RUTHFULLY YOURS

Economic indicators for Israel showed another successful year in 2017 as, for the first time ever, Israel’s GDP per capita has surpassed that of major industrialized countries such as Britain, Japan and France.

http://en.mida.org.il/2018/01/15/israel-successful-powerhouse-collapsing-middle-east/

Israel stands out among the nations that won their independence after the Second World War. Despite facing more challenges than virtually any other country, Israel has transformed from a poor and fragile socialist backwater to a first world Start-Up nation of cutting-edge technologies and knowledge during seven brief decades, while fighting for its existence.

The failures of the Arab boycott and later the Boycott Divestment Sanction (BDS) campaign movement to destroy Israel’s economy are no less spectacular than the Muslim Arab failures to defeat Israel in the military battlefields. Israel’s economy is far stronger today than when BDS was launched in 2005.

The Economist publishes an annual global report with numerous data on the countries of the world. In its newly released report, Israel’s GDP per capita has, for the first time ever, surpassed $40,000. According to the Economist’s data, Israel’s GDP per capita grew from $38,127 in 2016 to $44,019 in 2017.

Israel’s economy expanded by 4.4 % during 2017, the highest growth rate among advanced economies. By contrast, the GDP per capita of France was almost $41,000 and nearly $40,000 for Japan.

Private consumer spending rose 3.0% in 2017, 1.1% per capita. Per capita spending on semi-durable goods (clothing etc.) grew 4.7%. Per capita spending on current consumption (housing, food, services, etc.) was up 2.2%. The account deficit in the government sector totaled NIS 8 billion in 2017, making up 1.1% of the GDP, down from NIS 15.6 billion in 2016.

The contrast between first world Israel and the surrounding third world Arab world is larger today than ever before. Israel’s GDP per capita is almost 20 times the GDP per capita of impoverished Egypt and five times larger than semi-developed Lebanon.

Like any human project, Israel is a never-ending work in progress and much work remains to integrate Haredi Jews and Israeli Arabs into Israel’s knowledge economy.

Properly addressing Israel’s high costs of living requires more economic and legislative reforms and breaking up inefficient oligopolies that keep the prices artificially high. However, by any standard, the reborn Jewish state is a remarkable success story that overcame tremendous odds and obstacles.

According to Professor Jonathan Adelman, author of the book The Rise of Israel – a history of a revolutionary state, Israel’s current success was far from certain and required two Zionist revolutions.

The first Zionist revolution was Socialist democratic and lasted roughly from the first modern Aliyah in 1882 to the defeat of the Israeli Labor party in the 1977 national election.

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is accelerating efforts to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and has decided to modify an existing property to accommodate the new mission that will open next year, U.S. officials said.

The U.S. won’t be building a new structure, in a shift from what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and others from the Trump administration have said in describing the move recently. Mr. Tillerson has also said previously that the move is at least three years away.

“The secretary’s primary focus is on security,” said Steve Goldstein, undersecretary of state for diplomacy and public affairs. “We will not be moving to a new facility…we are going to retrofit a building,” which will be ready in 2019.

People familiar with the plans say officials intend to reconfigure portions of an existing U.S. consular facility in West Jerusalem, an area Israel has held since 1948, so that it can be designated as the U.S. Embassy.

“There is no plan for anything temporary,” Mr. Goldstein said.

Jerusalem is contested by Israel and Palestinians.

While a 1995 U.S. law requires officials to move the embassy to Jerusalem, Mr. Trump’s predecessors routinely have exercised their statutory power to postpone the project.

Mr. Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December and directed the State Department to begin to move the U.S. embassy there.

State Department officials at first said this would involve locating property and building a new facility, which could cost as much as $1 billion and take several years. Under that scenario, it might not have opened until a second Trump term or beyond.

Many career diplomats and others have been dismayed by Mr. Trump’s decision, which some believe has infuriated Palestinians while producing no obvious benefit to American diplomatic objectives.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, now in the fourth year of his four-year term, delivered a speech to the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization that directs a curse at President Trump, insults the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and the United Nations, and denies that Israel has anything to do with Judaism.. The New York Times responded that Abbas “shied away from urging the kind of provocative acts, like ending the Palestinian Authority’s security cooperation with Israel or disbanding the authority itself, that could raise the costs of occupation for Israel and shake officials in Jerusalem and Washington.”

Many Google sources on the speech included the curse that Abbas directed at President Trump: “‘may your house be demolished.” ABC News included the curse and also a call from the PLO to suspend recognition of Israel and end security cooperation with the Jewish state.

The Times acknowledged that Abbas “attacked” President Trump for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, along with David Friedman, U.S. ambassador to the Jewish state, and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley. It did not provide readers with the language of the curse, which drew laughter from Abbas’s audience, according to media reports. At the Times, attacks on President Trump and members of his administration apparently are not to be considered “provocative acts.”

The Times also reported that Abbas indicated he would never meet with Ambassador Friedman. Curiously, Abbas missed the chance to bolster his attack on Friedman by way of the Times, which, in a December 16, 2016 editorial, called Friedman “A Dangerous Choice for Ambassador to Israel.” The Times also quoted Abbas’s comment that Palestinian reaction to administration policy on Jerusalem would “be worse, but not with high heels.” It is not to be expected that Abbas will be cited by the Times for making a provocative “sexist” comment.

The Times further reported that Abbas, in the course of his two-hour speech, “delivered broadsides against Hamas, other Arab leaders[,] and Britain.”

It is not clear why the Times omitted the anti-Trump curse from its account of the Abbas speech (whose complete text seems to have not yet been posted on the internet). After all, would a Times columnist like Charles M. Blow have difficulty with the curse directed at President Trump?

Mr. Revivi is chief foreign envoy of the Yesha Council, which represents the 450,000 Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria.

‘Today is the day that the Oslo Accords end,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared Sunday. “We will not accept for the U.S. to be a mediator, because after what they have done to us”—namely, recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital—“a believer shall not be stung twice in the same place.”

The 82-year-old Palestinian leader cursed President Trump: “Yekhreb beitak!” (literally, “May your house be demolished”). He called Ambassadors Nikki Haley and David Friedman “a disgrace.” He denounced the British for enabling the establishment of a Jewish State, and he described Zionism as “a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness,” and whose real purpose is to “wipe out Palestinians from Palestine.”

Two weeks ago President Trump threatened to stop funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which subsidizes the descendants of Palestinians who left their homes 70 years ago, to which Mr. Abbas replied: “Damn your money!” On Tuesday the administration announced it would withhold $65 million of the planned $125 million.

Mr. Abbas’s tirade shocked the diplomatic world, especially those who regarded him as a statesman. One thing that did not seem to occur to Mr. Abbas was that if Oslo has failed, so has the Palestinian Authority, a corrupt fief that subsists solely on international aid and can barely pay its own personnel. The Palestinian Authority has monopolized peace negotiations for a quarter-century with no progress. Instead, it has taken its place in the multibillion-dollar “peace” industry, made up of bureaucrats, diplomats and pundits whose perspectives haven’t changed since the early 1990s.

The jihadist aim is to isolate Israel politically; to influence political leaders, public opinion, international institutions and international organizations so that on the day their planned offensive begins, no one will be there to support Israel and the Jews. The Palestinian Authority, the PLO and the Arab/Muslim states will be unhampered to do what Hitler was unable to do in historic Palestine — make it Judenrein (free of Jews).

Terror is “to achieve Palestinian political goals, to influence Israeli politics, to favor a given Israeli candidate for the post of Prime Minister, to compel the Israeli government to conceal more land, to prevent a final peace settlement by maintaining a state of conflict that could eventually lead to total war, to erode Israeli and American resolve and to demonstrate to Arab population that peace is not an option and that the existence of the Jews on their land cannot be recognized”. Some of the attacks occurred just when foreign representatives landed in Israel, “to prevent the revival of the peace talks.” Mr. Jason Greenblatt should take that into consideration.

The same jihadist war is also underway against the Americans and all “infidels”: Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Hindus, Buddhists, and in a general manner all those who do not believe in the “religion of truth”, namely Islam; and against those Muslims who compromise with such so-called infidels.

The critical question of why the Middle East seems unable to achieve peace has just been rigorously considered again, this time by Michael Calvo, an international lawyer, in an important new book, The Middle East and World War III: Why No Peace? It is worth being read by all political leaders, academics, journalists, students and anyone who wants to understand why there is no peace and what may happen.

The book analyzes why the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab/Muslim conflict has not been resolved, in spite of the Oslo Accords and many years of active involvement by the European Union, individual European states, the U.S., Russia and the United Nations.

The long-term Palestinian use of terror, for instance, looked at chronologically:

“to achieve Palestinian political goals, to influence Israeli politics, to favor a given Israeli candidate for the post of Prime Minister, to compel the Israeli government to conceal more land, to prevent a final peace settlement by maintaining a state of conflict that could eventually lead to total war, to erode Israeli and American resolve and to demonstrate to Arab population that peace is not an option and that the existence of the Jews on their land cannot be recognized”.

Some of the attacks occurred just when foreign representatives landed in Israel, “to prevent the revival of the peace talks.” Mr. Jason Greenblatt should take that into consideration.

geraldahonigman.com
From time to time, I will post thoughts and articles…Jerry

I am a Florida educator who has done extensive doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs, created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and have publicly debated many Arab and other anti-Israel spokesmen. My articles and op-eds have been published in dozens of newspapers, magazines, academic journals and websites all around the world.
As a doctoral student in the late ’70s, I had my academic career nipped in the bud because I believed in academic freedom (not to mention the fact that this was, after all, America). I naively expected that the same lenses of moral scrutiny–which were routinely used to critique and dissect Israel in the classroom–would be applied to the so-called “Arab”/Muslim World as well. As I learned the hard way, that was indeed far too much to expect. I asked too many of the wrong questions. I was the most advanced doctoral student in the program at Ohio State University at the time, was a T.A. (Teaching Assistant), and the department used me to secure additional funding.

Somewhat earlier, I had received my M.A. and was an advanced doctoral student at the Kevorkian Center For Near Eastern Studies, a consortium of New York, Columbia, and Princeton Universities based at N.Y.U.’s Washington Square campus. A prolonged illness and financial matters led to an interruption in my studies, and I next found myself based in Columbus in a fulltime job. A professor subsequently heard one of my presentations and suggested that I resurrect my doctoral work at Ohio State. I reluctantly agreed to do this…and you’ll see why I had reservations shortly.

Unfortunately, Middle Eastern Studies was fast becoming the most politicized field in academia…even more so since my earlier years at the Kevorkian Center. Universities were receiving money and other support from Arab countries, their supporters, and the like.

Palestinians need to start taking responsibility for their own existence and stop relying on the world to take care of them while they use the money freed up — by the international community — to launch jihad and intifadas.

No entity should forever be permitted to devote its resources to terror while the world is expected to owe them everything: financial support, jobs, citizenship, and even building the infrastructure that they keep destroying. The moral of the story is that if you do not want to lose wars, it would be better not to start them.

The longer financial aid and the pampering of Palestinians continue as an “insurance policy” ostensibly to prevent terrorism, the longer the suffering, dependence, terror and conflict will go on. It is time for Palestinians to learn that threatening terror is not a way to earn a living.

A British woman, Kay Wilson, apparently realized that when a Palestinian terrorist “plunged a knife into her chest”, left her for dead and then murdered her friend, it was British taxpayers who had paid for it.

“Is the UK funding the terrorists who tried to murder me?”, she asked.

Yes, it is. “According to data collected by Israel’s Defense Ministry, the PA spent a total of 1.237 billion shekels ($358 million), or about 7% of the PA’s total annual budget, on terrorist stipends last year.”

International payments to Palestinians that are used to pay terrorists in jail, as well as their families, serve both as a “reward for bad behavior” and also as a powerful incentive for youths to become terrorists.

They are a jobs program.

Some Palestinians are complaining that Arab countries are discriminating against them, and even going as far as calling themselves victims of “shameless Arab Apartheid” against Palestinians.

Such an accusation is unfair to many Arab countries, especially Egypt, which has sacrificed the blood of hundreds of thousands of its citizens to support the Islamic jihad against Israel.

A prominent Tunisian-born French movie producer, Saïd Ben Saïd recently issued one of the frankest denunciations of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. The real culprit, he argued, was the prevalence of anti-Semitism fueled by Islamic extremists across the Middle East. Ben Saïd was forced to pull out of an Arab film festival last year because he had worked with Israelis.

A Lebanese director, Ziad Doueiri, did something even “worse”: he filmed some scenes on Israeli land!

“No one can deny the misery of the Palestinian people, but it must be admitted that the Arab world is, in its majority, antisemitic. This hatred of Jews has redoubled in intensity and depth not because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but with the rise of a certain vision of Islam”. — Saïd Ben Saïd.

Fifty years have passed since many Arab countries were humiliated by Israel in 1967 in a war the Arabs started, with the explicit goal of destroying the Jewish State and throwing the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. Today, Israel has solid diplomatic relations with two of these countries — Jordan to Egypt — while Saudi officials speak with their Israeli security counterparts about the Iranian threat.

But although the Middle East is engulfed in a new wave of internal destabilization, and Iran has recently experienced a new wave of protests in which people chanted “we don’t want an Islamic Republic”, the great taboo for the Arab and Muslim world is still that of cultural exchanges with the hated “Zionists”.

A prominent Tunisian-born French movie producer, Saïd Ben Saïd, after being forced to pull out of North Africa’s most prestigious film festival, recently issued one of the frankest denunciations of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. He revealed, in an op-ed for the French daily Le Monde, that an invitation to preside over the jury of the Carthage Film Festival had been rescinded because of his work with the Israeli film director, Nadav Lapid, and for having participated on a panel at the Jerusalem Film Festival earlier this year. The real culprit, Ben Saïd argued, was the prevalence of anti-Semitism fueled by Islamic extremists across the Middle East:

“No one can deny the misery of the Palestinian people, but it must be admitted that the Arab world is, in its majority, antisemitic… This hatred of Jews has redoubled in intensity and depth not because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but with the rise of a certain vision of Islam”.