Israel by Philip Greenspun in February 2003 Site Home : Politics : One Article

• Why does the United States support the State of Israel?
• Why do Arabs reject the State of Israel? (sub-question: "Are Arab Leaders Crazy?")
• Why do Muslims hate Jews?
• Why do Muslims hate the United States?
• Why are the governments of the Middle East so unstable?
• Why are the Palestinians so violent?
• How have the Israelis survived for so long?
• Is there really a crisis?
• What can we, as average American citizens, do?

[I wrote this article because friends keep asking me for answers and opinions and it seemed better to lay it out in a coherent essay than provide piecemeal responses.]

Why does the United States support the State of Israel?

First let's look at what Israel is not. Israel is not a useful ally. We do not fight alongside the Israel Defense Forces in any battles. Nor does Israel fight any battles that we want fought on our behalf. The U.S. does not base troops or equipment in Israel. For its military adventures in the Middle East the U.S. has used aircraft carriers and bases in countries such as Egypt, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, etc. The U.S. military is more powerful than the next 15 countries' militaries combined. There is no conceivable conflict in which having Israeli assistance would mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Israel is not an important trading partner. In reports by country at the U.S. Census Bureau's Foreign Trade Statistics department (http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/), Israeli trade is buried in "Other". The total volume of foreign trade with Israel was about $18 billion in 2002. This compares to $80 billion for Germany, $123 billion for China, $215 billion for Mexico, and $345 billion for Canada.

Supporting Israel in an effort to win over Jewish voters in the U.S. is not an obviously good strategy for a politician. The United States Department of State estimates that "by the year 2010, America's Muslim population is expected to surpass the Jewish population, making Islam the country's second-largest faith after Christianity" (http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/islam/fact2.htm). The Jews of America have declined in number to 5.2 million or less than 2 percent of the population. Politicians like rich people so you'd think that the fact that American Jewish households had a median income of $50,000 per year might give them more clout than the average American household with its $42,000 income (source: National Jewish Population Survey 2000-2001). However, the income differential fades into insignificance when you adjust for the fact that the median age among American Jews is 41 against 35 for the general population. Older people of any race or religion are more likely to have advanced degrees and career experience that lead to higher salaries. The bottom line is that an American political strategy of winning over Muslim voters by promising to liberate Palestine would seem to be roughly as effective as promising to support Israel.

Israel is not a sympathy case. Conventional wisdom in international politics is "Nations do not have friends. They have interests." Nonetheless the U.S. occasionally tries to help suffering people in foreign countries where it serves no apparent U.S. interest. Could Israel be one of these places? Compared to the average person on Planet Earth, Israeli citizens, including the 1.2 million Arabs (2000 census), live in a paradise of economic prosperity and equality with representative government with a functioning and powerful legal system. Looking just within the region we could find many folks more deserving of sympathy, starting with the slaves held in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (http://www.iabolish.com/). Or we could decide that charity begins at home; one can certainly find a lot more folks begging in the streets of Seattle and San Francisco than in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

What then has Israel done for the U.S.? The only concrete benefit that the State of Israel has provided to the United States is the absorption of millions of Jewish refugees from Europe, Arab countries, the former Soviet Union, and miscellaneous states such as Ethiopia. Most of these Jews would have preferred to live in the United States and in fact applied for admission to the U.S. We were able to turn down their applications for immigration in good conscience. As long as the State of Israel exists, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew who shows up, we can turn Jews away from our borders without risk of an embarrassing mass killing.

It was not always this way. During the 1930s the average European Christian had the following preferences:

1. (most preferred) Jews alive and well but living somewhere far away, e.g., North or South America
2. Jews dead
3. (least preferred) Jews living in Europe or somewhere else that would inconvenience Europeans

Following the war, Americans changed their minds about Jews. Today the average American would probably express the following preference list:

1. Jews alive and well but living somewhere far away
2. Jews living in the U.S.
3. (least preferred) Jews dead

This preference shift occurring in America but not in Europe explains why the Europeans provide no financial support to the State of Israel. This is not because Europeans are stingy. European nations are the largest financial supporters of the Palestinian cause, providing more cash than the United States and far more than wealthy Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia (source: the "Building the State" section of http://www.pna.net/). Europeans expect Jews fleeing Israel either to be killed or to settle in non-European countries.

Note that Europeans have demonstrated a willingness to pay money to keep immigrants out. Under German law ethnic Germans living in certain other countries (volksdeutsche) have the right to return to Germany and claim citizenship and various welfare benefits. There are approximately 300,000 volksdeutsche living in Kazakhstan. These are the remnants of a large ethnic German population that were once prosperous farmers in the Volga and who were exiled by Stalin to Kazakhstan in 1941. Their descendants do not speak German and don't have the skills or education to succeed in the German economy. So the German government tries to keep them happy right where they are through aid programs. Quoting from http://www.gtz.de/minderheiten/english/index.html: "The aim of the programme is to improve the living conditions of the German ethnic minority in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It wants to provide an alternative to emigration and to encourage the German minorities to remain in their resident countries."

Israel's primary practical value to the United States is as a place that will accept immigrant Jews, of which the past decades have produced quite a few. In the 1940s and 1950s Arab governments and civilians emulated German policies from 1930s. Rioting Muslims killed enough of their Jewish neighbors that the remainder fled. Arab governments required that the Jews leave any wealth or property behind. More than 600,000 Jews from Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, and other Arab countries sought asylum in the State of Israel. These folks spoke no English, had no money, lacked a modern education, and had no experience of participating in a democracy. Most Americans would not have wanted them as neighbors. You could say the same for the more than 1 million Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel between 1989 and 2002. Between the founding of Israel in 1948 and 2002, Israel absorbed a total of 2.93 million Jews from other countries (source: http://www.jafi.org.il/aliyah/aliyah/clock/table.html).

[Nor would the U.S. want to accept the forthcoming waves of Jewish emigrants. France is home to 5 million Muslims, a rapidly growing community whose native sons include Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th September 11th hijacker". A rising tide of Muslim violence against Jews has sparked a growing percentage of French Jews, Europe's largest community at 600,000, to think about emigration ("French Jews leave home for Israel", BBC News, January 7, 2003). Jewish population statistics show nearly 1 million Jews remaining in Russian and Ukraine, countries with histories of anti-Jewish violence. On balance it is probably reasonable to expect at least 1.5 million Jews to become refugees within the next 50 years.]

Israel has no practical value for the nations of Continental Europe. The surviving descendant's of Germany's 500,000 pre-war Jews are not going to attempt to return to Berlin. Jews who escaped from Morocco with the clothes on their back are not going to want to try their luck in Poland (many of those Polish Jews who tried to return to their homes following WWII were murdered by mobs).

Why do Arabs reject the State of Israel?

Zionism is a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods. Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress. Israel is a constant source of threat vis-a-vis peace in the Middle East and the whole world. Since the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence and will contribute to the establishment of peace in the Middle East, the Palestinian people look for the support of all the progressive and peaceful forces and urge them all, irrespective of their affiliations and beliefs, to offer the Palestinian people all aid and support in their just struggle for the liberation of their homeland.

Israel occupies 20,330 square kilometers of land or roughly 0.23 percent of nearby Arab territory (see table at the end of the this article). This percentage would be slightly larger if we excluded Iran, which is technically non-Arab but which has been at the forefront of the fight against Israel by training, financing, and arming Palestinians. This percentage would be much lower if we included the Arab states of North Africa such as Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, etc. To put this into perspective, 0.23 percent of the Lower 48 United States is roughly equal to the southeastern corner of Florida (about 1/8th of the state).

In some sense the State of Israel represents a tremendous achievement for the Arab countries. In exchange for a fraction of one percent of their territory they managed to expropriate the property of their Jewish citizens (estimated at between $13 and $30 billion in 1950 dollars) and expel approximately 870,000 Jews from their territories. Without incurring any of the bad publicity that afflicted Hitler, the Arabs managed to accomplish one of Nazi Germany's primary goals: creating a vast empire that was free of Jews. For the first time in 2500 years an Arab could walk down the streets of Baghdad without encountering a Jew. Morocco and Algeria rid themselves of hundreds of thousands of Jews.

As impressive an achievement as concentrating the Jews from all the Arab countries into a tiny corner of the Arab world is, it would be yet more impressive to dump the Jews off somewhere in Christian territory, or perhaps to kill them all. This then becomes the challenge facing the modern Arab political leader.

Are Arab Leaders Crazy?

The closest analog in American society is the public corporation. The textbooks and some legal statutes say that the CEO and the Board are supposed to serve the interests of the shareholders. In practice the directors and top executives of American corporations siphoned off hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder wealth into their personal bank accounts during the 1990s. Jack Welch in Straight from the Gut proudly states that during his 20 years as General Electric CEO the "employees", by which he means himself and some other top managers, went from 1% to 31% ownership of GE. Rephrased, Jack and his golf partners stole 30% of GE from the investors who owned the company in 1980. [The most notorious Third World kleptocrat was Mobutu Sese Seko, estimated to have diverted as much as $5 billion in funds during 30 years of rule in Zaire (now the Congo). Measured against Congo's current annual GDP of $32 billion it would seem that Mobutu's slice was much smaller than the GE executives'.]

There is no reason to expect an Arab dictator to behave more altruistically than an American business executive. In fact, the Arab leader who behaves out of self-interest violates no trust or law unlike his American CEO counterparts.

Suppose that you managed to seize power in an Arab country. What would your first order of business be? Dictatorship is never a guaranteed long-term gig and therefore most people have started by transferring all the money that they could find into their personal Swiss bank accounts. Your second order of business is ensuring the happiness of your subjects. You don't actually care whether or not they're happy but you don't want them rioting in the streets and interfering with the flow of cash to Switzerland. Unless a subject is one of your cronies you can't make him happy with money or improved material conditions because you're moving all of the country's wealth into your own pockets. What you can offer your subjects is pride. By continuing the fight against Israel your subjects can feel that they are part of a noble effort that goes back to the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. and that has been, on balance, a tremendous success.

Starting from their homeland in present-day Saudi Arabia around the time of the death of Mohammed in 632 A.D., the Arabs managed to conquer about half of the known world by 750 A.D.:

Islamic power and territory spread more gradually until the 15th century when it began to decline relative to European Christendom. The Industrial Revolution in Europe reduced Arab power to a low point in the late 19th century when most Arab lands became colonial possessions of Britain and France. With the withdrawal of the Europeans and the rise in oil prices and production, Arabs have enjoyed a surge of increasing power throughout the second half of the 20th century. Destroying the State of Israel would be a glorious milestone indeed in the Arab march of progress and your subjects will be happy to focus their attention on this goal rather than on the year-to-year economics of the nation.

Do you suppose that you would behave differently in this situation of absolute power? That you'd be unable to shake off your bourgeois roots and Western idea that government should serve the people? That unlike every Roman Emperor except Marcus Aurelius, you'd respond to absolute power by continuing to be a kind generous self-denying sort of human being?

Suppose that you made peace with Israel and withheld support from terrorists? In your country, as in every Muslim nation, there is a mosque funded by the Saudi Wahhabi sect where teenage boys are trained for the jihad. If they don't see you as part of the solution (war on the Great Satan (US) and the Little Satan (Israel)) they will probably come to see you as part of the problem. Like Anwar Sadat, you may find yourself a target for assassination by an organized Islmaic movement.

Why do Muslims hate Jews?

We will not use the term antisemitism in this article. The word was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marrih to replace the then-current term Judenhass, which translates literally as "Jew-hatred". Marrih hated Jews and conjectured that middle-class Germans were turning away from the practice of Jew-hatred because the term for the activity sounded ugly. The neologism antisemitism was intended to sound more scientific and therefore make hatred of Jews more appealing to educated people in an industrial age.

Before considering why so many non-Muslims hate and have hated Jews, let's look at basic psychology research that has been done in this field. The classic experiment in this area is reported in Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (Muzafer Sherif, et al.; 1954; full text at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Sherif/). In 1949, Sherif divided 22 boys into two groups and took them to a 200-acre camp surrounded by Oklahoma's Robbers Cave State Park. The groups were set up in competition with one another and soon resorted to fighting and negatively stereotyping each other. Hating an out-group seems to make it easier for an in-group to function together. Moreover inciting hatred can be beneficial to leaders.

For an example that is close to home, consider George W. Bush and his constant talk of a "war against Iraq". Militarily the term "war" does not make much sense. Using 5 percent of the American nuclear arsenal, Iraq could be wiped off the planet in 5 minutes. Limited to conventional bombs, the U.S. Air Force could reduce every Iraqi city to rubble within a few months, at little greater expense or risk to American lives than is currently entailed in the Air Force's training missions over Nevada. It doesn't make linguistic sense to talk about a "war" if there is no possibility of losing but it does make political sense. If a president is in the middle of a war it is difficult to mount political opposition to that president without appearing disloyal and unpatriotic. Focusing media attention on a war prevents reporters from asking questions such as "How come William T. Esrey and Ronald LeMay, the two top executives at Sprint, deserved to get paid $311 million for their services to shareholders when the company's business and stock are in tatters? And then why is it fair that Joe Sixpack has to pay income tax but Esrey and LeMay didn't have to pay tax on their $311 million income? Would it have been fairer to divide the $311 million--equal to half of Sprint's 2002 profit--among the 13,000 workers that these guys laid off--$24,000 per worker--or possibly to the shareholders(!)?" [These gentlemen did pay a few million dollars to the accounting firm of Ernst and Young to participate in a tax shelter that the Internal Revenue Service is currently investigating and considering disallowing, in which case presumably Esrey and LeMay will join the folks in the February 7, 2003 New York Times story "Wealthy Suing Accountants Over Rejected Tax Shelters"] After the U.S. military crushes Iraq, a country that in 1990 had the same gross domestic product as West Virginia, George W. Bush will get a big boost in popularity for winning the war. Having Iraq as an enemy is apparently somewhat useful to the American people and very useful to America's leaders.

Why have the Jews through the centuries made such good all-purpose targets for hatred? It is difficult to understand how Jew-hatred started so let's focus on the factors that have made it endure: (1) concentration in residence, (2) concentration in occupation, (3) smallness in number, (4) military weakness.

Factor 1: concentration in residence. Until the early 19th century when they were emancipated by Napoleon, the Jews of Europe were required to live in ghettos, separate from gentiles, by order of the Catholic Church. After emancipation, the Jews still tended to clump together if for no other reason than the requirement that at least 10 men be assembled for morning prayers. In the United States real estate covenants prohibiting the sale of property to Jews kept them to some extent separate from other Americans, at least from those in the ruling class (these covenants were gradually dismantled through legal action just before and after World War II). It is easier and more convenient to hate people if you don't have to live with them.

Considerably strengthening the effects of Factor 1 is the fact that people don't change their prejudices without direct personal contact with the object of those prejudices. For example, suppose that you've been taught negative stereotypes about black people. If you move into a middle-class neighborhood where half of your neighbors are black you'll probably begin to change your mind. But if you never meet a black person face-to-face, why would you ever change your mind? The phenomenon has also been demonstrated by those Europeans who express hatred of Jews in opinion polls despite the fact that they live in countries where all the Jews were killed in 1944. An Anti-Defamation League (ADL) study in 1998 concluded "The current survey shows that the most anti-Semitic Americans tend to have less contact with Jews in their day-to-day life than do other Americans."

Factor 2: concentration in occupation. Jews in Europe were prohibited from owning land or farming and encouraged to take up a variety of trades including money lending, an activity prohibited by scripture for Christians. This made it easy for Europeans to believe that Jewish bankers controlled the financial markets. Jews in the United States were excluded from universities by quotas. Jews weren't welcome in traditional industrial enterprises. For example, in the early 1920s Henry Ford was the most respected businessman on the planet, sort of like an uber Bill Gates. He demonstrated his commitment to diversity in the workplace by publishing The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, a book that was a great inspiration to Adolf Hitler and early Nazi converts (if you Google the title you'll find the full text available on many Muslim sites worldwide). Jews looking for opportunity turned to new industries such as Hollywood and publishing. This made it plausible for Americans to believe that Jews controlled their media. Concentration in occupation among Jews reduces the likelihood that the average gentile will encounter a Jew at work and thereby have his or her prejudices contradicted.

Factor 3: smallness in number. Jews today number roughly 13 million worldwide. The peak of Jewish population was 1939 when the estimate was between 16 and 18 million. Close encounters, the only antidote to prejudice, are unlikely when the hated group is only 0.21 percent of the world population.

Factor 4: military weakness. Between the rise of the Roman Empire and 1948 the Jews were unable to achieve sovereign power in any region of the world and therefore were unable to build a military force. If you're going to hate a group and periodically inflict violence on them, it is best to pick a group that cannot retaliate.

The inherent virtues of hating an out-group plus these four factors were sufficient to fuel anti-Jewish violence throughout Christian Europe sponsored by the ruling class of the time. In medieval times this was primarily the Catholic Church and its local officials with secular authorities in the background. In modern times, up through the Holocaust, the primary sponsors of violence against Jews were secular officials with the Christian authorities in the background. The experience of Jews in the Islamic world was similar to the experience in Europe. State-sponsored murders of thousands of Jews were common in North Africa between the 8th and 12th centuries; Arab mobs were responsible for most of the killings after 1800.

It is difficult to reach back through the mists of time to determine whether or not stirring up Jew-hatred was truly beneficial to the Catholic Church or various secular rulers. So let's start with Nazi Germany. Jew-hatred was one of the most successful programs of the Nazi party. Hating Jews galvanized the German people and helped in creating an economic boom through the 1930s. The Jews of Germany were pauperized, their wealth and property transferred to German gentiles, and profits spread among the government contractors who helped smooth the process along (see the book IBM and the Holocaust for just how willing American companies were to assist the German government, up to December 1941 and beyond). Foreign governments did not object to anti-Jewish measures such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Germany's military and territorial ambitions ultimately resulted in negative consequences but her experience with Jew-hatred was almost entirely positive.

[Even those Germans directly involved in exterminating Jews were seldom punished. Participants in the Wannsee Conference, for example, where the Final Solution was planned, generally spent less than 4 years in prison--compare this to the minimum of 5 years in Federal prison that you'll get today if you are caught with 5 grams of crack cocaine.]

Let us consider Jew-hatred in modern Europe. Opinion polls in countries such as Poland reveal that hatred of Jews has survived even where the Jews have not. British and French academics propose a cultural and scientific boycott against Israel, an echo of 1930s Germany in which university professors joined the Nazi party at a rate double that of the general population. What purpose does Jew-hatred serve in modern-day Europe? Nearly all European countries were home to enthusiastic participants in the murder of the Jews of Europe. This is a source of a certain amount of shame and bad publicity for Europeans. Suppose, however, that it were possible to demonstrate that Israel is the worst of the 300 nations on this earth? This justifies the killing of Europe's Jews to a large extent: "Just look at the rogue nation these Jews created when left to themselves." [The reasoning is a bit flawed because the vast majority of Israel's Jews come from Arab countries or Russia; the Europeans did such a thorough job of killing their Jews that we'll never know what kind of country they would have created.] A side-effect of this desire to show how evil the state created by the co-religionists of the Jews whom they murdered is the European focus on Palestinians as a humanitarian cause. There may be billions of people in the world who are poorer and more oppressed than the Palestinians but they can't be held up as examples of how horrible Jews are and therefore get no mindshare and no assistance.

Jew-hatred in America is less prevalent and less violent than in Europe. As noted in the first section, a 2002 ADL study found that 17 percent of Americans were solid Jew-haters and 52 percent held some anti-Jewish beliefs. These numbers compare to 21 percent of Europeans holding the full range of stereotypes and a variable number by country proving mildly anti-Jewish, with the Spaniards topping the list at 71 percent. Americans generally are able to hold anti-Jewish stereotypes without feeling the need to take action. For example, the author has encountered quite a few Harvard PhDs who express the belief that a conspiracy of Jewish financiers manipulates the U.S. economy (their doctorates are in humanities, not business). These university professors and non-profit organization administrators would not want to be seen at a Ku Klux Klan rally nor participate in a lynch mob but they'd be happy to join a boycott of the State of Israel. That only about half of Americans hold some of the same beliefs about Jews espoused by the Nazi party is comforting until one one reflects that Hitler was able to hold power in Germany with only 33 percent of the vote in 1932 and 44 percent in 1933.

We come finally to the original question of why Muslims hate Jews. These days it is mostly because they're taught to by their governments. The standard grade school curriculum in Muslim countries includes a healthy measure of Jew-hatred, much of it translated from materials first developed by Nazi Germany. State-run television in Muslim countries keeps the public fed with a constant stream of images of Israeli troops beating up Palestinians in the West Bank. Saudi-funded mosques complement the government-supplied material to the point that the average Malaysian Muslim, who has never been within 500 miles of a Jew, might easily easily ascribe any of his problems to an international Jewish conspiracy and the rogue state of Israel.

A declining standard of living contributes to anger among the populace and the consequent search for scapegoats. The vast majority of Muslims live in Third World countries where any economic surplus is appropriated by the ruler's family and friends. Rather than investing the money in new machines for factories or productivity-enhancing technology, rich people in the Third World tend to sock money away in Swiss bank accounts or build themselves fabulous villas with fleets of imported cars and jets. The family that owns Saudi Arabia, for example, has reportedly transferred $1 trillion into foreign bank accounts, an amount nearly equal to the $1.1 trillion invested in capital goods during 2001 by all U.S. businesses; King Fahd spent $300 million on his August 2002 family vacation in Spain. Lack of re-investment of surplus results in slow or negative economic growth. Meanwhile the population in Muslim countries generally grows rapidly, e.g., 2%/year for Egypt, 2.5% for Jordan, 2.9% for Saudi Arabia, compared to 0.1%/year for the average rich country (source: http://www.prb.org/). If the Canadian economy grows 2% next year, for example, and the wealth is spread equally, the average person will have 1.7% more money to spend because the wealth need only be shared with 0.3% more people. If the Saudi economy were to do as well as it did in 2001 and grow 1.6%, the average Saudi would have a standard of living that was 1.3% lower, even if the new wealth were distributed equally.

[There is evidence that growth in the U.S. economy is governed by similar forces. In the late 1920s the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent of Americans rose to 45 percent. They built a lot of big fancy houses for themselves and the Great Depression followed. Between 1979 and 1997 the share of wealth for the top 1 percent of Americans rose from 20 percent to 40 percent. All of these rich people bidding against each other for waterfront property and Impressionist paintings has led to tremendous inflation in beach house prices and Sotheby's auctions while nobody can give away machine tools or improved information systems. In the 1950s a CEO made 5-10X the salary of the average worker and a company could pay out some of its profit in dividends, thereby encouraging further investment, and internally invest the rest in productivity improvements. In the 1990s a typical large company employed a long list of top executives earning 100-1000X the salary of their average worker. As in the case of the Sprint managers mentioned earlier, these amounts were often comparable to the company's total profits and therefore public corporations had a lot less to invest. The result was the recession that started in late 2000.]

Muslims have a Jew-hatred tradition that dates back at least 1000 years. Most Muslim countries expelled their Jews more than 50 years ago and consequently 99 percent of the world's Muslims will never meet a Jew face to face. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that Muslims will go on believing what they've been taught by their governments and mullahs. The worldwide Muslim population is estimated at between 1.2 and 1.4 billion. If we assume that the percentage of Muslims who really buy into what their leaders are telling them about Jews is equal to the percentage (33) of German voters who opted for Hitler in 1932, that works out to more than 400 million Jew-hating Muslims. This population constitutes an inexhaustible source of financial and physical support for anti-Jewish violence.

Why do Muslims hate the United States?

Nobody is going to blame the Rwandan genocide on Ireland. They've only got 17,000 troops and a limited number of ships and cargo planes. Nobody is going to blame Denmark, with its 35,000 troops. But the U.S. military is strong enough to intervene anywhere in the world. People can blame, with some justification, anything that makes them unhappy on the U.S.

Ask Joe Foreigner what upsets him most about the U.S. Top on the list is the fact that the U.S. is too interventionist, swaggering cowboy-like with military power into complex international situations. Complaint #2, however, is that the U.S. failed to intervene in a particular situation that is near and dear to Joe's heart. They hate us because we are too interventionist... except when we're not inventionist enough. They also hate the U.S. because they're so weak and their government essentially serves at our government's pleasure. Consider how annoying it is to be an American voter, knowing that because you don't have $50 million you don't have any political power. Imagine how much more annoyed you'd be if you were a citizen of one of the European nations. Not only are your politicians corrupted by the local rich but if your society wants to do something that is contrary to a sufficiently important U.S. desire, the U.S. military might invade and turn your country into a possession, ruled by a colonial viceroy.

Joe Third World Foreigner has even more reason to hate the U.S. than Joe European Foreigner. Most Third World governments have no plausible claim to legitimacy. They have power because they seized power and because the U.S. has chosen not to overthrow them. If Joe Third World Foreigner hates his rulers, who are presumably skimming whatever they can take out of his pocket, it is only natural for Joe to hate the U.S. for enabling his rulers to remain in power.

If Muslims hate the U.S. more than average it is probably simply because they have a longer than average list of things that are making them unhappy. Most Muslims are poor, getting poorer, and living under dictatorships in which they are essentially the personal property of the rulers. Most Muslims are exposed, at least via television, to a world in which women are permitted to show their heads in public, drive cars, and defy orders from their fathers and husbands. Most Muslims live in societies that lack the technological wherewithal to manufacture lightbulbs, much less the advanced weapons that will be necessary to overpower the infidels. And it can all be blamed on the United States.

Why are the governments of the Middle East so unstable?

The vast nation states carved out in the Arab world by the British and French had very primitive communication infrastructures and a largely illiterate population. If you were friends with a European diplomat you might find that you and your family were given absolute power over an area one fifth the size of the US (Saudi Arabia) or twice the size of Idaho (Iraq) and you could even ask that your new country be named after your family ("Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan" and "Saudi Arabia"). These regions might contain lots of mutually antagonistic tribes with linguistic, religious, and ethnic divisions. The first source of instability is that the nation-states of the Middle East in general did not encapsulate groups of people that had any real affinity for each other or common identity. Sudan, for example, contains a northern group of Muslim Arabs and a southern group of animist and Christian blacks. The primary interaction between these groups over the centuries has been the Arabs sweeping down to capture and enslave blacks. The British in 1956 decided that these two groups should be yoked together forever in one country and the result, according to BBC News, has been "Unstable governments, civil war and widespread human rights abuses have afflicted the country ever since." The CIA Factbook notes that "Sudan has been embroiled in a civil war for all but 10 years of this period (1972-82). Since 1983, the war and war- and famine-related effects have led to more than 2 million deaths and over 4 million people displaced." The country is one quarter the size of the United States, the people lack a common language, religion, or race, the literacy rate is 46 percent, yet nobody is willing to say "Hey, maybe it was a mistake to carve this big a chunk out of the African continent as one country."

[Nigeria was a similar arbitrarily carved-out country with an Arab north and a Christian-indigenous south that has achieved a measure of stability. Muslim mobs killed thousands of Christians in the mid-1960s, leading the Christian Ibo (or "Igbo") tribe to secede in the late 1960s, forming a new country called Biafra. The Muslim tribes controlled the Nigerian army and were therefore successful in overpowering the Ibo, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1-3 million Christians and the permanent exclusion of the Ibo from political power in the reunified nation. Muslim-Christian violence continues to claim hundreds of lives each year in Nigeria but the government and military have a firm grip on power and hence Nigeria is considered a successful example of decolonialization.]

A second factor contributing to instability is the fact that any tribal leader or military commander could claim just as much legitimacy to rule as the European-appointed dictator. No ruler sought or had the consent of his subjects. Iraq, originally granted by the British to the Hashemite family that also got Jordan, provides a typical example of coups and counter-coups.

A third factor contributing to instability is that agreements among peoples are impossible where there is no representative government. If the democratically elected government of the United States signs an agreement with the democratically elected government of Canada, one presumes that this agreement represents the will of both people. The agreement ought to survive even if the leaders who signed it have been replaced. This presumption does not make sense in the Arab world where every country is ruled by a dictator. The Ayatollah Khomeini did not feel bound to honor the deposed Shah's various treaties. If you seized power in Iraq tomorrow would you feel bound to honor Saddam Hussein's agreements with neighbors? An agreement in the Arab world is only good for as long as the two guys who signed it are still in power. [Note that this has painful implications for those Israelis who yearn for a negotiated peace; they could sign deals with every living Arab dictator but face a new war the instant that one of those signatories dies or is overthrown. For example, if they signed a peace treaty with Yasser Arafat today and Hamas took over the Palestinian leadership tomorrow, the war would be back on.]

Why are the Palestinians so violent?

Most of the nations within the Middle East contain conquered people and conquerors. For an example right next door to the Palestinians, consider that the rulers and bulk of the population in Egypt are Arab conquerors who swept in from the southeast. The conquered indigenous people are the Copts, the descendants of the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids and temples so familiar to tourists. The Copts converted to Christianity during the Roman Empire and have suffered from religious, political, and economic oppression for 1300 years, ever since the Arab conquest. Copts are periodically murdered by Arab-Muslim mobs and generally the Arabs are not prosecuted for the killings. You could read about this in http://www.copts.net/ but you probably won't because the Copts are not violent.

At the Potsdam Conference the Allies granted Eastern European nations the right to expel their ethnic German citizens, i.e., people who had been living in these areas for generations but whose forebears were German and who spoke the German language. Roughly 12 million of these volksdeutsche were in fact expelled, their property confiscated, and as many as two million may have been killed in the process. The surviving volksdeutsche settled in crummy houses in Germany and Austria and integrated themselves with those societies. If there were a Volksdeutsche Liberation Army murdering Czech, Polish, and Hungarian civilians the world might pay some attention to the injustices suffered by this group.

The 870,000 Jews expelled from Arabs countries in the 1940s and 1950s similarly settled quietly in the U.S., Europe, and Israel. They aren't out there blowing up Iraqi, Moroccan, and Algerian embassies or airplanes, which is why you probably never think about them.

The list of people who were displaced by the events of World War II and decolonialization is endless. The only group that anyone pays attention to is the Palestinians. If the Palestinians were to stop blowing up airplanes and pizza shops people would stop paying attention.

Arab leaders don't care about non-violent Palestinians. As noted earlier, if you were an Arab leader there is no reason to care about your own subjects, much less members of very distant tribes. The only Arab nation that has ever offered Palestinians citizenship is Jordan; a Palestinian family that has lived in Egypt or Saudi Arabia for several generations will still be aliens with no right to permanent residence. Thus there are more than 4 million people officially classified as Palestinian refugees despite the fact that the final British census before the 1948 war found only about 1 million people of all religions living in Palestine. The primary agency for these stateless souls is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). If you visit their Web site, http://www.un.org/unrwa/, you'll see that the U.S. and European nations provide almost all of the funding. Historically in fact the Western nations provided 100 percent of the funding for UNRWA but in recent years Saudi Arabia has been shamed into chipping in. For 2002 the Saudis contributed $5.8 million, compared to a U.S. contribution of $120 million and Britain's $30 million. Most Arab countries contribute less than the cost of a new Mercedes automobile.

Violent Palestinians, by contrast, have no trouble getting support from fellow Arabs. In April 2002 the Saudi state television network ran a telethon that raised more than $100 million to aid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (Associated Press, April 13, 2002). Iraq, which contributes nothing to UNRWA, has been donating roughly $10 million per year to the families of suicide bombers. Iran, another state that contributes nothing to UNRWA, sends weapons and money to anti-Israel groups such as Hezbollah and Yasser Arafat's army, most notably a 50-ton shipment of rockets and plastic explosives in January 2002 (notable because it was in violation of the agreements that Arafat had signed and because it was discovered and intercepted by the Israeli Navy).

The only way that a Palestinian can get his or her hands on a share of Arab oil wealth is by becoming a suicide bomber. "[Izzidene al Masri] lived with his 12 brothers and sisters and his parents in a neat, tile-floored house" (Knight Ridder, April 1, 2002, on the Sbarro pizza shop bomber). If you lived in poverty it might make sense to trade your life for the knowledge that Saudi Arabians would support your parents, grandparents, and 11 siblings in comfort for the rest of their lives.

This kind of poverty is likely to endure because Palestinians combine a low level of education and a high level of illiteracy (30 percent) with perhaps the highest birthrate of any world population, estimated for 2001 at 5 percent per annum by passia.org. This means that Palestinians need to generate economic growth of 5 percent per year, and preserve that growth from kleptocratic politicians, merely to maintain their standard of living. For comparison, the most rapidly growing population with which most Americans are familiar is Mexico; its population is growing at an annual rate of 1.47 percent (CIA Factbook 2002). In the 1990s, according to the World Bank, the average country enjoyed a 2.5 percent annual growth rate. Even if they succeeded in liberating all of Palestine, the Palestinians would have a difficult time growing at any rate close to 5 percent per year. They'd have one of the most densely populated countries in the world, one of the poorest in natural resources, especially water, and a complete lack of industry.

It may be a mistake to look too deep into Palestinian poverty for the roots of Palestinian violence. For most violent Palestinians we need not conjecture as to the motivation for their violence because they've explained it in their own words. Here is an except from The Palestinian National Charter, July 1-17, 1968:

Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.

Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit. [Note that this would include the present-day country of Jordan, 70 percent of the land of the original British Palestine, split off and handed to Emir Abdullah in 1923.]

Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.

Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war.

The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to their natural right in their homeland, and inconsistent with the principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations; particularly the right to self-determination.

Source: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/mideast.htm

Hamas is a Jihadi (fighting for a holy purpose) movement in the broad sense of the word Jihad. It is part of the Islamic awakening movement and upholds that this awakening is the road which will lead to the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.

... [settlement with the State of Israel] should not be allowed to happen because the land of Palestine is a blessed Islamic land that has been usurped by the Zionists; and Jihad has become a duty for Muslims to restore it and expel their occupiers out of their land.

Because Hezbollah's ideological ideals sees no legitimacy for the existence of "Israel" a matter that elevates the contradictions to the level of existence. And the conflict becomes one of legitimacy that is based on religious ideals. ... And that is why we also find the slogan of the liberation of Jerusalem rooted deeply in the ideals of Hezbollah. Another of its ideals is the establishment of an Islamic Government.

Hezbollah also used one of its own special types of resistance against the Zionist enemy that is the suicide attacks. These attacks dealt great losses to the enemy on all thinkable levels such as militarily and mentally. The attacks also raised the moral across the whole Islamic nation.

Hezbollah also sees itself committed in introducing the true picture of Islam, the Islam that is logical. Committed to introduce the civilized Islam to humanity.

How have the Israelis survived for so long?

The last real fight between Arabs and Jews was the 1973 Ramadan War. In this war, called the "Yom Kippur War" by Westerners, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, backed up with money, troops, tanks, and airplanes from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Morocco, Lebanon, and Jordan, and came very close to winning. All of these countries have much larger economies and militaries than they did in 1973. All, except for Egypt and Jordan, remain in a state of declared war with Israel. In light of the example of the Ramadan War, the willingness of Anwar Sadat to sign a peace treaty with Israel back in 1978 seems either insane or an enormous triumph for the diplomacy of American President Jimmy Carter.

Perhaps there is a military and rational explanation for the 1978 peace treaty, however. The Israeli nuclear weapons program was in its infancy in 1973 when the Arabs launched their big war. The best estimates are that Israel had enough material to make 3 bombs. By 1978, however, Israel was estimated to have built between 100 and 200 atomic bombs, enough nuclear power to wipe out every town in Egypt, whose population is densely concentrated along the banks of the Nile River. Anwar Sadat, in command of a military without nuclear weapons, could no longer realistically hope to prevail in a conflict with Israel.

The nuclear balance of power has been shifting since 1978. Pakistan has the Bomb and long-range ballistic missiles. Wealthy Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia have been buying missiles from the Chinese and anyone else who will sell them. Ironically the Palestinians may save the physical lives of the Jews. If a Arab dictator were to succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons, dropping the Bomb on Israel would seem to be a quick and easy path to everlasting glory. The fact that the Palestinians are living in and among the Jews and would be killed alongside them might be the only thing that gives a nuclear-capable Arab pause. In 2002 there were 1.26 million Arabs who held Israeli citizenship and who lived within the 1948 boundaries of Israel, nearly 20 percent of the population. Most of the remainder of those officially classified as Palestinian refugees live in the West Bank, Gaza, or in nearby Jordan.

Are the Palestinians adequate protection for the state of Israel? Islamic terrorists have demonstrated a willingness to kill coreligionists in the service of larger goals, e.g., when they brought down the World Trade Center and the Muslims working inside. Secular Arab leaders going as far back as Anwar Sadat have pronounced themselves willing to lose millions of their own soldiers in exchange for a victory over Israel. Given the lack of interest in Palestinian welfare by fellow Arabs over the decades it seems reasonable to conclude that the deaths of even several million Palestinians might come to be considered acceptable as the price of liberating the land.

Israel's nuclear arsenal is small and weak. The Israelis might be capable of wiping out neighboring capitals such as Cairo and Amman but not of surviving a first strike, deterring an Osama bin-Laden-style foe, or of reaching a far away enemy such as Saudi Arabia. On balance it would seem that the presence of the Palestinians amidst the Jews is currently the main deterrant against an Arab nuclear or biological attack.

Currently it seems as though Israel and its enemies have arrived at a standoff. However, taking the long view and keeping in mind that the Muslims can afford to lose 1000 battles while the Israelis cannot afford to lose even one, it seems worth considering what would transpire if the Muslims were to win. The published post-victory plans of the Arabs call for deporting all the Jews who weren't in Israel prior to 1947 back to where they came from. The most problematic subgroup therefore are the 600,000 Israeli Jews, and their descendants, who were expelled from Arab countries. Would the Arabs want them back in their homelands? Would a population that has grown up on a steady diet of Jew-hatred in their schools, mosques, and media accept Jews back in their midst?

Conclusion

• Jews are not wanted in Europe or in Islamic countries
• Although initially settled by some idealistic Zionists, Israel has become primarily a dumping ground for the world's unwanted Jews and this is its principal significance to non-Muslim countries
• For dictators in Muslim nations, inculcating mass hatred of Jews has substantial political value; Israel's principal significance to Muslim countries is as a focus of popular hatred
• For the dictators and subjects of Arab nations, the State of Israel takes on an additional significance as a place whose successful conquest would signify a resurgence of Arab power as exciting as the Arab conquests circa 700 A.D.
• Palestinian violence continues because it is yielding substantial material support from Arab and European nations, support that should lead to a gradual victory over the Jews and the liberation of all of Palestine.

Historically most concentration camps for Jews have eventually turned into death camps and certainly there is no shortage of people worldwide trying to effect this transformation.

Is there really a crisis? (Practical Implications)

Referring to an Israeli-Palestinian "crisis" in a headline is a good way to sell newspapers but not an accurate description of a conflict that will enter its second century soon. The last significant event was the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty on March 26, 1979. You could have missed every news report for more than two decades and yet be fully up to date on this crisis.

Events that would qualitatively change the situation in Israel include the following:

• Palestinian takeover of Jordan or establishment of a Palestinian state elsewhere
• Islamic revolution in Egypt
• acquisition of nuclear weapons by a country ruled by Islamic fundamentalists (or a powerful independent group such as Al-Qaeda)

Start following the news if you hear that a sovereign Palestinian state has been established on the West Bank because that is a required first step in any larger effort by Palestinians.

What would be the logical second step? Jew-haters worldwide like to cheerlead for a Palestinian takeover of the present state of Israel but the reality is that a takeover of Jordan would be much easier and in fact this is where most Palestinian efforts to achieve sovereignty have been focussed. Jordan offers five times the land area of Israel defended by a military that is considerably weaker. The majority of Jordan's citizens are Palestinian yet the country is ruled by foreigners, the Hashemite family of Mecca, who were defeated in their native land by the Bedouins under Ibn-Saud and were granted ownership of most of Palestine by Britain. Relations between Palestinians and the family have been strained ever since. A group of Palestinians organized King Abdullah's assassination in 1951 at the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount. King Hussein, who was wounded in the attack that killed his father, fought a civil war with Yasser Arafat's PLO in 1970 resulting in the deaths of many thousands of Palestinians and the expulsion of all armed Palestinians to southern Lebanon (these fighters sparked off a 15-year civil war between Muslims and Christians in their new host country; more than 100,000 people were killed by their neighbors (plus a few thousand more when Israel invaded from 1982-85)).

After Palestinian sovereignty the next important event to watch for is an Islamic revolution in Egypt, a county with a population of 70 million and an economy twice the size of Israel's. Currently the population is kept under control by a 500,000-man military that has modernized its capabilities with $38 billion in U.S. military aid between 1978 and 2000. The army spends much of its time finding, torturing, and killing Islamic fundamentalists but still has plenty of energy left over to train for a big battle with Israel. If the Muslim Brotherhood manages to seize power in Egypt the Israel Defense Forces could face their toughest challenges since the 1973 Ramadan War.

What can we, as average American citizens, do?

Oil is an especially bad thing to buy and burn. Any country that earns most of its income from natural resource extraction is a place where it is easy for a ruling elite to transfer that income into its pockets. You don't need the consent or assistance of your subjects to strike a deal with a foreign oil company and watch them extract the product. Burning oil contributes to air pollution and atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus leading to global warming. "Roughly half the oil consumed in the US goes for cars and trucks," noted the Wall Street Journal on March 18, 2003. The same article quotes Saudi Arabia's oil minister, Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani in 1981: "If we force Western countries to invest heavily in finding alternative sources of energy, they will. This will take them no more than seven to 10 years and will result in their reduced dependence on oil as a source of energy to a point which will jeopardize Saudi Arabia's interests."

If we were to tax oil to reflect its true military and environmental cost it would encourage investment in more fuel-efficient technology. Half of our oil is burned up in cars and trucks whose powerplants are scarcely different from the engine in a Model T Ford. One can build an engine with precise computer-controlled solenoid-lifted valves rather than a sloppy camshaft but when gas is cheap it isn't worth the extra capital cost (see "Why Not a 40-MPG SUV? Technology exists to double gas guzzlers' fuel efficiency. So what's the holdup?" in the November 2002 Technology Review). Toyota and Honda showrooms offer hybrid cars that get 50 miles per gallon but at current gas prices it takes years to recover the higher initial investment. High-tech windmills are good enough that Denmark is able to generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind power; in the U.S. it is slightly cheaper to take a fossilized dinosaur from Venezuela and light it on fire so that's what we do. Would you invest in genetic engineering of bacteria that could separate hydrogen fuel from water if you knew that a Sheik in Riyadh could wipe out your company with the stroke of a pen?

If you want to know who is funding terrorists, look in the vanity mirror as you turn the key of your SUV. If you want to stop funding terrorists, work for a $20/barrel tax on imported oil and a $10/barrel tax on domestic oil, which doesn't require an expensive military to defend but we still want to discourage its use to curb pollution. The tax should be phased in over five years, thus giving businesses and consumers time to replace inefficient older machines.

Terrorism is theater. Terrorism will taper off if people lose interest in news coverage of acts of terror. It is tough to ignore a spectacular event such as the destruction of the World Trade Center but we can do our share by ignoring newspaper and television stories about run-of-the-mill terrorism. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like a traffic accident on Interstate 95: a tragedy for the handful of people involved that wouldn't have affected the rest of us if we hadn't slowed down to gawk. The last couple of years have been the most violent and even so the number of people killed on both sides has been about 1000 per year. Shouldn't this many deaths provoke our sympathy and interest? If we're motivated by humanitarian concerns there are richer opportunities for saving lives right here at home. For example, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 Americans are killed every year by medical malpractice (To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, Kohn et al, 2000). The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration reports that 41,821 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the U.S. in 2000, at a cost to the economy of $230.6 billion, not including intangibles such as physical pain or reduced quality of life (link). Many of these deaths could be prevented with simple engineering, information system, and procedural improvements. If we want to be unselfish and help foreigners we might look at malaria, a preventable disease that kills between 1 and 3 million people each year.

More

• http://www.terrorismanswers.com/ has some useful, albeit shallow, background information on various terrorist groups

Table of Middle Eastern Countries

Literacy, and oil. You mentioned literacy a lot.

I also heard once that there is a strong correlation with wealth and human rights abuses and civil war. in the nations of africa with having plentiful natural resources. I think it was Tantalum (high capacity capacitors) and Emeralds, along with oil (of course) and some other highly profitable natural resources.

So sad.

-- Stephen De Gabrielle, April 15, 2003

Showing that reducing our dependance on oil is an effective means of combatting of terrorism is good thinking but it is possible to go a step further.

Part of the reason we burn fossil fuels is that we use a monetary system where hoarding the means of exchange is encouraged by the fact that it bears interest. This encourages short term thinking. Assuming there was only one model of car with the only difference being how long it lasted. It is in my interest to buy 10 cars which lasts 10 years for $10000 apiece rather than 1 car which lasts 100 years for $100000. I can invest the money in the meantime and it will grow thanks to compound interest.

The solution to many political, social and environmental problems is to adopt a monetary system which is not based on scarcity and does not encourage hoarding of the means of exchange. See Bernard Lietaer's website for more details http://www.transaction.net/money/cc/cc01.html

-- Simon Tzu, April 15, 2003

Why are palestinians so violent? Because the Israelis have settled in their land .My perspective is that of all Irish People who are born and live here in our island. We have been taught , literally for hundreds of years , to hate "the settlers". In the part of Ireland , the Republic , where these settlers (since 1922)are no longer of political importance (but valued citizens), we have no bad feelings based on ethnicity or religion to them . They treated us openly as inferiors and savages for generations , nobody could (or should ) care less what they once did. In Northern Ireland , after over 30 years of violence , the settlers (Protestants) and the aboriginal inhabitants (Catholics) , the hatred is still there where these communities actually live side by side , but the political groups who represent them , after realising that neither side could overcome the other , are on the brink of a final power sharing agreement to dump all the guns . They hate the Israelis because they feel submerged by settlers who never appear to have shown them respect.

-- des fitzgerald, April 15, 2003

Great reading, as always. I would just like to add some information that may be useful for readers:

• Courting Jews as an electoral bloc may or may not be a successful strategy for a US politician, but many evangelical Christians have a reading of apocalyptical scripture in which the second coming of Christ first requires all Jews to be gathered in Jerusalem where presumably they will either convert or be destroyed. The conservative religious right is of course an important electoral consideration for Republican candidates, and one can safely assume George W. Bush's policies towards Israel are influenced more by this group than by (traditionally more Democratic) Jews.
• A recent report on hate crimes in France in 2002 showed violence against Jewish persons or property increased six-fold to 193 incidents and now represents 60% of hate crimes there. Compare this with the 2001 FBI hate crime statistics which show 1043 anti-semitic hate crimes in the same period (the overall level of hate crimes is much higher, specially against African-Americans and gays). Even after a six-fold increase the per capita number of anti-jewish hate crimes in France is still less than in the US, so we do not have any reason to be smug.
• Historically, until the 20th century, Jews (and Christians) were given a somewhat humiliating second-class citizen status in Muslim countries, but unlike contemporary Europe, they were not the objects of wholesale massacres. A case in point: Spanish Jews expelled in 1492 mostly found refuge in Muslim North Africa or Turkey (a small minority like Spinoza fled to Holland, which mostly worshipped Mammon, of course). While Muslim treatment of Jews was not exemplary, it is an exaggeration to write "Muslims have a Jew-hatred tradition that dates back at least 1000 years", specially when compared to the virulence of European anti-semitism. That is really a very recent phenomenon, stemming of course in the creation of the state of Israel. In fact, there are many verses in the Koran that require Muslims to provide protection to Jews and Christians (at least those who do not oppose the Muslims by force of arms), which is more than can be said of official Church doctrine until recently.
• "If you were friends with a European diplomat you might find that you and your family were given absolute power over an area one fifth the size of the US (Saudi Arabia)". The implication is that the Al-Saud ruling family in Saudi Arabia was installed bu European colonial powers. Actually, the British supported the Hashemite family of Mecca rather than their mortal enemies, the Al-Saud family of Riyadh (Lawrence of Arabia fought alongside the Hashemites). Saudi Arabia is actually one of the few countries in the region not to have been colonized (unlike Syria, Lebanon or Palestine) or a protectorate (unlike Kuwait or Oman).
• Hezbollah are Lebanese, not Palestinian (the Palestinian equivalent is Hamas).
• Karen Armstrong's book Holy War is an excellent history of the Crusades, their legacy of European anti-semitism and how they color the Arab world's perception of Israel.

-- Fazal Majid, April 15, 2003

Lots of good info, but would point out that global warming is a farce - as you should know, with your CS degree, that the mathematical models used on even the biggest supercomputers like the one in Japan are not complex enough to give accurate results (for instance, there is no accurate model for the 75% of the earth's surface that is covered by water in terms of what the ocean will do with more heat).

Was also a little surprised that you did not mention the more evangelical or fundamentalist Christians in the USA who are very strongly pro-Israel. The State Dept and often the President's close advisors in times past have wanted to throw away the US-Israel relationship but have been stopped in part by the 20 or 30 million pro-Israel folks represented by Dobson, Falwell, etc.

-- Patrick Giagnocavo, April 15, 2003

Philip,

"The fact that the Palestinians are living in and among the Jews and would be killed alongside them might be the only thing that gives a nuclear-capable Arab pause."

I thought much of this article was well written and fairly calm and even-handed, but this particular comment struck me as unnecessary and exaggerated. Would not such a person also be concerned about the destruction of holy sites (eg Jerusalem), or perhaps the wrath of third parties (eg the US)?

-- Jim Morash, April 15, 2003

Phil,

This effort to claim that religious hatred is "fundamental" is pure BS. Jews are well-integrated into quite a few Muslim countries. E.g. Jews have played a dominant role in Ottoman culture ever since a large group that escaped the Spanish inquisition was welcomed in Istanbul, and more recently more Jews escaped to Turkey than the United States during World War II. Is there no religious hatred or bias ? Obviously not, nutcases exist in every religion. But I don't share your belief that hatred is fundamental and that religions are necessarily diametrically opposed and at odds with each other. I find that rather grim, and to be honest, boring vision for the future.

-- Ahmet Unal, April 15, 2003