World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [116]
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But most important, Israelis seem to agree, is the country’s “human capital”: its unusually skilled and educated population and their deep commitment to the survival and success of a Jewish homeland. Most developing countries suffer from “brain drain”; this is certainly true of many Arab nations. By stark contrast, Israel has always been a magnet for talented Jews who move to Israel out of ideology rather than out of hopes for a better life. (Tellingly, aliyah, the Hebrew term for the act of moving to Israel, literally means “going up,” while yored, literally “one who goes down,” refers to someone who moves from Israel to any other place in the world.) Most recently, over a million Russian Jews—a quarter of them engineers—have emigrated to Israel since 1990. In part because of this latest influx of engineering skill, Israel has become one of the world leaders in high technology.
If you ask Arabs in the Middle East the reasons for the disproportionate success of Israel as compared to the Arab nations, their responses also tend to be consistent, but, predictably, could not differ more from the Jewish perspective. Typically, their first reaction (not directly responsive to the question) is to emphasize the mistreatment of Palestinians within Israel and the Occupied Territories. Although Palestinians residing in the pre-1967 areas of Israel do have Israeli citizenship and the right to vote—there are a few Palestinian members of the Knesset—Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have few political rights and are treated as a conquered people. More generally, Arabs in Israel are treated as second-class citizens in numerous respects, including frequent infringement of their land rights. At least until the most recent deterioration in Palestinian-Jewish relations, many Israeli Jews disagreed with their government’s policies toward the Palestinians.14
As for Israel’s economic success vis-à-vis the other countries in the region, Arabs usually attribute it to a combination of U.S. aid and Israel’s “racist” “neo-colonialism,” although one often hears half-admiring, half-contemptuous grumblings about Jewish wealth, greed, and moneymaking tendencies. Generally speaking, Arabs see the Israeli Jews not as members of a persecuted minority but as a ruthless, expansionist colonizing force supported by the capitalist countries, especially the United States. Indeed, because the Zionist movement that founded modern Israel was largely European in origin and ideological inspiration, Arabs commonly describe Israel as representing, as a historical matter, “the last wave of European overseas colonization.” A favorite historical parallel among Arabs is between Israeli Jews and the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christian Crusades. The Crusaders, of course, were eventually expelled from Palestine after two centuries of precarious rule.
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Arab Ethnonationalism and
“Driving the Israelis into the Sea”
To describe the Middle East as a site of majority-based ethnonationalism targeting a market-dominant minority might at first seem surprising. The Middle East, after all, is not a nation but a region. Moreover, it is a region that, on the whole, has assiduously resisted democratic politics and majority rule. Nevertheless, closer examination reveals striking parallels between the defining conflict in the Middle East and the central dynamic in, say, a contemporary Indonesia or Zimbabwe.
As already established, Israeli Jews are perceived, by themselves and Arabs alike, as a disproportionately wealthy, market-dominant minority in the Middle East. In addition, Arabs perceive themselves