The Way I See It is MOVING!

Hello all, I have decided to move the location of my blog. You will find the new blog at the following url: http://ww2db.com/mansal/

Israel, Palestine and America's Nose in Between

In the post-holocaust world it is often difficult to criticize Israel even if one just disagrees with governmental policies. For a military scholar of the Nazi era, this is certainly more apparent. Still, this phenomenon does not just apply to individuals, but sometimes nations as a whole. One of the most prominent examples is Israeli’s long-time ally and big brother, America.

Now, I’ve always maintained that my views are a bizarre mixture of liberal and conservative ideas shaped by many factors, but one thing I can’t stand is the seemingly unconditional protection America offers to Israel. They are surrounded by rather hostile Arab states and America does have a rather large Jewish lobby, but that makes it no better.

Going forward to create long-standing peace is going to be exceedingly difficult in the middle-east. As with many governments in the world, the economic crisis of the past two years, along with other factors, has prompted a dangerous shift to the far-right within Israeli politics. To make matters worse, years of American mediated peace agreements have turned up little, except to change the mentalities of both Israel and Palestine. Instead of working out the details of life-saving settlements with each other, they now ask America “what do we get if we follow those rules?” In today’s economic climate continuation of such thinking is absurd. America can’t afford $20billion worth of military hardware so that Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right ministers can halt settlement construction in east Jerusalem for ninety more days. Luckily, they’ve gone so insane that they didn’t accept it.

President Obama has made it clear that one of his most important policy goals is finding a peaceful two-state solution for Israeli’s and Palestinians. But as Friedman says, “[America] can’t want peace more than the parties themselves, and that is exactly where America is today.”He couldn’t be more right because stability in the middle-east is one of America’s greatest concerns. Not necessarily because of terrorism, but because America is addicted to oil as much as it is to Chinese credit. America needs to either enter oilaholics anonymous, or we need to realize that allowing Israel and Palestinian backed groups to slug out their differences will not disrupt our supply of oil and it may even help our standing abroad.

In the end, America can’t afford to lopsidedly support anybody in this conflict. Claiming unconditional support in the United Nations or a veto of a reversion to pre-1967 borders is detrimental to America’s image in the middle-east (which is both a terror and thus oil supply concern) and the peace process as a whole. In fact, Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of Palestine, seems to be making greater strides at peace than does Netanyahu and his cronies. Due to his leadership Palestinian security services have cracked down on attacks that mean to destabilize the peace process. On the other hand the Israeli equivalent of Congress has passed a new law stating that any non-Jew wishing to gain citizenship to Israel must “pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Not only does this alienate the thousands of Arab-Israeli citizens, but it an act of obvious opposition to the peace process. This legislation combined with the fact that Netanyahu has rejected Obama’s outright bribery makes me wonder whether the Israelis want a two-state solution or to maintain the status quo.

Whatever the answer may be, America needs to step back and let these two parties decide their own fate. We can mediate and offer our support to the process, but the sooner that we realize our goals in the middle-east will not be largely compromised by their actions, the better.

Holiday Economics

In America the “holiday season” typically involves the end of November, including Thanksgiving, December, for several religious reasons, and New Year’s Day celebrations. Many non-Christian families join in the Christmas celebrations even if it just includes giving / receiving presents and eating larger portions of food (my own family). As this holiday season reaches the final days, I couldn’t help but wonder about “holiday economics”.

There are a few basic economic factors at work within this interesting study. One is the decline in economic productivity due to extended vacation time. The other is the increased consumption (something that is perhaps more important in our economic climate). I will not try to gauge either of these phenomena in an in-depth study, but instead will just try to make logical educated inferences.

My theory is that some holidays, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, are probably beneficial to the economy, while celebrations like New Year’s Day or Veteran’s day pose little benefit. Christmas has the obvious benefit of highly increased consumption of both staple and luxury goods. On the other hand New Year’s Day is often marked by little increases in consumption (except perhaps alcohol).

Still, there is another factor at work. Societies are different, but all societies need vacation time to relax so that they may be productive during the rest of the working year. Therefore, the question is: does the morale boost of a work-free New Year’s Day compensate for 1/260 of GDP (assuming there are approximately 260 work days per year)?

“Holiday economics” is not a new field of study. Shifting holiday observances to better fit a nation’s economy has been experimented on in the Philippines. It would seem that some problems have arisen from the model applied there, but the study is nonetheless important. My hypothesis to the question regarding morale boost and the comparison with yearly GDP figures is largely sociological. Europeans have been given some of the most lenient vacation times and would balk at the thought of losing them (meaning morale would decline disproportionally because they are used to larger numbers of holidays). Americans on the other hand already have fewer holidays, but reducing our number would cause larger problems than it is worth. Once the holiday catches on it is very difficult to pry it from citizens’ rights.

Without proper research material and time I couldn’t hope to answer the question fully or even scrape the surface. This may be a crude analysis, but this post is only food for thought and perhaps my colleagues at the Freakonomics blog could answer these questions in a better fashion.