Imagine Rome supporting Carthage with grain shipments, temple-building technology, and conferences on Greek philosophy. What has changed in human nature or war objectives? Why should Israel help Arabs attain prosperity?
Two extremes are safe for Israel. Permanent low-level intra-Arab strife is one; a stable, prosperous Middle East is the other. The question is how to cross the danger zones leading to either pole. While a prosperous Middle East environment would be better for Israel in the long run, Arabs would need decades to build a just society, and Israel would be in serious danger all the way, especially as Arab state governments get rich enough to afford aggression against Israel. Intra-Arab strife can be created by Israel much more quickly and would relieve Israel of most of the current Islamic threat. Indeed, even if Israel talked somebody into building factories in the Arab world, the Islamic terrorists would sabotage them as Israeli evil, scare people off, and keep Arabs poor—a perfect recruiting base.
Israel should not try to buy Arab goodwill. People do not thank those who help them, especially if they detect self-interest in their benefactors, but rather denigrate donors to esteem themselves. Benevolence increases demand, and failure to meet it generates resentment. The Palestinians, economically the fastest-growing non-oil Arab group in the Middle East - thanks to Israel - support the anti-Israeli Islamic terrorism, although it impoverishes them and kills thousands.
Giving the Palestinians temporary jobs in Israel would create an immigration problem in Israel not unlike America’s with Mexican illegal immigrants. Israeli ban on Palestinian immigration might not work just now but is Israel's best long-term solution. Israeli isolating of Palestinian Arabs does not preclude Israel's overall economic cooperation with Muslims. The hundreds of thousands of Arabs who work in Israel and sell farm produce to Israelis are economically expendable and Israel can replace them. Israel needs only a few, financially viable Arabs. An electronic fence would show the Palestinians that Israel wants to forget about them and their “state” and its problems. Palestinians should be barred from Israel for any reason.
No country cares about its poor neighbors’ job opportunities, and Israel has nothing to do with the Palestinians’ problems. They are responsible for their own lives. Israelis turned deserts—and swamps—into a garden without help and Israel is not obliged to help anyone. The biblical injunction to the Jews is to do no harm, not to curry favor by helping people—and certainly not for Israelis to build another nation's economy.
Whether Israel decides to annex the Palestinian territory or give it away, there is no reason for Israel to help the Palestinians. Israeli subsidies to the Palestinian Authority are nothing but blackmail, just like Soviet grain shipments to Germany before World War II. Israel has no business whatsoever pensioning Palestinians and should not require Israeli employers to give them pension benefits. Israel should transfer whatever money the Israeli trade unions have accumulated to a Palestinian administration to steal. Better still, Israel may use pension funds to compensate Israeli victims of Palestinian Islamic terrorists.
Israeli economic aid to Palestinians is wrong; people have to prosper by themselves. Many rich Arabs are potential aggressors. Israeli assistance only sharpens inequities and makes Arab peasants jealous of Israel. Israel should give away only intangible know-how to better the lives of Israeli enemies.[1] Arabs will always be Israeli enemies, as a poll taken after 9/11 showed: in spite of American military aid, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia showed the highest support for the Islamic terrorists. Neither nations nor individual people like to accept kindness and assistance from the rich and powerful. People naturally resent gifts from richer people unless the giver seems to care for the recipient genuinely. Arabs would see Israeli help as a payoff for earlier Israeli transgressions, meant to buy Arab silence in future confrontations with Israel.
An impoverished Palestinian Authority is good for Israel. People despise it, and poverty fosters emigration, relieving Israel of demographic problem at borders. Any Palestinian state within borders agreeable to Israel had better be wealthy to resist Islamic terrorist or fundamentalist anti-Israeli propaganda.
There is a difference between the wealth a nation creates with work and fortuitous wealth from oil or foreign aid. Natural wealth enriches all strata of society, helping people move from political radicalism to tolerance of Israel, since everyone must practice mutual tolerance to preserve and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Wealth suppresses anti-Israeli radicalism. On the contrary, poor people put up with intolerance among themselves and practice it with others like Israel. Envious Arab paupers fill their empty hours with radical anti-Israeli politics and religion. Israel should welcome natural wealth in Arab countries, but none is in sight.
Israel might try to find supporters among Westerners and rich Arabs for some kind of Marshall Plan for poor Arab countries. Though most Arabs are unprepared for life in a modern economy, the Israeli plan would have other positive effects at no cost to Israel. It would show the West’s goodwill. It would create a local bourgeoisie concerned with preserving its wealth, conservative and wary of Islamic terrorists likely to stir up conflicts with Israel and dry up the cash flow. It would create targets for Israeli retaliation. It would channel some of the radicals’ and the mullahs’ energy from anti-Israeli rhetoric into lobbying for more money. It would strengthen Arab dictatorships by funding growth in the governmental sector of the economy and loosen the grip of the meddlesome Islamic charities unwelcome to Israel. Still, Arabs have neither the work ethic nor the education that let Germany and Japan recover quickly after 1945. No more than a small percentage of the Arab population could be employed in agriculture, with another twenty to thirty percent in other primitive industries. Israeli and Western assistance must start with technical education. Very likely, educated Palestinians would emigrate in search of better jobs.
[1] Even though teaching Arabs would foster competition with Israeli farms, especially so since Arab labor is cheaper in Palestine than in Israel, technology transfer is probably feasible for Israel. Israel's competitiveness depends on the ability to upgrade her skills continuously. Weak local competition from Arab farms would be another inducement for developing Israeli agricultural technology.