NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez ("Kay-Lo") interviews super-brain George Gilder about his new book, The Israel Test (2009). In a nutshell GG says that Israel's 20-year super-boom has transformed it into an economic powerhouse that can pull the Palestinians--and the rest of the Middle East--out of its economic stagnation, if only the Arabs will let Israel do so. During the first 20 years after Israel retook the West Bank in 1967, Palestinians prospered--until the UN and the West intervened:
During this 20-year period under Israeli rule, some 250,000 Israelis settled in the Territories. These were the supposedly predatory settlers. They supplied the infrastructure of power, water, education, and medical care that attracted nearly ten Arab settlers for every one Israeli. During this period, the economy in the territories grew some 25 percent per year, nearly the fastest in the world, and far faster than that of Israel itself, which was still bogged down in socialism. Arab life expectancy rose from 40 to around 70. Their incomes tripled while their population soared. Seven universities and 2,500 factories were established. It was the golden age for Palestinian Arabs.
Then, in the early 1990s, the U.N. and the West sold out the country to Yasser Arafat and his terrorist forces. The Palestine Liberation Organization became the world’s leading per capita recipients of foreign aid as international organizations squandered billions on them and thus transformed the Palestinians from entrepreneurs and workers into terrorists, welfare queens, and political poseurs of victimization and violence.
Bottom Line. Gilder's grand book is politically incorrect but on the mark. Team Obama, alas, is too P.C. to see this. The big losers will be--as always--the Palestinians, who remain true to the late Israeli FM Abba Eban's dictum: "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."
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