandinavian
countries have demanded that their SodaStream products be sourced from
elsewhere, instead preferring that they get their goods made in that beacon of
human rights, China. Were it not for a boycott like this, the Mishor Adumim
factory would employ more Palestinians.
Asked
about the current controversy and publicity, Birnbaum stated that it is convenient
and popular to demonize Israel and that NGOs such as Oxfam were more concerned
with attacking Israel than dealing with human rights. After all, what would be
achieved if SodaStream were to lay off hundreds of Palestinians leaving them
jobless with no way to feed their families?
Birnbaum
also accused Oxfam of funding groups responsible for the BDS campaign.
I was
tremendously impressed with Daniel Birnbaum’s commitment to peaceful
co-existence and SodaStream’s practical role in promoting it. While the
boycotters may wish to see the factory closed down, he would not let his
workers down.
Less
impressive, however, was the line of questioning from many of the journalists.
The same people who had just met with and interviewed Palestinians happy with
their lot were still unable to get beyond their preconceptions. It seems that
even if Birnbaum were to throw wads of free cash for the Palestinians, it
wouldn’t be good enough for them.
In
their eyes, the welfare of ordinary Palestinians is secondary to the wider
consideration of cleansing Jews from the West Bank. Sadly, some of the
journalists’ worldview evidently isn’t that far from that of the BDS movement.
With
Secretary of State Kerry gradually unveiling his proposal for a solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is worth asking what it is that Kerry seeks to
solve. The present situation is certainly far from ideal. Yet, most Israelis
feel safe most of the time and most Palestinians don’t live under “occupation”;
they live in areas controlled and governed by the Palestinian Authority. In the
last decade this conflict has generated comparatively fewer casualties than
those in nearby countries and if one doesn’t count Hezbollah-controlled
southern Lebanon or Hamas-controlled Gaza, which are after all not even being
included in Kerry’s peace plan, then the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of recent
years has been positively uneventful. A cold war between Israel and the PA.
For
most Israelis and most Palestinians the present situation is tolerated with the
understanding that this is not a permanent arrangement. What each side thinks a
permanent arrangement should look like, however, is still vastly different. In
this way the unresolved nature of the standoff leaves open the hope for each
side that their vision will win out. Drawing from this, there are those on the
two sides that prefer perpetuating and advancing the status quo, even if only
as means of keeping open the possibility of achieving more far-reaching
objectives in the long run. For these parties it has essentially become about
playing the long game. For each the hoped-for future remaining just out of
reach.
While
the Palestinian population in the West Bank is clearly far from happy with the
status quo, it also seems that they prefer an outcome that is unachievable as
things stand. Electoral support for Hamas and polling of Palestinians in recent
years would suggest most Palestinians either reject the two-state proposal
outright, or they believe two states should be used as a step toward eventually
eliminating the Jewish state. The dream of seeing Israel ended and Palestinians
return in its place has remained prominent and unaltered, constituting the core
of Palestinian identity ever since it was formed in the aftermath of Israel’s
establishment. This is what most Palestinian politicians continue to express
support for–in Arabic at least–and it’s what they broadcast on their television
networks and teach in their schools.
The
Palestinian leadership also has multiple practical reasons for maintaining the
status quo. For one thing, they have long grown fat on the financial aid and
sympathy that comes with playing the part of the ever-destitute nation. They
are also confident that under the status quo they are better able to advance
their strategy for weakening Israel, chipping away at its international
legitimacy while believing that demographics are ultimately on their side. With
every round of negotiations they have been able to win more concessions from
Israel, the consensus about the final-status parameters gradually drifting in
their favor. When new talks begin it is with Israel’s previous concessions
assumed as given, with the expectation that Israel now agree to further
demands. The division of Jerusalem and land swaps being a case in point. Each
time the amount Israel is obliged to offer increases.
The
Israeli public became sick of policing the West Bank decades ago. The electoral
success of those promising to end the impasse has been persistent, even in the
face of unrelenting Palestinian terrorism. However, this hope for peace accompanied
by the constant background noise of violence against Israeli civilians creates
a strange kind of cognitive dissonance. Israelis find themselves unwilling to
stay with the present arrangement, while not quite able to embrace a new one.
Land-for-peace
compromises only served to weaken Israel’s security, undermining the left-wing
peace camp, adding weight to the arguments of Israel’s security hawks who, like
many Israelis, still hope for a complete and definitive defeat of Palestinian
terrorism. These voices insist that given current Palestinian attitudes and
incitement, for now it is safer to manage the conflict than attempt to solve
it. For such an agreement would mean evacuating the strategically vital Jordan
Valley and abandoning the West Bank hilltops that overlook Israel’s narrow
coastal strip where its major population centers, industrial infrastructure,
and transit network are all situated. Israel would have to do this knowing a
Palestinian state has every likelihood of turning out to be another failed
state, a terror state and an Iranian satellite. Far better, they argue, to have
the IDF in the West Bank, keeping Hamas and Islamic Jihad at bay, while
strengthening the Jewish presence in the settlement blocks ensures that the
areas most vital to Israel’s future will be retained in any agreement.
In this
way the unhappy status quo at least leaves open the possibility to people on
both sides of eventually achieving their most precious objectives. The problem
with Kerry’s final-status plan is that it threatens to permanently slam the
door firmly shut on these hopes. We have already seen what unsettling the
status quo looks like. It was during the Oslo years that suicide bombers first
ventured into Israel’s cities. Equally, the failure of the Camp David peace
talks in 2000 played no small part in unleashing the horrors of the second
intifada.
Israel
and the PA have already agreed to disagree, for now. Kerry may yet come to wish
he’d left well enough alone.
The accommodation and facilities complex, under construction in Sochi, with the
Bolshoi Ice Dome in the background, on December 2, 2012. Construction is due to
be completed by August 2013 according to organizers. (Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski).
SOCHI,
Russia — The alarms sounded every 45 minutes, with a stern Russian woman
advising that a fire had been reported and the hotel needed to be evacuated
immediately.
I
believed it the first time.
And the
second.
I might
have fallen for it a third time Tuesday morning, if I hadn’t thrown caution to
the bone-tired, jet-lagged wind and decided to stay in bed. Whatever would
befall me, it had to be better than wandering along the western Caucasus Mountains
in my pajamas.
It was
already 5:50 a.m. and I couldn’t fall back to sleep so I figured I would just
begin my day. I turned on the water to brush my teeth, but nothing came out.
Just the gagging, asthmatic sound of pipes wanting to produce water.
I tried
to flip on the shower. It wouldn’t work. The toilets wouldn’t flush either.
I
called the front desk.
“It
will be fixed in 40 minutes,” the sympathetic man at the reception desk told
me. “But when it comes back on, please do not use on your face because it
contains something very dangerous.”
Welcome
to Sochi 2014, the dystopian-like Games where a simple shower poses a threat to
your face, fire alarms ring constantly and several hotels remain unfinished.
Russian President Vladimir Putin spent more than $50 billion on these Games —
the most expensive Olympics, winter or summer, ever — yet he seemingly forgot
to pay the water bill.
No one
likes to hear sportswriters complain about their hotels. I’m not a
sportswriter, so believe me when I swear that I mock those whiners right along
with you.
But
this is different.
The
Sochi Olympics aren’t just a sporting event. They represent Putin’s pride, his
metaphoric muscle flexing in an effort to show the international community just
how virile his country has become under his leadership. He dared the world to
admire Russia’s ability to produce these Games, so we must.
And, in
some respects, the effort looks extraordinarily weak.
Only
six of nine media hotels were finished on time, leaving hundreds of reporters
scrambling to find temporary lodging.
When
the water eventually came back on at my hotel — my temporary housing for a
night until my scheduled room could be finished — the water that poured through
the faucet was dark yellow. It was the color of apple juice or a performance
enhancing drug test specimen. The shower left what looked like fish food flakes
coating the tub.
I took
a picture of the water and tweeted it out.
“On the
bright side,” I wrote, “I now know what dangerous face water looks like.”
My
tweets about the water went viral — more than 1,500 people have retweeted it —
not because I wrote something exceptionally clever, but because I pointed out
the annoyances that many here have endured.
One of
my colleagues, for example, went to his assigned hotel room only to find an AP
photographer already sleeping there. Others have dealt with a lack of hot
water, sheetless beds and baths without shower curtains.
“Congrats
to @Dave _Schwartz only media personality who’s arrived in Sochi with a hotel
room that’s ready, with doorknob that doesn't fall off,” Minnesota Wild
spokesman Ryan Stanzel tweeted.
International
Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach told reporters Monday that 97 percent
of Sochi hotel rooms were delivered without a problem. Only 3 percent of the
rooms — about 750 total — had some kind of a problem, he said.
“I have
some travel experience and I know how embarrassing it is when you arrive after
a long flight to a place and your room is not ready,” he said.
I’m not
sure why Bach thinks I should be embarrassed by my ‘bathroom faucet spitting
urine-colored water. First of all, I ended up washing my face with bottled
Evian water, which made me feel like a Kardashian.
And,
second, it’s made me extremely popular among my fellow journalists here in
southwestern Russia. I’ve received tweets in Russian, German, Danish and
languages I have not yet determined.
On a
bus down the mountainside Tuesday night a Swedish photographer came up and
asked if I was the person who tweeted the hotel photo.
“You
are the dangerous face water woman, right?” he said.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin caresses a Persian leopard
cub as he visits the Persian leopard breeding and rehabilitation centre in the
National Park in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, on February 4, 2014. (ALEXEI
NIKOLSKY/AFP/Getty Images.)
Breakout Session: The Middle East Peace Process. Video. Munich Security Conference, January 31, 2014. Livini-Erekat exchange starts at 50:55. Erekat’s remarks/tirade on his historical narrative as a proud son of Jericho with roots 5500 years before Joshua ben Nun start at 58:35.
Western
experts may argue with some justification that the upheavals in the Arab world
since 2011 have been the product of decades of authoritarian repression, weak
and ineffective governance, failed social policies, poor economic development
and growing inequality of income distribution, corruption, and crony capitalism
– points made equally clear by Arab experts in the series of Arab Development
Reports issued by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
The
fact remains, however, that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies have valid
reasons to see these upheavals as direct threats on or near their borders, and
to the two other remaining monarchies in Morocco and Jordan, and can argue that
they were far better at meeting popular needs with their oil wealth than any of
the Arab states with titular presidents and pseudo democracies. It is also
interesting to note how many Russian and Chinese diplomats and scholars have
the same impression of the results of the upheavals in the Arab world and the
Western response – views that strike an immediate chord with Arab experts at
conferences and meetings in the region.
It is
hard to argue why most citizens of any Arab Gulf state or Arab monarchy would
envy or want to emulate any citizen of Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq,
Lebanon, Palestine, or Yemen. Whatever hopes outsiders may have in the eventual
triumph of modernization, democracy, and development, it is far from clear why
anyone in their right minds would want to live through any of the examples of such
transitions to date. At present, the best any outside power can do is to try to
find the least bad course of action. There are no good sides, merely ones that
offer less risk and less potential for future damage.
Two
phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection
between them? In a letter to this newspaper, the noted venture capitalist Tom
Perkins called attention to certain parallels, as he saw them, between Nazi
Germany's war against the Jews and American progressives’ war on the “one
percent.” For comparing two such historically disparate societies, Mr. Perkins
was promptly and heatedly denounced.
But is
there something to be said for his comparison—not of Germany and the United
States, of course, but of the politics at work in the two situations? The place
to begin is at the starting point: with the rise of anti-Semitism, modernity's
most successful and least understood political movement.
The
German political activist Wilhelm Marr, originally a man of the left, organized
a movement in the 1870s that charged Jews with using their skills “to conquer
Germany from within.” Distinguishing the movement that he called anti-Semitism
from earlier forms of anti-Judaism, Marr argued on professedly rational grounds
that Jews were taking unfair advantage of the emerging democratic order in
Europe, with its promise of individual rights and open competition, in order to
dominate the fields of finance, culture and social ideas. Though some of Marr’s
rhetoric and imagery was based on earlier stereotypes, he was right to insist
that anti-Semitism was a new response to new conditions, channeling grievance
and blame against highly visible beneficiaries of freedom and opportunity.
These
were some of its typical ploys: Are you unemployed? The Jews have your jobs. Is
your family mired in poverty? The Rothschilds have your money. Do you feel more
insecure in the city than you did on the land? The Jews are trapping you in
factories and charging you exorbitant rents.
Anti-Semitism
accused Jews of undermining Christian authority and corrupting the German legal
system, the arts and the press. Jews were said to be rabid internationalists
spreading Bolshevism—and ruthless capitalists exploiting for their own gain the
nation’s natural and human resources. To ambitious politicians seeking office,
to rulers of still largely illiterate populations, “the Jews” became a
convenient catchall explanation for deep-rooted and sometimes intractable
problems.
But
though the origins of modern anti-Semitism may be traced to Germany,
anti-Semitism itself remains sui generis and cannot be simply conflated with
either Germany or Hitler. True, the latter gained power on a platform of
anti-Semitism and then proceeded to put his Final Solution into effect, but the
modern organization of politics against the Jews is independent of Nazism—and
of fascism, since the Italian variant did not specifically target the Jews.
Features of anti-Semitism are present in other political movements, on the left
fully as much the right.
The
parallel that Tom Perkins drew in his letter was especially irksome to his
respondents on the left, many of whom are supporters of President Obama’s
sallies against Wall Street and the “one percent.” These critics might
profitably consult Robert Wistrich, today’s leading historian of anti-Semitism.
His From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The
Left, the Jews, and Israel (2012) documents the often profound
anti-Semitism that has affected socialists and leftists from Karl Marx to today’s
anti-Israel movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions. It was Marx who
said, “The bill of exchange is the Jew’s actual god,” putting a Jewish face on
capitalism and accusing both Judaism and capitalism of converting man and
nature into “alienable and saleable objects.”
Herein
lies one structural connection between a politics of blame directed
specifically at Jews and a politics of grievance directed against “the rich.”
The ranks of those harping on “unfairly” high earners include figures in
American political life at all levels who have been entrusted with the care of
our open society; in channeling blame for today’s deep-rooted and seemingly
intractable problems toward the beneficiaries of that society's competitive
freedoms, they are playing with fire.
I say
this not only, and not even primarily, because some of those beneficiaries
happen also to be Jews. So far, mainstream American politicians and supporters
of movements like Occupy Wall Street have confined their attacks to the
nameless “one percent,” and in any case it is doubtful that today any U.S.
politician would be electable on an explicitly anti-Jewish platform.
My
point is broader: Stoking class envy is a step in a familiar, dangerous and
highly incendiary process. Any ideology or movement, right or left, that is
organized negatively—against rather than for—enjoys an inherent advantage in
politics, mobilizing unappeasable energies that never have to default on their
announced goal of cleansing the body politic of its alleged poisons.
In this
respect, one might think of anti-Semitism as the purest and most murderous
example of an enduring political archetype: the negative campaign. That
campaign has its international as well as its domestic front. Modern
anti-Zionism, itself a patented invention of Soviet Communism and now the
lingua franca of the international left, uses Israel just as anti-Semitism uses
Jews, directing grievance and blame and eliminationist zeal against an entire
collectivity that has flourished on the world scene thanks to the blessings of
freedom and opportunity.
Herein
lies a deeper structural connection. On the global front today, the much larger
and more obvious beneficiary of those same blessings is the democratic
capitalist system of the United States, and the ultimate target of the ultimate
negative campaign is the American people. Anyone seeking to understand the
inner workings of such a campaign will find much food for thought in Mr.
Perkins’s parallel.
Hoping
to understand the current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in human terms, I
made a visit last week to a Palestinian farmer named Hammadeh Kashkeesh, whom I
first met 32 years ago.
The
encounter reminded me of the pain that’s at the heart of this dispute, and how
hard it will be for any diplomatic settlement to resolve the bitterness on both
sides.
First,
try to imagine the landscape, and how it has changed in the years of Israeli
occupation. Halhul is an agricultural town in the rock-ribbed hills just south
of Bethlehem. When I first traveled this route in 1982 to spend two weeks with
Kashkeesh, to write a profile of his town, the hillsides were mostly barren.
Now, the landscape is dense with Israeli settlements, many of them built since
the Oslo Accord in 1993 that created the Palestinian Authority.
Kashkeesh
and his neighbors pride themselves on raising what they claim are the tastiest
grapes in the world. His access to his vines was obstructed more than a decade
ago when a special road was built for Israeli settlers who live nearby. He had
given up his precious grapes when I visited in 2003, but he’s now found a way
to tend them again. Some of his neighbors aren’t so lucky; their vines have
grown wild or died.
Kashkeesh,
67, worked for years as a stonecutter and then a farmer. He somehow managed to
send all of his seven children to high school or college.
The
indignity and bitterness that come with military occupation are deeply embedded
in Kashkeesh’s voice. In Halhul, the Palestinian Authority is in theory largely
responsible for security. But the Israeli military controls access and
intervenes when it sees a security threat. The night before my visit, Kashkeesh
said, the Israeli army arrested 10 people for throwing stones at soldiers.
There’s
no condoning rock-throwing, let alone terrorist violence. Such tactics have had
ruinous consequences for Palestinians, not least in undermining Israeli hope
that they ever could live in peace. Hearing the anger in Kashkeesh’s voice, and
seeing the sullen faces of young men gathered near his house, was a reminder
that Palestinians experience life as a series of daily humiliations. Life in
Halhul feels closed, embittered, confrontational.
When I
first visited the town, openly advocating a Palestinian state could get you
arrested. Villagers would hide a Palestinian flag disguised as embroidery, or a
map of Palestine on the back of a wall photo. Now, the U.S. is working with
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on a “framework agreement” outlining terms
for peace accord.
But
Kashkeesh said he has nearly given up. He dislikes the Palestinian Authority
almost as much as the Israelis. “They are liars,” he says, whose corrupt
leaders build themselves fancy villas and operate “like a trading company.” He
also rejects Hamas, and says the Palestinian leadership overall has “destroyed
itself, by itself.”
As for
the peace negotiations, he asks how Palestinians will control their destiny in
the demilitarized state that Israel is demanding. “How can we have a sovereign
state if we don’t have control over the border with Jordan?” he wonders. If
Israel gains the recognition it wants as a Jewish state, he argues that
Christian and Muslim citizens of Israel will feel unwelcome. “Nobody will
believe in the agreement, which means there will be no peace.”
Thinking
sadly that Kashkeesh might be right in his skepticism – and that a real end of
this conflict may be impossible – I asked him to tell me again the story about
the boy and the swimming pool. Listen with me:
It was
1975. Kashkeesh was 29 and had recently been released from prison after serving
a six-year sentence for membership in the Fatah guerrilla group. He was working
at a resort in Arad when he saw an Israeli infant fall into the swimming pool.
The parents were elsewhere, and though Kashkeesh couldn’t swim, there was
nobody else to save the boy. So he jumped in the water and took the child in
his arms. When an Israeli investigator asked him why he had risked his life to
help a Jew, he answered that the boy was a human being.
He
tells that story now without much animation. As with millions of Israelis and
Palestinians, I suspect that his heart has been hardened by so many years of
pain and failure. Will the peace negotiations work amid so much mistrust and
anger? I don’t know, but this quest for peace is surely still worth the effort.
Unless
you are exceptionally coldblooded, it’s hard not to be disturbed by today’s
huge economic inequality. The gap between the rich and the poor is enormous,
wider than most Americans would (almost certainly) wish. But this incontestable
reality has made economic inequality a misleading intellectual fad, blamed for
many of our problems. Actually, the reverse is true: Economic inequality is
usually a consequence of our problems and not a cause.
For
starters, the poor are not poor because the rich are rich. The two conditions
are generally unrelated. Mostly, the rich got rich by running profitable small
businesses (car dealerships, builders), creating big enterprises (Google,
Microsoft), being at the top of lucrative occupations (bankers, lawyers,
doctors, actors, athletes), managing major companies or inheriting fortunes. By
contrast, the very poor often face circumstances that make their lives
desperate. In an interview with the New Yorker, President Obama recently put it
this way:
“[The]
‘pathologies’ that used to be attributed to the African-American community in
particular — single-parent households, and drug abuse, and men dropping out of
the labor force, and an underground economy — [are now seen] in larger numbers
in white working-class communities.”
Solutions
elude us. Though some low-income workers would benefit from a higher minimum
wage, most of the very poor would not. They’re not in the labor force; they
either can’t work — too young, old, disabled or unskilled — or won’t. Of the 46
million people below the government’s poverty line in 2012, only 6 percent had year-round full-time jobs. Among men 25 to 55 with a high school diploma or
less, the share with jobs fell from more than 90 percent in 1970 to less than
75 percent in 2010, reports Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution . For
African American men ages 20 to 24, less than half were working.
It’s
also not true that, as widely asserted, the wealthiest Americans (the notorious
top 1 percent) have captured all the gains in productivity and living standards
of recent decades. The Congressional Budget Office examined income trends for
the past three decades. It found sizable gains for all income groups.
True,
the top 1 percent outdid everyone. From 1980 to 2010, their inflation-adjusted
pretax incomes grew a spectacular 190 percent, almost a tripling. But for the
poorest fifth of Americans, pretax incomes for these years rose 44 percent.
Gains were 31 percent for the second poorest, 29 percent for the middle fifth,
38 percent for the next fifth and 83 percent for the richest fifth, including
the top 1 percent. Because our system redistributes income from top to bottom,
after-tax gains were larger: 53percent for the poorest
fifth; 41 percent for the second; 41 percent for the middle-fifth; 49 percent
for the fourth; and 90 percent for richest.
Finally,
widening economic inequality is sometimes mistakenly blamed for causing the Great Recession and the weak recovery. The argument, as outlined by two
economists at Washington University in St. Louis, goes like this: In the 1980s,
income growth for the bottom 95 percent of Americans slowed. People compensated
by borrowing more. All the extra debt led to a consumption boom that was
unsustainable. The housing bubble and crash followed. Now, weak income growth
of the bottom 95 percent “helps explain the slow recovery.”
Optimism
seemed justified. Beginning in the 1980s, inflation fell, reducing interest
rates. Lower interest rates raised stock prices and home values. People felt
wealthier and, on paper, they were. Buoyant consumer spending kept the economy
advancing and unemployment low. Recessions were mild and infrequent. Economists
called this the Great Moderation. Its complacency led directly to the Great
Recession. The boom and bust had little to do with economic inequality.
Americans
in the top 1 percent are convenient scapegoats. They don’t naturally command
much sympathy, and their rewards sometimes seem outsized or outlandish. When
most people are getting ahead, they don’t worry much about this economic
inequality. When progress stalls, they do. There’s a backlash and a tendency to
see less economic inequality as a solution to all manner of problems. We create
simplistic narratives and imagine that punishing the rich will miraculously
uplift the poor. This vents popular resentments, even as it encourages
self-deception.
Breakout Session: The Middle East Peace Process. Video. Munich Security
Conference, January 31, 2014. Livini-Erekat exchange starts at 50:55.
Erekat’s remarks/tirade on his historical narrative as a proud son of Jericho
with roots 5,500 years before Joshua ben Nun start at 58:35.
Erekat:
You
mentioned something about narratives. It is a narrative. I am the son of
Jericho. I am ten thousand years old. I celebrated last year the birth date of
my city. I am the proud son of the Natufians and the Canaanites. I’ve been there
5,500 years before Joshua ben Nun came and burned my hometown Jericho. I’m not
going to change my narrative. When you say accept Israel as a Jewish state it
means you’re asking me to change my narrative.
Saeb
Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator over the weekend again ruled out the
notion of Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Speaking at a
Munich conference, on a panel with his Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni, Erekat
said the demand was unacceptable: “When you say ‘accept Israel as a Jewish
state’ you are asking me to change my narrative,” he claimed, asserting that
his ancestors lived in the region “5,500 years before Joshua Bin-Nun came and
burned my hometown Jericho.”
Joshua
lived about 3,300 years ago, so Erekat is claiming that his family was in the
region for nearly 9000 years. Is this
true? Not
even close. Erekat
was born in Abu Dis, near Jerusalem. I found an interview with another Erekat
who was born in Abu Dis, named Hussein Mohamed Erekat. He says that his family
actually comes from the Huwaitat region of the northwestern Arabian Peninsula. Indeed,
this article about the dialects and clans of Saudi Arabia confirms the
existence of the Erekat (sometimes spelled Areikat or Ariqat) families in
Huwaitat, and they are one of seven clans that ended up in Palestine. Is Saeb
a member of this clan? Yes, he is.
This
Facebook page of the Erekat family traces the Erekat family history, and this article confirms that the family came from the Huwaitat region, and it also
mentions prominent Erekats – including Saeb.
That
article also says that before Huwaitat, their ancestors emigrated from Medina. All of
the Erekats are related. Most of their most prominent members have held
positions in Jordan’s government or armed forces, but three PLO diplomats are
from the family, including Saeb, the US representative of the PLO Maen Rashid Areikat, and the PLO’s delegate to the Ukraine Khaled Erekat.
(Saeb
is also implying that he was born in Jericho, but he wasn’t.) Saeb
Erekat is, once again, lying. Just as we caught him lying many, many times
before. And
after all these years of documented lies, no one in the media has had the guts
to confront him. Because, you see, he may be a liar, but he is a moderate liar,
and therefore deserves everyone's uncritical support. And why
should Israel have a problem signing a peace agreement with liars? UPDATE:
Erekat actually said “I am the son proud of the Canaanites who were there 5,500
years before Joshua bin Nun burned down the town of Jericho.”
It is
one of the less appealing characteristics of Zionist bullies that they engage
blithely in stealing Palestinian land and resources in complete disregard for
international law and then use the fig leaf of charges of “anti-Semitism” to
deflect any criticism of their actions. (The Jewish Home Party, though
religious, characterizes itself as “Zionist.”) This distasteful ploy has
increasingly jumped the shark as simple human rights law has become
“anti-Semitic” insofar as the current rightwing Zionist enterprise violates
international norms, and yet its proponents maintain that criticizing Israel or
Zionism is not allowed. All this is not to mention that the United States gives
(underline gives) Israel billions of dollars a year in its taxpayers’ money, as
well as trade privileges worth further billions. It doesn’t do that for any
other country at that level. If Kerry is anti-Semitic now, what would he have
to do, make it trillions?
The
very attributes conservatives say make America special—religiosity, patriotism,
and mobility—are ones they’ve inadvertently undermined. Is it any wonder
millennials are less impressed with their country?
