By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Canadian-turned-Israeli Joel Bainerman calls economics the key to peace in the Middle East. He says Palestinians must take it upon themselves to create a viable economy and build a reliable Palestinian Authority. That, he said, must take a lot of time and patience.
Bainerman came to Seattle Wednesday to speak at a luncheon for the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, then for an evening engagement at Congregation Beth Shalom. He stopped here as a part of a tour across the country to explain the Middle East situation as seen through the eyes of an economist, and to promote his upcoming book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Arab-Israeli Conflict but were Never Told. The book will be released in May.
Bainerman hails from Toronto, but has lived in Israel since 1981. He spent several years as a journalist writing about technology and the emerging tech sector in Israel in the 1980s. In the ‘90s, he focused more on Israeli diplomacy, bringing information to an English-speaking audience not widely reported in the mainstream Israeli press . He also spent several years working in the tech sector.
Bainerman says the seven years between the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the start of the intifada were a failure in building up a true Palestinian economy. “The predictions or the calculations I made in the early ‘90s about what would have to take place for there to be stability and prosperity didn’t happen,” he says.
Bainerman blames the Palestinian Authority for failing to build an infrastructure with the more than $4 billion dollars it was given. He said the money was taken by “Yasser Arafat’s cronies.”
Anyone who thinks that conflict in the region is based upon anything but oil and arms is mistaken, Bainerman says. He takes politicians and the media to task for obscuring that fact.
“Everyone focuses the entire conflict and tries to take the moral high ground,” he says. “The fact is, the oil and the arms are much more important.”
Bainerman explains how from the end of the 19th century forward, the British moved into the region because of the vast amount of oil reserves.
“Every single country in the Middle East was created by a foreign power,” he says. Britain carved up all of the countries — including Israel, he notes — to get better access to oil reserves.
“To this very day, that’s still pretty well the situation. [The United States] wouldn’t care about Saudi Arabia – wouldn’t sell arms to Saudi Arabia — wouldn’t do anything if they weren’t sitting on all that oil. They only reason they can buy the arms is because the oil is there,” Bainerman says.
He says the press does not report on why the United States sold arms to these countries, but the information is readily available in the Congressional Record.
Bainerman also noted it is because of oil that the United States will probably go to war with Iraq.
“I can’t believe people really believe that this whole thing is about getting rid of this evil guy so we can install democracy in Iraq,” he says. “Where else in the world have we installed democracy?”
Bainerman says he does not wish to be considered on either the right or the left, but as more of a pragmatist. By not placing blame on either side, he said it’s easier to figure out where the region has gone wrong and can work on building stability.
One solution, he says, is for foreign powers to get out of the Middle East, the parties can work things out on their own.
“Sharon has got to worry about the American thing, Peres about the French, Arafat looking at the Europeans, everybody’s worried about what the outside world will say or think or finance or fund,” Bainerman says.
He says that before statehood, Jews and Palestinians had been able to work in cooperation and build ventures together. He doesn’t see that as a viable alternative now, not from animosity, but because Israeli businesses see nothing to invest in. More likely collaborators would be Poland, Hungary or Western Europe, he said.
Whatever the solutions, however, nothing will happen instantaneously. Any Palestinian economy – most likely based in the West Bank, Bainerman says — would take years before it could stand on its own.