COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY NAOMI ZEVELOFF IN
DESERTPEACE
“Why Do A Third of
Israelis Want To Leave The Country?”
You first have to wipe away all the old myths, misty-eyed
sentiments, and government propaganda, but when you do, you find that for most
of its inhabitants, Israel is not a good place to live.
It has a poor economy, hugely dependent upon immense foreign
subsidies, and there are few prospects for improvement over time.
The subsidies come in many forms, but who believes subsidies
continue forever? They don't.
It is an armed camp with constant tensions and fears, and
there is the fact that any children face conscription into an occupying army.
Prices are high, and some things, like housing, are simply
not affordable for large numbers.
Life is much, much better in other places where many
Israelis can go because many are in fact dual citizens. I suspect, but do not know,
that dual citizenship is concentrated in Israel’s more affluent classes. Even if
that is the case, there is still an effect on the psychology of ordinary people,
knowing as they do, that the already-privileged have fool-proof means of escape
if things go too sour.
You cannot live forever eating and breathing ideology. It
grows tiresome to say the least.
Israel is condemned, by the structure of its population, to
a government constantly driven by extremists who always hold, and will always
hold, the balance of power. Israel's ultra-Orthodox and Settlers are cut from
the same cloth as any hateful, unthinking extremist religious or political groups
you care to name anywhere.
A future declining population without new immigration, but
what is there to attract numbers of immigrants? And the world pool of potential
immigrants is quite tiny with only something like 15 million Jews in the entire
world and Israel willing to accept no other kind of people.
A future growing population of Palestinians, people who,
owing to their lesser economic state, have more children which is just the
natural pattern for populations everywhere.
Living with millions of people who must unavoidably harbor resentment
for what you have done to them, done to them owing to nothing they ever did to
you, is I am sure less than pleasant.
There is the need to learn a genuinely useless language in
the schools, Hebrew being about as useful in the world at large as Mohawk or
Welsh.
