The Gay Courier: Settlements Generate Virtually No Economic Activity

Settlements Generate Virtually No Economic Activity

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 12:55 AM PST

Like the Ancient Mariner, Israel is forced to wear the settlement albatross around its neck

You will hear Israel’s boosters brag about the Mediterranean Miracle that is the Israeli economy. ‘Start-Up Nation’ and the like. But you’ll hear virtually nothing similarly-claimed regarding the settlements. Over the decades, the State has invested roughly $20-billion into the settlement enterprise (including military spending to defend them). You’d think it would’ve invested similarly in creating a viable economy there. It hasn’t. Or if it has, it simply hasn’t worked.
Tucked into Jodi Rudoren’s latest NY Times article, which highlights (naturally) a settler website meant to generate economic activity and oppose BDS, is an eye-opening, even shocking fact. If you didn’t read it carefully, it might’ve zipped right by you:

A recent Israeli government report estimated there are…$250 million in annual exports — 0.55 percent of the national total — from the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, territories the international community generally considers illegally occupied.

Consider this, there are roughly 500,000 Jews living in the same Occupied Territories (note how Rudoren concedes they’re considered “illegally occupied,” but refuses to call them by their commonly-accepted term, ‘Occupied Territories’), which is roughly 8% of the overall Israeli Jewish population. Yet, they produce only “0.55%” of the overall nation’s export product. In other words, there is a mismatch by a factor of more than ten between the expected and actual export product of the settlements. Which means that the settlements produce almost nothing of economic value.
What do they produce? Ideology. And you can export ideology. But it has no monetary or economic value. In fact, BDS makes a very good argument that ideology, in that sense, actually suppresses economic output (since BDS is harming Israel’s overall economic activity).
So what do they do in the settlements? Most of the working residents are employed by government or local/municipal services. In other words, the government pays these people to serve others like them. There are also many settlers who work at actual productive jobs within the Green Line. Their homes are not where they work. So their economic output drives the economic engine within the Green Line, not outside it.
Which brings us to this basic truth: while the settlements make an ideological statement, they have no actual economic foundation. This is the case despite fifty years of effort and massive expense on the part of the Israeli government, which offered the settlement enterprise every opportunity to establish itself. So settlements offer almost no contribution to the nation’s overall GDP. They are not viable from any realistic measure. So the question arises: how long can Israel afford to carry this albatross around its neck before it realizes the huge bird will cause it to drown like shipwrecked sailors of old.

UK Ambassador to Israeli TV: BDS “Not Yet Tsunami”

Posted: 21 Jan 2014 01:12 PM PST

Israeli TV Channel 2 news aired a lengthy segment on the economic costs of BDS to Israel’s corporate bottom line. It is, as far as I know, the first full, dispassionate coverage of the subject in the Israeli media. The report, aired on the weekend news program, traveled to the West Bank industrial park, Barkan, located next to the Ariel settlement:

In Barkan, they’ve been suffering from the European boycott for years. The world considers Barkan a black mark symbolizing Israeli Occupation ["conquest"].

There it interviewed business owners. They claimed that in the past few years since BDS began to play a major economic impact on their business operations, sales were down for some by 40%. Another says he began losing $100,000 a month in sales. Others claimed that they no longer had any European market for their products and had instead transferred their business to eastern Europe, where awareness of BDS was less prominent. One warned those within the Green Line that soon find the boycott would impact businesses whether they were in the Territories or Israel itself. One business owner new to the park suggested that Israel should initiate a counter-boycott to harm those nations who had banded together against Israel.
The Israeli businessmen attempted to argue that the world should instead see Barkan as an “island of co-existence” because it offers jobs to West Bank Palestinians. They neglect the fact that the very reason some of them have moved their operations from Israel to the West Bank is because of the lower wages they can offer their Palestinian workers and lower operating costs of locating in the Territories rather than within the Green Line. Further, the reason Palestinians are desperate for these jobs is that the Occupation stifles economic development within the West Bank. One such worker even says on camera: if there were such [Palestinian] jobs he would take them. But there aren’t.
UK’s ambassador, Matthew Gould made what sounded like a plaintive plea to Israel’s leaders to sit up and take notice:

I love Israel, but worry that in another five years Israel will wake up and find that it doesn’t have enough friends in the world. Israel is losing support in Britain. I look at the British parliament, the media. There is a change. It’s not [yet] a tsunami. It’s happening slowly. It’s happening over time and if you don’t stop it before it’s too late, then it’s very hard to repair.

Gould also warned that Israel came very close (“days away”), regarding negotiations over the EU Horizons 2020 project, to having contacts severed between “British-European and Israeli science:”

“That would’ve been a tragedy.”

An Israeli scientist whom Gould visits tells the interviewer that without EU funding, he would not be able to develop and take his bio-technology research to the “next level.”
The report also features Israeli lawyer, Daniel Resnick, a partner in Yaakov Neeman’s firm, who acts as a fixer for Israeli firms harmed by the boycott. He makes an unfortunate and offensive comparison between businesses harmed by BDS and a rape victim, saying both are afraid of the stigma attached to their suffering. Neither wants to make their shame public, or so he claims. Though the interviewer doesn’t note this (and should have) it’s in Resnick’s interest to exaggerate the extent of the problem, so that he may drum up new business and clients. Nevertheless, even if we discount some of his claims as overstated, his remarks indicate a real economic toll that BDS is taking on the bottom line.
This is precisely the goal the movement set in mind when it first launched. It intended not only to foster a moral message about ending the Occupation and offering a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it wanted to hurt Israeli interests in the pocketbook. And it has and will continue doing so as BDS gathers steam and Israeli rejectionism continues.
Israelis have had decades to build up psychological and moral barriers to insulate themselves from consideration of the injustices of Occupation. They continue electing nationalist-rejectionist governments who can’t or won’t negotiate in good faith with their Palestinian or even American interlocutors (as we’ve seen lately in the Kerry-hosted talks). But once the boycott impacts the comfortable middle-class lifestyle of which Israelis are justifiably proud, then they will have no choice but to consider the consequences. If standard of living goes down, then many more will sit up and take notice.

Srulik stands underneath maple tree with single leaf, “Canada,” remaining on otherwise leafless tree named “support for Israel.” (cartoon: Shlomo Cohen)

Those who’ve followed the history of BDS and arguments used to discount or discredit it, will remember those Israel advocates who used to dismiss the threat from BDS as overstated. They said that it was little more than a theatrical display intended for effect rather than impact. Now they’re changing their tune. As a result, the rhetoric of BDS opponents has ramped up.
The reporter closes the news segment expressing the hope that Israelis will wake up from their slumber regarding BDS “before it’s too late.”
In his Zionist ‘pilgrimage’ to the Holy Land, Canadian Premier Stephen Harper, who dragged along 200 of Israel’s strongest Canadian supporters in his entourage, addressed the Knesset by calling BDS both “sickening” and “anti-Semitic.” Being a pro-Israel propagandist rather than a dispassionate analyst, Harper offered no proof for either claim. But those terms do indicate how desperate the other side has become in trying to define the opposition using classic scare tactics.
Despite Harper’s harsh labels devoted to BDS, he didn’t seem to have the same reaction to three members of his invited entourage (two rabbis, one pastor) who have expressed stridently anti-gay and Islamophobic views publicly. The Canadian leader brought a vertitable paoply of Canadian intolerance to meet an equally intolerant Israel. It’s a match made in heaven…or the other place.
On a related subject, I loved the histrionics of Harper’s claim that Canada would stand with Israel “through fire and water.” Somehow, it doesn’t come across with quite the stirring cadence Harper intended. Instead, it sounded a bit limp, as if it was trying too hard and fell flat as a result. But of course Israel’s ultra-nationalist Knesset, increasingly besieged around the world, ate it up and gave him a standing ovation. I understand the next “statesman” scheduled for a Knesset address will be the prime minister of Nauru, with the leader of Palau following shortly thereafter. They may actually have to brave at least “water” in order to get to Israel as global climate change threatens to sink their islands under the ocean. It promises to be a great, and deeply meaningful Zionist show.