Any Jewish state –secular, religious, ethnically pure or mixed- in the Near East is also a representative of a Western mutation that adapts to local conditions. Its rejection implies the dismissal of the values and the modus operandi of the entire civilization that had produced it. This hostility expresses the combination of systemic repudiation, ethnic pride and religious conviction. This response represents a handicap because it hinders modernization. With the dismissal of modern approaches as alien poison, the developmental gap does not close but widens. Consequently, the iconized differences prevent the copying of the declared enemy. The response to underdevelopment is to close the gap by destroying the disturbing regional evidence of progressive possibilities. With that, the tensions arising between the static but indigenous system and the dynamic but alien one intensify. Rejecting modernization because its local representative is disallowed brings weakness. Once realized, this, too, will amplify resentment.Risky Freedom Or Safe Servitude
Protecting criminal subcultures. When laws do not count. The attraction of world-saving schemes. Fighting a war or conducting a police action. When a bad system is deemed to express a national – religious essence. Who needs Israel?
1. Some of the insiders of our lording power elites attempt to convince us that we need to choose between competing versions of collectivism. A related complementary message is that the alternative we face is risky freedom or safe servitude under their protective command.
2. Homework for the interested. We are used to sermons about the proper reception of what the elites deem to be politically correct. Now, reactions begin to pour in about majorities that ignore the command of their leaders. A typical case comes from France. “Thousands” demonstrate against the expulsion of illegally present Gypsies. These are unemployable in any post bronze-age economy. The cause is a lack of skills caused by knowingly refused training intended to protect Roma culture from assimilation. The result is that these illegal migrants have to find their livelihood in criminal activities. This might mean petty crime or income from welfare claims based on questionable pretentions. The silent majority agrees with the deportation of aliens to their home countries. At the same time, those that can afford to live far from where parallel society unfolds, demand tolerance expressed by inaction. After all, the described way of life is associated with such untouchables as “culture” and “race”. Protecting criminal subcultures will hardly make its advocates popular.
3. What happens once laws do not count, once moral is ridiculed, once customs can be violated with impunity? The only remaining source of security - which the citizen expects from his state- is provided by vigilantes.
4. Few are those intellectuals that are willing to give up on the socialism (mostly in its radical form) of their youth. Doing so implies admitting fallibility. That, in turn, entails surrendering a postulate that gives access to a moral rostrum from which preaching to others becomes easy. The claim to power and a significance justified by ethical superiority rests on being necessarily right. No matter what the facts may be.
5. The Iraq war has been fought and won (by destroying the Saddam system) against the prediction of the thereby discredited experts. The reason for the unanticipated success: the conflict was contested and fought as a war. Once on paper that classical war was over, the war “with other means” continued. This is something that official politics and the power elite’s ruling clans choose to ignore. The US fought the second round as though it would be a police operation to discourage jaywalkers. Since that policy had been based on a misconception, it duly failed. The lesson tells much about how to handle recalcitrants. At the same time, the conclusion has a lot to do with the errors of fighting enemies with the means of which they approve.
6. The humanitarian emergency in Gaza. Those who assign to Israel’s blockade the responsibility for the ailments of the strip stress the unemployment and poverty that prevails there. One should question not only the blockade but also whether, without a blockade, the pilloried problems would disappear. Essentially, the issue here is whether bad policies or outside intervention are responsible for inadequacies. The “outsiders” theory is a pleasing but that does not validate the thesis of malicious outsiders.
The conditions in Gaza remind one of the conditions in numerous regional entities that are not suffering from a “Zionist” blockade. In Gaza’s case, some aspects of the general poverty are the natural results of its people’s empowerment of an authority that uses its control to attack another community.
The complicating factor is that this society regards its bad system to be an expression of its ethnic-religious essence. At the same time, it considers the attacks from its territory that provoke responses in kind as a mandated duty.The results of the chosen a front-line role might be hard and regrettable.
Nevertheless, the consequences caused by the anticipable response remain the inevitable results of freely formulated collective decisions.
7. That Gaza is not a concentration camp is obvious –assuming that one knows that the genuine article is. Gazans can move freely. At least formally, they can also make policy and have the means to confront the enemies of their choice. As Gazans are able to determine their fate, they can give power to an executive that is enabled to act in conformity with its platform of confrontation. One of the preferences of the moment’s governors is to attack their neighbor. Since that neighbor is also a master of his fate, she is apt to retaliate with military and economic means. The conditions that arise because of that response are predictable. That makes retaliation into a logical, that is anticipated, consequence of the actions of those who control Gaza’s means.
Majorities and even minorities (possibly kidnapped by radicals) that allow the wrong people to govern them are responsible for what is done in their name. This is what bombing victims of WW2 like to ignore when, asserting their personal innocence, they claim to be victims of an arbitrary brutality. There is a lesson here. It is that individual responsibility and the accountability one shoulders as a member of a community form different categories. Accordingly, if Gazans wage war against Israel then they cannot demand immunity while war is waged in their name.
8. Bemoaning the conditions of Palestinians in Gaza means that a group is commiserated that lives better than some of its peers in the region. Life in Gaza or the West Bank is better than the lot of the underclass in Muslim countries. The rational secret hope of the propagandists of a Palestinian solution must be that Israel might survive regardless of their PC war against her. If Israel goes under, those Arab groups that benefit from her proximity will also experience a decline of their fortunes.
9. Israel is a transplanted, but also creatively adapted, version of the species we call “industrial democracy”. This quality she has in a region whose players are aware of the implications of modernization for the order that protects their dominance. Therefore, the beneficiaries of backward looking underdevelopment resists the spread of the political, economic and social policies associated with nascent and developed industrial democracies.
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