Last week, the Trump administration’s announced that the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv would move to Israel’s actual capital, Jerusalem. As the cognoscenti shrieked, some ten nations are now planning to do the same, in a snowball effect. According to the New York Post:
Israel is in talks with more than 10 countries — including some in Europe — about potentially moving their respective embassies to Jerusalem, according to officials.
Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely on Monday said the nations were interested in following President Trump’s footsteps and declaring the Israeli city the new capital in the wake of Guatemala’s recent decision to do so.
Pretty amazing what U.S. leadership will do. The U.S. move provided all ten of those nations plausible cover for moving their nations to Jerusalem after us. Prior to that, they stayed put.
But makes absolutely perfect sense for them to move. Here’s why.
Most nations want nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict and have no influence over its events. They aren’t players, nobody wants their opinion, and they don’t have the expertise or exposure, and it’s none of their business. They are nations however, and nations have interests.
What’s the interest of a tiny nation such as Guatemala or Honduras in the broader conflicts of the Middlee East? Nil. But they do want to develop their countries and draw foreign investment to ensure job creation and a rising standard of living for their locals. One of the best nations for this pursuit of national interest is Israel. Would it not make sense for them to get on Israel’s good side and move their embassies to Jerusalem? The Israelis would be delighted and they would probably bend over backwards to help these nations in achieving their goals.
Israel is such a good ally for any nation to have.
For starters, and little known to the media community, Israel is a high-tech powerhouse to rival Silicon Valley. Other places try to set up Silicon Valleys and flunk but Israel is one of the few places that have really succeeded – and like the original Silicon Valley, there was nothing centrally planned about it. Israel is such a success as a tech powerhouse that some say it is the “brains” of Silicon Valley, given the kinds of outposts all the big tech companies have set up in that country and the kinds of operations (design and software development) they are.
Besides tech, Israelis are also famous problem-solvers — on intractible resource issues such as water and natural gas. Israel, after all, is the nation that made the desert bloom. It’s the nation whose greenery outlines its borders from airline flights. It has no water problems – it exports water. What’s more, with energy an issue in the last decade and fracking and other technologies for extraction rising, Israel has mastered many of these technologies and is poised to develop its great natural gas fields offshore, too.
It’s the can-do country. Case in point: the water problems Ethiopia has been having are being resolved by the Israelis.
Here is some perspective from George Gilder whose book, The Israel Test, is must-reading for understanding why good relations with Israel benefits every nation.
