Peace Process, Economy and Lies
                                By Noah Nissani
 
Persistent fallacies sustained for a sufficient time, become accepted as
universally truths by the public. When a monopolized media mobilizes for this
cause and when the fallacy is based in an apparently related truth, the
effect is magnified. The fallacy that the Israeli left favors the peace process
with the Arabs more than the right has gained acceptance among the Israeli
public by means of both the above circumstances. The de jure monopolized radio
and television, and the de facto monopolized written press, were and are
repeating this fallacy insistently. And it seems to be supported by the fact
that the left, in an acquiescent attitude that has not shown to be fruitful,
has pronounced in favor of more far-reaching concessions in exchange for
dubious signed peace agreements,
 
However, the facts show that the most relevant, and possible the only real,
achievements in the peace process were attained during the periods of Likud
government. The Likud was the first to sign a peace agreement with an Arab
nation, and brought about the convocation of nearly all Arab nations to a
comprehensive peace conference in Madrid. It is significant that this
achievements were attained under two Likud prime ministers, Menachem Begin and
Isaac Shamir, known to be extremely opposed to territorial concessions.
 
When Rabin (Labor) took power from the hands of Shamir (Likud) in 1992, a few
months after the Madrid conference, Israel and the Arab world were involved in
a general peace process. Bilateral direct talks, without the participation of
third parties, continued with all the adjoining nations, Jordan, Syria and
Lebanon. At the same time, nearly all the other Arab nations participated in
multilateral conferences. In the face of the more acquiescent position of the
new Israeli government, Asad hardened his position, and he now demands not only
the return of the entire Golan Heights, but also the Israel withdrawal to the
June 4 1967 lines. Namely, Syria demanded from Israel to withdraw beyond the
international boundary, and to return a strip of Galilee Syria conquered in
1948.
 
Convinced that it would help, Syria reinforced its baseless demand with a
massive bombing of Israeli towns carried out by the Hizbullah terror
organization from an area in Lebanon under Syrian control. Rabin responded to
this aggression with a large scale military action in Lebanon, but for the
moment the peace negotiations continued. At this point Rabin took a new step
toward Syria by asking the Americans to clarify with Asad the security
conditions he would grant Israel in exchange for a withdrawal to the June 4
lines. Asad did not hurry to accept Rabin's indirect generous proposal and
seeing the effect of violence, he suspended the talks after the meeting of the
Syrian and Israeli chiefs of staff in June 1995, and launched new Hizbullah
bombing against Israeli populations. Peres, who became Prime Minister after
Rabin assassination, responded with a new military action against Lebanon, and
the talks with Syria and Lebanon remained definitively interrupted.
 
When Likud returned to power in May 1996, the promising peace process initiated
by Shamir in 1991 was in total crisis. The multilateral talks have waned. The
face to face meetings with Syria and Lebanon were suspended one year ago.
Combat and bombing took the place of peace talks. The far reaching and
fruitless concessions made by Rabin raised Asad expectations, whose demand that
the new Israeli government stand behind Rabin's generous offers makes the
renewal of the peace talks very difficult. In June 1996, a few days after
Netanyahu became prime minister, the Arab foreign affairs ministers met in
Cairo and acceded to Syria and Arafat's demand that Arab nations suspend the
normalization process with Israel. However, one year after the return of Likud,
Arab foreign affairs ministers met again in Cairo, but now they had changed
their mind and the renewed Syria and Arafat's demand to suspend the
normalization process with Israel was met with dissent.
 
The dubious Oslo agreement signed in 1993 by Rabin and Arafat was
repeatedly violated by both sides from the beginning. Its stipulations are so
disconnected from reality that they are impossible to fulfill. More problematic
than the naive stipulations are the numerous fundamental issues that
remained non stipulated. The exact beginning and ending dates of the
talks to arrange pending issues were established with the ingenuous
faith that all would be easily resolved with mutual goodwill. In practice, from
its earliest implementation by the Rabin-Peres administration,
none of the steps specified in the Oslo agreement could be effectuated on time.
In place of the hoped peace, Palestinian terror reached
proportions never seen before. Rabin responded with prolonged closure of
the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which reduced hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian families to misery. To replace the Palestinians that had been
employed in Israel and were now deprived of their livelihood, hundreds of
thousands of foreign workers were imported under shaming slavery conditions of
"indentured labor."(1)
 
Honoring the democratic principle of governmental continuity, Netanyahu
administration continued the peace process with the Palestinians, despite
the strong opposition of the Likud party to the Oslo agreement. Netanyahu
carried out the Rabin-Arafat agreement concerning the city of Hebron, whose
accomplishment was suspended by Peres in response to a bloody wave of terror
launched by the Palestinian in the eve of the 1996 elections. Thereafter,
Netanyahu confronted one of the perplexing deficiencies of the Oslo agreement.
The agreement establishes the exact three dates on which additional areas of
Judea and Samaria would be transferred to the Palestinian administration, but
forgets to specify the areas and their size. This serious deficiency of the
Oslo agreement was corrected by the Wye River Netanyahu-Arafat complementary
agreement which arranged all pending issues concerning the interim period of
the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
 
Perhaps the most important advance in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process
during the Netaniahu administration was in the area of security and human
relations. Terror has been greatly reduced thanks to the collaboration between
the security services of Israel and the Palestinian Autonomy. More than one
hundred thousand Palestinians have returned to work in Israel with the
consequent improvement in the situation of their families. The return of the
Palestinians workers allowed the reduction of the number of foreign workers.
However, the stain on Israel's history for being perhaps the only Western
nation with legal slavery in the form of indentured labor since 1918, will
remain for ever. (2)
 
The monopolistic print and broadcasted media, feeling itself menaced by the
policy of liberalization and suppression of monopolies, has launched a
systematic campaign against the government based in three lies:
 
1) That the Israeli economy is in depression.
 
2) That the peace process was interrupted by Netanyahu's administration.
 
3) That there is a link between the "interruption" of the peace process and the
economic "depression", because foreign investors restrain from transferring
capitals to an insecure area.
 
It is of the nature of the lies that insistent repetition for a sufficient time
convinces many people of their truth, but the facts will infallibly disclose
their fraudulence. That the Israeli economy is neither in depression nor in
recession (3), but in a healthy process of recovery, development,
liberalization, and consolidation, was shown in two Hebrew articles on this
site. That the peace process with Syria and Lebanon was interrupted during the
Rabin-Peres administration, and that the impractical Oslo agreement was
repeatedly violated by both sides from the beginning, and continued by
Netanyahu was already pointed out here. And that there is no link between the
peace process and foreign investments, or that, on the contrary, Netanyahu's
peace policy attracts foreign investors, was finally confessed by the daily
newspaper "Haaretz."
 
In the first page of its economic section, in the place of honor generally
held by an economic editorial article, on February 2, 1999, appeared
an article signed by the journal's economic correspondent Abraham Tal, intitled
"The Facts Speak". A few lines of this article are worth transcribing here:
 
"It is seen from the data, that the [foreign] investment decreased in 1998 by
nearly 26% in relation to 1997. The decrease results from the financial
investment. The real investment - establishing new factories or acquiring
existent ones - increased in the last year by the highly impressive amount of
43%. ....It is easy to explain the reduction in financial investment. They are
highly mobile investment in response to local changes and to alterations in the
world economy. Furthermore, most of the reduction in the financial investment
was in the fourth quarter of the year, in which great agitation affected
international financial markets [caused by the crash of the Russian economy and
the leaning to fall of the South American markets.] At such times, foreign
investors and speculators want their money at hand. ...This fact has great
significance in light of assertions, which have been heard in past years,
concerning the negative influence of the interruption of the peace process on
the readiness of the foreign investors to participate in the Israeli economy.
...[Foreign] investment also increased in 1997, and then it was explained that
decisions respecting investments are taken long before their realization.... It
is a little more difficult to accept such explanation respecting the investment
in 1998." ("Haaretz", "The Data Speak", Abraham Tal, February 28, 1999.
Translation and explanations in brackets by N.N.)
 
The only ray of light in the darkening peace process during the Rabin-Peres
period ('92-'96) was the signing of the peace agreement with Jordan, which
formalized the strategic partnership which existed since the early seventies.
In the unwritten Shamir-Hussein agreement, with the somehow forced consent of
Arafat, the Israel-Jordan peace would contain, as established in the Camp David
agreement, the solution of the Palestinian issue. The Oslo agreement violated
this understanding, and closed the way to Jordian-Israeli collaboration in this
difficult joint issue. In some measure it voided the Israeli-Jordian peace,
since it left this sickly fount of future conflicts between both nations.
 
(1) The United Nations considers indentured labor a remaining form of slavery
in numerous third world nations. Hebrew readers can verify this in the entry
"Slavery" of the Hebrew Encyclopedia.
 
(2) "...importing of indentured Indians to the Caribbean began in 1836 with a
shipment of a hundred "hill coolies" to British Guiana. From then until the
trade ended in 1918, more than half a million immigrants, most of them
indentured, were fed into the plantation system of the British Caribbean. ...
Chinese were imported to various parts of the British Caribbean as late
as 1918, .." ("The Asian Diaspora in the New World: From Indentured Labor to
Brain Drain", Roger Daniels, University of Cincinnati, 1996)
 
(3) Recession, depression, recuperation and boom, are terms of an obsolete
theory, which described the free market as a wave phenomenon. This theory
distinguished four alternating steps in which the market wave rises, reaches
the summit, turns downward, and reaches the bottom. The last two steps were
named recession and depression. Since the wave theory was abandoned, the
diagnose of recession and depression requires the presence of a set of economic
parameters, such as reduction of the number of jobs with consequent increasing
unemployment, diminution of private consumption, reduction of salaries, a
number of bankruptcies greater than the number of new companies, etc.. Clearly,
none of these indicators are currently present.
 
Television, radio, and newspapers, in an orchestrated chorus, use the moderate
increase in unemployment to create the false appearance of depression.
Defending their own interests menaced by the anti-monopolistic liberal policy
of the government, they do not disclose that the increase in unemployment is
sectoral and not general, as it would have been if caused by recession or
depression. And that, on the contrary, the current disemployment is caused by
two main factors: First, the positive evolution of the Israel economy from
industries based on low-paid-workers to high-tech and highly-paid fields.
Second, world markets are flooded with inexpensive merchandise from the South
Eastern Asian countries whose economies and currencies have collapsed. (Hebrew
readers can find a detailed analysis of the economic facts in two Hebrew
articles on this sites: "Is the Economy in Depression?" and "Economic
Development in '98")