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Jerusalem
Post - March 12, 2004
by Jonathan Rosenblum
One central myth has guided American Middle East policy
for more than three decades: to wit, that resolution
of the Palestinian-Israel conflict holds the key to
curing the region's manifold deformations. Undersecretary
of State Marc Grossman put that myth to rest for good
last week - at least as far as the Bush administration
is concerned - when he publicly told Egyptian Foreign
Minister Ahmed Maher in Cairo that democratization of
the Middle East is too urgent to "wait until there
is full peace [between Israel and the Palestinians]."
(The State Department had been the last holdout within
the Bush administration.) For Israelis long inured to
bad news, Grossman's statement is indeed cause for celebration.
The old doctrine, however, would doubtless return in
full force in a Kerry administration. Witness how the
New York Times trotted out Jimmy Carter's National Security
advisor Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski on Monday to instruct
Vice-President Cheney that neither Palestinians nor
Iraqis will be attracted to the virtues of democracy
as long as their lands are under Israeli and American
occupation, respectively. Brzezinski implied that
the Bush administration's focus on Arab democracy is
nothing more than a device to avoid "any serious
American effort to push the Israelis and Palestinians
to reach a genuine peace settlement."
The thesis that the Palestinian-Israel conflict has
caused the endemic failures of the Arab world cannot
bear five minutes scrutiny. Even a brief catalogue of
those failures makes clear Israel's irrelevance. Israel
had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's invasion of
Iran, at the cost of more than a million lives on both
sides, or with his decision more than a decade later
to invade Kuwait. Similarly, Israel did not cause
the brutal decade-long civil war in Algeria, and is
not responsible for the tensions between Saudi Arabia
and Yemen, which recently prompted Saudi Arabia to contemplate
building a fence across its southern border. The mutual
loathing of Sunni and Shiite Moslems, so chillingly
on display in Iraq last week,
precedes the creation of the state of Israel by 1200
years.
Most importantly, Israel's existence cannot explain
the chronic backwardness of Arab nations, despite being
blessed with the world's most valuable natural resources.
The 2002 Arab Human Development Report (AHDR), produced
by a group of Arab intellectuals under the auspices
of the U.N., identified three areas of deficit that
characterize the Arab world: knowledge, democracy, and
the status of women.
Arab states rank lowest on the freedom scale of the
world's seven regions. Arab despots are so terrified
of their subjects that they fear to grant them access
to knowledge. Internet connectivity in the Arab world
ranks behind that of sub-Saharan Africa. The entire
Arab world translates 300 books annually. Greece alone
translates five times as many.
Arab expenditures on research and development as a percentage
of gross national product are one-seventh of the world
average. From 1980-2000, Arab countries registered 370
patents; Israel with less than one-fortieth the population
registered 7,652. Any Arab who does manage to acquire
a decent education quickly flees for the freedoms of
the West, creating a massive brain drain. The result:
the total GNP of 22 Arab nations, with 280 million people,
is less than that of Spain, with a population of 40
million.
In light of the Arab world's complete failure to keep
apace of the West, it is pointless to ask why Arabs
hate the West. As the great Orientalist Bernard Lewis
notes, "It is very natural that they should. Your
have this millennial rivalry between two world religions,
and now, from their point of view, the wrong one seems
to be winning." Those who are rich, strong, and
successful are always likely to be despised by those
who are the opposite.
Take any hotspot around globe where large numbers of
people are being killed, and you will find angry Moslem
men between the ages of 18 and 25 at the center of the
action. (In Israel, they start younger and women join
in the action.) Every single act of terrorism since
9/11 has been perpetrated by Islamic fanatics.
Arab and Moslem hatred of Israel is a subspecies of
the generalized hatred of the West; only hatred of Israel
is more intense because Israel is viewed as a projection
of the West into the midst of Arab territory.
Israel is not the cause but the excuse for the Arab
failure to join the modern world. Arab dictators require
Israel as an object of hatred to distract the attention
of their subject populations from their ignorance, poverty,
and lack of freedom. So long as Israel exists in any
form, they will continue to use Israel as a pretext
for martial rule. As Lewis said in a Jerusalem lecture
last week, "The great fear of Arab leaders is not
that America will fail to establish a democracy in Iraq,
but that it will succeed."
The Egyptian claim that democratization of the Arab
world cannot take place as long as "Israeli aggression
against the Palestinian people continues," is tantamount
to a schizophrenic refusing to take desperately needed
medication in order to punish his loving parents who
are begging him to take it.
And Dr. Z is in the position of the psychiatrist who
encourages that refusal.
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