Democratic Palestine : 32 (ص 28)
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- Democratic Palestine : 32 (ص 28)
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Israeli exports... Israel’s ratio of defense exports to total ex-
ports is the highest in the world» (ibid).
While aggressive aims motivated the Israeli military build-up
in the first place, this dynamic is self-perpetuating in part
because war is seen as a solution to economic problems. In the
mid-sixties, ‘Israel’ experienced its first recession. Reparations
from Federal Germany were coming to an end; the gross na-
tional product had stagnated as had immigration. The 1967
war reversed this trend. The conquest of new territories pro-
vided both a captive labor force and new markets. In the same
period, ‘Israel’ began to develop international markets for
what would become the single largest sector in the economy
-arms sales. Israeli performance in war has proven to be the
most effective form of advertisement for its war products.
Thus, the premise that aggression and occupation are pro-
fitable has deep material roots in Israeli thinking. It was never
challenged until the 1982 occupation of almost one-third of
Lebanon, and then not again until the current popular uprising
in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. While the invasion
of Lebanon was a fiasco for ‘Israel’ in many respects, it did
boost arms sales. Less than a year after the Israeli army
withdrew from most of Lebanon, Mapam’s newspaper, A/
Hamishmar wrote in the midst of the Israeli economic crisis
and threats to Syria: «A not-too-long war, one which would
continue for two or three weeks, will solve most of the pro-
blems of the Israeli military and security industrtes.»
DEFORMATION OF THE WORKING CLASS
The Zionist state’s militarization has decisively shaped the
class structure of the settler society as well, leading to further
deformation of the working class, in addition to that inherent
in Zionism’s colonial nature. Here, three factors have been
determining: (1) imperialist aid, (2) access to cheap Palestinian
labor, and (3) the army.
Half of all industrial workers are employed in military-
related projects, and 70% of all US aid to ‘Israel’ over the
years has been in the military field. The combination of these
facts means that substantial cuts in the Israeli defense budget
and/or in US aid would mean mass unemployment. Thus,
willingly or not, the core of the Israeli Jewish working class
had immediate material interests in the prevailing situation.
A corollary of this is that the contradiction between social
and military spending, which serves as a focus of popular
struggle in many capitalist countries, is almost absent in the
Zionist state. The sole exception is the movement of a sector of
the Oriental Jewish population which has second-class status
compared to Jews of European origin.
While the creation of a Jewish proletariat figured among the
stated aims of the early Zionists, the state’s actual nature and
its increasing militarization and expansion have produced quite
the opposite phenomenon. In 1960, young men were 80% of
the Israeli (Jewish) labor force, but only 63% in 1974. This is
partly due to longer education, but mainly to the higher rate
and longer period of military mobilization. The other side of
this phenomenon is the increase in Palestinian Arab and Jewish
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PUTT
female labor: «Men are released for the front (army) when
women take over the ‘rear’ economic activity,» writes Avishai
Ehrlich in «Zionism, Demography and Women’s Work»
(Forbidden Agendas), which exposes the myth of the liberated
Israeli woman.
Emmanuel Farjoun, writing on «Palestinian Workers in
Israel: A Reserve Army of Labor» (Forbidden Agendas), adds
to this: «The percentage of the total population employed or
seeking employment is among the lowest in the world, just 33
per cent. By way of comparison: the corresponding figure for
England is 46 per cent... Israel, in fact, is in the same category
as countries like India (33 per cent)... quite low for an in-
dustrialized country. One reason for this is the size of the
standing army... Also, in comparison with other industrialized
countries, Israel has relatively few people engaged in
agriculture, construction and industrial production.»
This gap is filled primarily by the labor of Palestinians from
the 1967 occupied territories. Histadrut has actively con-
tributed to this structural deformation of the work force, con-
centrating Jewish workers in white-collar and high-tech jobs
needed by the military in particular. The only Histadrut com-
pany to employ Palestinian Arabs is Soleh Boneh, the con-
struction firm. This corresponds to the deformation which
became blatant after the 1967 occupation. Whereas in 1960,
70% of construction and manual workers were Jews. this
percentage is now 30%, the remaining jobs being filled by
labor from the territories (Jerusalem Post, June 10, 1986).
MILITARIZED SOCIETY
Aside from where he or she may work, the average Israeli
citizen’s life is permeated by the military in a variety of ways.
Yigael Yadin, former chief of staff and later deputy prime
minister, once said, «the civilian is a soldier on eleven months
leave» (New York Times, May 28, 1986). Most Israeli men
spend 47 days on reserve duty each year, while the average
Israeli is taxed at a rate of 58% to maintain the state as the
world’s fourth-ranking military power. According to Martyn
Halshall, writing in the British Guardian, May 12, 1987,
«Every Israeli appears to listen to every hourly radio news
bulletin, not just for traditional information, but in case their
coded military signal is being broadcast. The whole nation is
an army, capable of mobilizing within a few hours.»
According to Baruch Kimmerling of the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, the Israeli army has not fulfilled original expec-
tations as a tool for integrating immigrants from different
countries, but it does serve as a «rite of passage for acceptance
into the Israeli society... the symbolic differentiation between
the ‘old timer’ and the ‘immigrant’ is not the number of years
that the person has been living in the country, but whether he
has lived in the country during a war or not... for all the other
members of the population, participation in the armed forces
grants a feeling of intense participation in the society» (Israeli
Society and its Defense Establishment).
Whereas in many societies, higher education defers military
service, the opposite is true in ‘Israel’ where «the Israeli draft
Democratic Palestine, March 1989 - هو جزء من
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