Those [retired IDF] who spent their service in the West Bank and Gaza Strip quickly learn how to apply and refine new technologies for surveillance, crowd control and urban warfare that find ready markets overseas. In 2006 Israel’s defence exports reached $3.4bn, making the country the fourth largest arms dealer in the world.If you saw the information on how an Israeli firm has been helping the U.S. spy on peace activists, we know the U.S. & Israeli military industrial bloodsuckers are working hand in glove. Linda J.
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100928/FOREIGN/100929445/1011/NEWS
EXCERPT:
NAZARETH // With the resumption of settlement construction in the West Bank
yesterday, Israel’s powerful settler movement hopes that it has scuttled peace talks
with the Palestinians, too.
It would be misleading, however, to assume that the major obstacle to the success of
talks is the right-wing political ideology the settler movement represents. Equally
important are deeply entrenched economic interests shared across Israeli society.
These interests took root more than six decades ago with Israel’s establishment and
have flourished at an ever-accelerating pace since Israel occupied the West Bank and
Gaza Strip after the Arab-Israeli War in 1967.
Even many Israeli Jews living within the recognised borders of Israel privately
acknowledge that they are the beneficiaries of the seizure of another people’s lands,
homes, businesses and bank accounts.
Most Israelis profit directly from the continuing dispossession of millions of Palestinian refugees.
Israeli officials assume that the international community will bear the burden of restitution for the refugees. The problem for Israel’s Jewish population is that the refugees now living in exile were not the only ones dispossessed.
The fifth of Israel’s citizens who are Palestinian but survived the upheaval of 1948 found themselves either transformed into internally displaced people or the victims of a land-nationalisation programme that stripped them of their ancestral property.
Even if Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, signed away the rights of the refugees, he would have no power to do the same for Israel’s Palestinian citizens, also known as Israeli Arabs. Peace, as many Israelis understand, would open a Pandora’s box of historic land claims from Palestinian citizens at the expense of Israel’s Jewish citizens.
But the threat to the economic privileges of Israeli Jews would not end with a reckoning over the consequences caused by the state’s creation. The occupation of the Palestinian territories after 1967 spawned many other powerful economic interests opposed to peace.
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