However, within the next 20 years or so, that oil will be mostly gone. Maybe sooner than we expect—arab nations do not estimate their reserves the way we do it in the USA, and international oil companies don’t estimate their reserves in arab countries or the arab countries’ reserves our way either. These nations may have significantly less reserves than they claim. In one case—iraq—our government got to actually look at the books. We were claiming that the war would pay for itself, that international oil companies would move in and develop iraqi oil fields and sell lots of oil making iraq rich. Then we took Baghdad and guarded only the oil ministry and started looking at the books, and right after that Bush started talking like it would be a long slow grind and started cutting costs. I haven’t seen new public estimates of iraq’s reserves, except that an iraqi expert points out various places that have never been explored and suggests they’re probably full of oil.

In perhaps less than 20 years, arabs may have no oil to sell and there may be no international oil market for israel to buy. The israeli economy and israeli military might have to adapt to operate mostly without oil. I don’t think any of us are in a good position to predict how that would turn out.

We simply aren’t in any position to look ahead 100 years. These days the foreseeable future is probably more like 5 years.

After 1973 the USA agreed to guarantee israel’s oil supply. Do we still pay for all or some of it, or has that stopped? Your links didn’t discuss payments, only routes.

I certainly didn’t mean to imply that israel has nothing but (not stolen but donated) US technology to sell. My thought was that, as Lordacton pointed out, israel could (and in some circumstance would) bargain their US secrets to china, but that this isn’t nearly enough to base an alliance on.

Similarly, china isn’t particularly interested in buying hi-tech weapons from other nations. They want to copy hi-tech weapons from other nations and perhaps improve on them.

So I believe that Lordacton’s view that israel is likely to replace the US with china as an ally does not look plausible. China doesn’t have much that israel needs, while israel has essentially nothing that china needs.

It also looks as though we urgently need a link to Borats Anonymous.

Cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Crooked Timber.

Borat has seen through fiendish plot to ship pure Kazakh oil profitably to growing South Asia market through Ashqelon-Eilat pipeline, bypassing Suez monopoly. Is really plan to pollute our essence with Jew oil from America!

(I also love the implication that IAI has nothing but stolen US technology to sell. It reminds me of the apocryphal gaffe when a Clinton-era bureaucrat supposedly tried to stop Israel from “importing” a chip designed at Intel Haifa and built at Qiryat Gat.)

Certainly if the USA didn’t provide israel with all their great-power needs they’d look for another great power. But ….

First, what would israel have to offer china? They could give china all the military secrets we’ve trusted them with. But that wouldn’t be enough to justify an alliance. China would buy those for money or trade them for their secret info about the USA or russia or whatever, but they’re surely already doing that.

Israel could attack arab nations for china. I doubt china would want them to.

China could threaten arab nations with israel. They could say unless those nations did what china wanted, china would let israel attack them. But I don’t think the chinese would be that stupid.

China is negotiating things like oil and security with iran and other oil states. How would an alliance with israel play on that? “The friend of my enemy is….”

Well, israel could offer ports for chinese warships, and airbases for chinese warplanes. No.

I just don’t see that israel has much to offer china. Or any other great power, actually. Our unconditional support for Likud comes because we believe in doing the right thing despite its giving us nothing of material value. Or something like that.

What could china offer israel? They don’t have carriers or airbases nearby, to provide clandestine military assistance.

If israel got into a war and needed a lot of resupply, could china provide a massive airlift? No.

China could provide a Security Council veto, that’s one thing israel absolutely needs.

I hear the USA provides israel with all its oil, for free. I don’t hear much about that but the CIA factbook seems to confirm it. A quarter million barrels a day we give to israel, and israel pumps 100 barrels a day of israeli oil. That isn’t a whole lot, really, only about $6 billion a year at current prices, not counting shipping oil from the north sea or wherever to the middle east. Would china do that for israel? No way.

Would china give secret military technology to israel? No possible way even if china had something israel could use, not after israel sells our secret military technology to china. Obviously if israel would sell out the USA they’d sell out china.

China has very little to offer israel. There is no alternative to the USA to be israel’s only friend.

And israel has essentially nothing to offer china or any other great power.

When I look at this list, I find myself imagining what would happen if the USA and israel did get into a serious disagreement. I see no likelihood that anything like that might happen in the foreseeable future, but what if it did?

First, the USA would cut out whatever economic and military assistance we provide to israel, as well as the free oil. That’s about $8 billion/year plus whatever doesn’t get publicised.

Then the USA would presumably make the case that israeli WMDs are a threat to the world. There are the nukes, and the biowarfare weapons, and the nerve gas, and the weapons that are better left unmentioned. The nukes are obvious. The bioweapons are less so. Israel has enough vaccine to immunise all israelis against smallpox and they’ve immunised key people already. The claim was they thought Saddam might attack them with smallpox, though there was no particular reason to think he had smallpox stocks. Israel was known to have smallpox stocks, but we were ready to assume israel would never use them. Hmm.

If the USA led the charge against israeli WMDs, who would oppose it? China? Hardly. Presumably israel would refuse inspectors, and the USA could then embargo israel leading to tremendous suffering for palestinians, and then…. I dunno. My crystal ball was pretty murky already and at this point it just fades out. I can’t see the USA giving up unconditional support for Likud in the foreseeable future, anyway.

At any rate, it doesn’t work for zionists to threaten to play the china card. It isn’t a strong card at all. They do better to play the lobby card. Go to each individual politician in DC and tell them “Unless you give us single-issue zionists everything we demand you’ll never work in this town again.”. That’s a trump.

Basically it has already happened, as the pattern of settlements and bypass roads chopping up the West Bank shows. The realistic question is whether a fully democratic state would be more dysfunctional than the pseudo-apartheid state that currently exists.

Since the majority populace would still be in the driver’s seat of the state apparatus that resulted from any such move, and since Arab deaths in the conflict outnumber Israeli by something like four to one since 2000, it’s really the Arabs who would face a leap of faith in committing to a democratic binational state; it’s not a question of whether Israel could realistically face a sudden wave of Jaffa Massacres.

What else can one say but you go, Avraham Burg.

1. Hezbollah-style attacks on israel won’t really threaten israel in the next 10 years or so. Here is my reasoning—the missiles have to be aimed very carefully to do more expensive damage to their targets thank they cost their makers. In economic terms Hezbollah’s missiles cost the arabs more than they cost israel, they cost more to make than it cost to repair the damage they did. They had a political result, they made it look like israel was not invincible. Of course, it did and will cost more for israel to shoot them down than they cost themselves, and the tiny weapons that damaged or destroyed israeli tanks cost much less than the tanks. This sort of thing is likely to continue. It has gotten more expensive for israel to attack lebanon but it’s still less-than-useless for lebanese to attack israel.

If that changes—if Hezbollah-etc find ways to make truly effective attacks on israel, then israel will stop them. Israel could have stopped all the missiles in about 2 days by making nerve gas attacks on all suspected missile sites. They would have killed maybe a few hundred thousand lebanese civilians and they would have looked very bad to the world, and it clearly was not worth it. But if they needed to stop a crippling attack on israel, would they do it? In about 12 heartbeats. If they’re truly threatened of course they’ll use the WMDs and deal with world opinion later.

2. Israel will not get a tremendous number of new jewish immigrants because they don’t have the water and they can’t get it. I don’t know where the limit comes, I’d certainly expect comes at less than twice the current population. The water just isn’t there to support anything like a western-style lifestyle for that many people. It isn’t just waterless toilets and 1-minute showers, the effects ripple everywhere.

3. People at the bottom of the economic heap tend to have as many children as they can raise at all. For various reasons that works for them. People closer to the middle realise how poor they’d get if they had more children and so they don’t. But when there aren’t big economic rewards, when you’re still on the bottom with fewer children, why bother? Israel can reduce israeli-arab birthrates by increasing their wealth to the point they don’t want to lose it raising more children, or by decreasing their wealth to the point that all but 1 or 2 children die in each family. Or the israeli government and israeli society can ignore the situation and hope it turns out well. But unless they do nothing then it isn’t just an uncertainty. Israel can regard it as a threat and do something about it. And they probably will, since it’s publicly recognised as an existential threat.

4. The threat of high palestinian or israeli-arab birth rates might not happen, and if it truly looks like an existential threat then the israelis will probably find ways to keep it from happening. But I thought it was interesting how the argument went. Racist zionists made the same arguments about the threat that I used to hear from racist whites complaining about high negro birthrates. And the obvious implication in both cases was that something had to be done to prevent it. But here, zionist opponents made the argument that high israeli-arab birthrates implied that zionism would fail. I think what they meant was that to do anything effective to stop it, zionists must do something so terrible that they couldn’t live with themselves and they’d have the world against them so the israeli government would have to be replaced with something else. They used the exact same argument to say that zionists must give up!

The nice-guy zionists here responded that it isn’t inevitable that arab populations will keep growing relative to jewish populations in israel and so it might not come to that. But I want to point out that all the other links in the logical chain are broken too. Zionists can probably reduce arab birthrates without agonising over the ethics involved. The world probably won’t do anything about it. The israeli government can chug right along, perhaps they’ll have a scandal about bribery or foreign bank accounts or something that will bring down the government but relations with arabs probably won’t do it.

Joshua blithely accepts war without end, even if it costs Israel some bridges and America some cities, as a price Zionism is somehow worth …

This is a horrible conflation of two things I said. To clarify, Mr. Bento observed correctly that weapons are getting deadlier and stateless militias increasingly effective. I agreed that this was a trend in our century (though there are countervailing trends), and stated (uncontroversially, I think) that nuclear terrorism on US soil is a likely, repeated outcome. The near-total US immunity to disco and airport bombings, which draw from the same hat as suitcase nukes for their targets, has been explicable only by the fact that state actors have return addresses and so don’t hassle superpowers. Nonstate actors have fewer constraints.

Mr. Kervick, in the thread I quoted, said that Israel believes it’s in a Victor Laszlo situation. He also said that “the Jewish state simply participates in the same fate as the Jewish people in that regard,” referring not to neighbors who want to kill it but rather to bystanders who want to blame it. In other words, Israel believes that eternal UN (and garden gnome) condemnation is its inevitable fate, and therefore tends to discount such criticism as a moral compass. (When Paul VI visited the “Holy Land” in 1964, snubbing Israel’s government, Israeli crowds lined the road with signs reading “We did SO kill Him!”)

That Israel believes war, as opposed to enmity, is its permanent fate is an overreading of Kervick’s screed, and whether he believes it or not, I do not. Egypt and Jordan are good models for lasting peace treaties with Borat. And that America’s exposure to the common lot of the plutonium century is Zionist fallout, and would somehow end if 7 million Israelis obligingly marched into the sea, is very far from anything I think I said.

If the “Jew down the well” crackpots, and people who quote the PCHR Bulletin as a news source, ever succeed in convincing the US that abandoning Israel will save US cities, then that is the course I would urge, of course. But remember Oklahoma and Waco, and look to the beam, brother. North America has hundreds of kilos of MUFs of domestic vintage.

Good bar bet: what religion has produced the most suicide bombers in the last 25 years? Gandhi’s, of course; Sri Lanka still leads the world. And I did make the point, above at 91, that Muslims aren’t even very good at killing Jews by the standards of the last century. September 2001 was traumatic, but please don’t give in to the “clash of civilizations” worldview or the US will be no help to anyone.

Perhaps a threat to Mecca would be respected by all, but it seems a thin reed.

Good heavens, I warned you to read my remarks, not those of the mad armchair bomber to whom I was responding. My point was that Israel would mouse-that-roared the US to save Mecca—from people who prefer Final Solutions to Victor Laszlo situations, a contemptible group which I hope excludes all present company.

And so to bed.

As for people deserving danger, treat men as they deserve and who will escape whipping? Like I say, my basic moral position is to see the situation resolved with a minimun of suffering on all sides. I don’t believe in indulging retribution, as it is endless; history is one long injustice. However, I do believe revenge is basic to man’s moral nature for sound game theoretic reasons. So revenge is what I expect.

Still, Zionism is looking less viable to me every day, and the way Joshua blithely accepts war without end, even if it costs Israel some bridges and America some cities, as a price Zionism is somehow worth, no, I think Joshua means well by his own moral lights, but that attitude is extremely dangerous, and not just to those that hold it.

How so, what are your facts on this? In the last thousand years the only serious massacre of Jews in the Arab world (unless you want to count relatively minor political-Zionism-related skirmishes) was when they (along with Arabs) were slaughtered by crusaders about 900 years ago. Check it out.

If you want to argue that “the Jewish population will be in serious danger” as Jews (as opposed to political Zionists), you need to produce some proof. Warning: many quotes you’ll find on the internet are fabricated.

Note, BTW, that a few years ago a guy named Adam Shapiro spent months in Ramallah (iirc) living among Palestinians without any danger whatsoever, while his parents had to flee Brooklyn, NY, facing multiple credible death threats and general hatred. Check it out.

Let me leave you with this scene, from about a month ago:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3398969,00.html
Hundreds of Jews protested against an Arab family moving into the Naveh Zayit neighborhood in Lod on Saturday, and two demonstrators were taken in for questioning.

Preparations for the protest began after residents of the neighborhood discovered that one of their neighbors had signed a contract to sell his home to an Arab family.

Immediately upon hearing this, tenant representatives went door-to-door, distributing fliers calling to “save the neighborhood”.

Some 200 residents responded to the call and gathered in front of the seller’s home to protest the deal.

The demonstrators, who were carrying signs and shouting slogans against the family in protest of the sale, tried to talk with the owner of the house, who had heard about the planned protest beforehand and was not home at the time.

During the protest, the neighbors brought up different suggestions on ways to cancel the deal, including holding a fundraiser in order to fund the difference in price that the owner would receive if he sold the house to a Jewish family at a lower price.

The residents said that they planned to hold protests all week long, in another attempt to change the owner’s mind.

“We have no problem with Arabs living in their own neighborhoods, but they’d better stay out of our neighborhood,” one of the residents told Ynet, “this is their way to slowly kick us out of the city by taking over Jewish neighborhoods. Just like we don’t go live in their neighborhoods, they shouldn’t come live in our neighborhoods.”

Don’t these people deserve some danger; not for being Jews, but for being the scum that they are?

No, your implication with this line of thought is that 1000 years from now Jews will still be under threat from genocide everywhere in the world by States, the only organisations which pose a real threat to any minority group. But this is also not true. There are many states in the world which have no historical or cultural context within which killing Jews will ever occur. Examples which spring to mind are Australia, NZ, Japan, Papua New Guinea, the United Kingdom, and probably China. Sure, these nations might one day get into a weird situation and start killing foreigners en masse, but whether or not Jews will be singled out for that treatment will depend upon the context, not their Jewishness – witness the side of teh apartheid line in South Africa on which the Jews fell for examples of what happens in countries with no context for killing Jews.

(However, we could be confident that if one were to tear out a chunk of land from any of those countries and give it to [insert racial group] it would lead to conflict with [insert racial group] and potentially slaughter – isn`t that interesting?)

The fact is Jews will never be under any serious threat in Australia. I would go so far as to add a lot of the Muslim countries to that statement, due to religious protection afforded the Judaeo-christian minorities. Furthermore, it`s blatantly obvious to everyone in the post-world war 2 world that no Western European country is going to get its State worked up into a genocidal rage over Jews for hundreds of years at least. Which, given the way religiosity is declining in Western Europe, means probably never. And gives Jews a long time to work in which to make sure genocide becomes an impossible thought in those countries.

By spouting this nonsense you have fallen for either 1) a really limited understanding of the world 2) a really strong desire to misdirect the blame for Arab rage onto anti-semitism or (I think most likely) 3) the racialist view that Jews and Gentiles cannot live together. Number 3) is a particularly odious misconception because of its provenance, and the fact that it is so little held by the majority of the Western world.

So you have to do better than that if you want to defend Zionism. Paranoid delusions don`t cut it as argument.

Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory14 – 20 June 2007

14 Palestinians, including 5 children, were killed by IOF in the OPT.
One of the victims was extra-judicially executed by IOF in Tulkarm.
5 children were killed in al-Shouka village in the southern Gaza Strip when they played with an object left by IOF.
31 civilians, including 11 children, 2 women and an American journalist, were wounded by IOF gunfire in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
IOF conducted 32 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank, and 2 incursions into the Gaza Strip.
IOF arrested 50 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and 2 others in the Gaza Strip.
IOF transformed 2 houses into military sites in ‘Azzoun village, east of Qalqilya.
IOF have continued to impose a total siege on the OPT.
IOF have isolated the Gaza Strip from the outside world and a humanitarian crisis is likely to emerge.
IOF positioned at various checkpoints and border crossings in the West Bank arrested 3 Palestinian civilians.
IOF have continued settlement activities and Israeli settlers have continued to attacks Palestinian civilians and property in the West Bank.
IOF demolished a house in Jerusalem.
Israeli settlers burnt dozens of olive trees in the south of Tulkarm.

I closed following the economist Max Sawicky, who wrote:
“I guess I am ill-tempered. Stuff like this makes me angry”
before quoting Alex Tabarrok:

“The effective patent life of the average new pharmaceutical in the 1990s averaged just 12 years (see here for some references). Competition from competing but non-infringing pharmaceuticals makes the de facto patent life even shorter. Thus, my response to the seniors and others clamoring for lower pharmaceutical prices is to be more patient. Does this sound harsh?”

end.

Didn’t somebody just call me “grasshopper”? You unaccountably neglect stealth tactics, though they have already imploded two major intifadehs from within.

For the record, I’m in favor of deterrence, but against retaliation. This is, if you like, a nuanced view of the Strangelove dilemma.

The best Israel could do is put itself in a position where it can take much of the Mideast with it if it goes.

God forbid. Over and out.