>
> On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > Does nonviolence depend in part on the exhaustion of your opponents?
> > Wasn't the British empire near the end of its life in India? In the
> > U.S. south, wasn't the local elite under attack from the federal
> > government and national opinionmakers? Israel, however, seems in a
> > most uncompromising mood, and has forever.
> >
>
> Ungovernability has definite costs. The peace process emerged because
> Israelis didn't want their sons to die patrolling the West Bank.
To quote June Jordan: 'What if each time they kill one of us, we kill a cop'. I recall the anxiety amongst English speaking white South Africans in the 1980s that their children would get blown up by a land mine in Angola or Namibia. Of course, it also helped that English speaking whites could pretend that it was all the Afrikaners' war.
And
> because they wanted economic prosperity. Economic ease may be even more
> closely linked to the peace process in Israeli minds than it is in
> reality. Israelis see the 90s as marking a complete change from a country
> proud of privation to a country proud of its shopping malls. But the real
> effects are considerable. To start with, all of those shopping malls are
> now ghost towns.
Another quote, this time from Joe Slovo: "Whites in South Africa have had 100 years of easy living" - this was at the time of the 100th anniversary of Johannesburg. Things like the MK bombing campaigns around Christmas time were quite effective in convincing white SAfricans that even if they could win the war, it wasn't really worth it.
The Palestinians don't even have to bomb to terrorize
> people anymore. The tourist industry just entirely died -- and you have
> only to walk along the beach in Tel Aviv and look at the billions of
> dollars of brand new hotels that went up in the 90s to see a powerful
> elite constituency for peace. On top of that is FDI, which has jumped
> enormously in the last two years. I would be surprised if that doesn't
> drop off markedly as well if the troubles continue.
After the Sharpeville massacre, investment flowed out of South African. Business leaders like the late and unlamented Harry Oppenheimer (recently called 'an inspiration to all South Africans' by ex-SACP Central Committee member, and South African President Thabo Mbeki) were instrumental in shoring up the Apartheid regime at that time and ensuring that the investment kept flowing. I suspect the powerful pro-Israel lobby internationally might play the same role.
Related to that is the
> rapid growth of the IT industry that Israel has been so proud of. If the
> intifada continues, it will suffer a large brain drain as the
> American-educated Jews with children decide they'd rather make it in the
> States.
Again, the 'brain drain' was an important psychological factor in South Africa - that, and the fact that SAfricans were becoming pariahs wherever they went. Not happening (yet) for Israel, though.
And lastly there is the captive market of Palestinian consumers
> which I just I saw estimated in an FT article at $2.5 billion in annual
> exports.
The emergent Black market in South Africa became particularly important in the 1980s, as the white market saturated - under pressure from sanctions and more harsh world economic conditions. This was one of the factors which made the end of Apartheid an item on SA business radar screens.
[rest of post snipped]
If - as is likely sooner or later - Israel is forced to make some concessions on the Palestinian issue (after all, how necessary is massive support for Israel after the demise of Arab nationalism?), there still be the massive range of problems for progressive forces. In particular, the unionisation situation in Israel is dire, with Histadrut (the Zionist union federation) being one of the worst 'bosses unions' in the world - with investments solidly embedded in the Israeli economy.
Peter P.S. thanks for an excellent analysis, Michael. -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844