Michael's Blog
I am running for Florida Governor
By Michael E. Arth - Posted 3 June 2009
Florida's problems are plentiful, but our leaders have done their best to hide them or make them worse by continuing the same failed policies. This has happened in our financial sector, in the sprawled–out cities, and in our costly and inequitable health care system. It has also happened with our social and judicial policies that have created an incarceration rate more than eight times that of Canada, and 14 times that of Denmark. Unfortunately, this is only a sampling of the wreckage left behind by irresponsible government.
I can help. My expertise, going back over three decades, involves designing homes, businesses, neighborhoods, and even towns, and then building them from the ground up. This experience has also helped me as a policy analyst. I deeply immerse myself in the interconnected issues to understand problems, and then come up with practical solutions designed to serve the highest common good. I intend to put these skills to work in bringing the future to Florida.
America Should be Israel’s Shabbos Goy
By Michael E. Arth - Posted 10 January 2008
As I write this, Israeli forces have invaded the Gaza Strip to battle Hamas. Over 800 Palestinians and 14 Israelis have died in the latest clash. In 2006, about 1,200 Lebanese and 159 Israelis were killed in a war with Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based militant group. The whole world is weary of this ongoing saga. There is a perfectly reasonable solution to the interminable Arab-Israeli conflict that both the U.S. and Israel have been ignoring since 2002. What is it and what will it take to make it happen?
One Friday evening years ago, while walking the narrow cobblestone streets of Old Jerusalem, I saw an Orthodox Jewish man charging up the street. “Are you Jewish? Are you Jewish?” he asked, frantically asking person after person. Finally he stopped a tourist next to me and explained that it was his Sabbath (Shabbos) and that he had been walking for blocks trying to find a non-Jew (goy) to turn on his light switch. Observant Orthodox and Conservative Jews are forbidden to do any work from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday and lighting the filament of a light bulb is equated with starting a fire, which really was work say—2,500 years ago. The man was looking for what Jews call a “Shabbos goy,” a non-Jew who can do work for a Jew on the Sabbath. Usually the search for a Shabbos goy is not so blatant. It’s actually not kosher to ask directly, and the most conservative Jews like to have at least two degrees of separation, just in case God happens to be watching. A very careful Jew might put out a hint to one of two conveniently situated gentiles (“It sure is dark in here”) in the hope that the first goy will hint to the other goy who will then turn on the light.
America should be Israel’s Shabbos goy instead of being a schmuck. Rather than giving the kind of help that would really do some good, the U.S. has been sending Israel $3 billion a year in military aid enabling the hardliners to keep the peace process in the dark. Fear-driven religious/nationalistic institutions have put up immense walls, both literal and figurative, to keep sincere, peace-loving Israelis and Palestinians from settling their dispute. America and Israel are still lock-n-loading like it’s 1967 when, just after the Third Arab-Israeli war, Arabs at the Khartoum Summit conference offered their “three noes”: “no peace, no recognition, no negotiation.” The hate generated by the Arab-Israeli conflict has spread throughout the world. The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts alone could eventually end up costing American taxpayers $3 trillion even before we begin to talk about the countless human casualties, acts of terror, and other horrors that have also been fed by the expanding Arab-Israeli conflict.
In fact, a reasonable offer was unanimously made by the 22 members of the Arab League at the 2002 Beirut Summit followed by the added endorsement of all 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference at the 2007 Riyadh Summit. The Arab Peace Initiative would probably have gotten more serious attention when it was first proposed, but on March 27, 2002, one day before the initiative was announced, a suicide bomber blew himself up in an Israeli hotel in Netanya and killed 30 people. Two days after the “Passover Massacre,” Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield was launched, resulting in the deaths of 500 Palestinians and 29 Israelis.
The Arab Peace Initiative proposes that Israel will return to its pre-1967 borders and withdraw totally from all occupied Arab land, including East Jerusalem, which will become the capital of a sovereign Palestinian state, in return for total Arab recognition, end of hostilities, and normalization between all the Arab states. Both parties would work out a mutually agreed to settlement for the estimated 4.25 million Palestine refugees in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
It’s not going to get better than that. Barack Obama has reportedly told Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority, “The Israelis would be crazy not to accept this initiative. It would give them peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco.” Israeli president Shimon Peres also told the originator of the initiative, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, “I wish that your voice will become the prevailing voice of the whole region, of all people.
Hawks such as Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the center-right Likud Party, oppose the settlement so it is up to the U.S. to declare its position and use its full leverage to assist the process. To start with, the U.S. should immediately stop the $3 billion in annual military aid to Israel and declare that Israeli charities are no longer exempt for U.S. citizens, who give an additional $1.5 billion to Israel each year. No other country gets this special treatment, and it sends the message that America is playing favorites, which has had disastrous consequences in Arab-American relations. Stopping the military aid and insisting on negotiating the peace immediately will put tremendous pressure on Israelis to do the right thing, something most already want to do anyway. In fact many moderate Jews, such as Jews for Justice for Palestinians, and many non-religious Jews believe that not settling with the Palestinians, or sharing their joint homeland, is immoral. It may be hard for those Israelis who suffer the retribution of Hamas in its mortar attacks to feel the same way, but continuing the cycle of retribution will never solve what has turned a local feud into a global struggle.
As an incentive to Israel, the annual $3 billion in military aid should be America’s contribution to an international fund that would compensate Palestinians who agree to relinquish their right of return. Many, if not most of the refugees, are already settled in other Arab countries and it would be acceptable to them to stay where they are if they had an incentive. Once this refugee question is settled, then any future government aid from U.S. should be non-military in nature and divided between Israelis and Palestinians according to need.
The Arab states should guarantee Israel’s security and the Palestinian government should constitutionally recognize Israel and disavow all terrorism. Some Hamas members have already publicly stated that they will work within the guidelines of the Arab Peace Initiative. Nonetheless, a back-up mechanism also needs to be in place for dealing with potential terrorists—so that if Palestinians or Israelis fail to deal with extremists then UN peacekeeping forces could step in. The window may be closing in the Arab world for the two-state Arab initiative, because of the Gaza invasion and because some sentiment is shifting toward a single state solution that would require Israelis and Palestinians to share one state. Most Israelis favor the two-state approach, so it would be a tragedy if America did not seize the opportunity as Israel’s Shabbos goy to switch on the light of peace.
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Copyright © Michael E. Arth, 2009. All rights reserved. This article is an excerpt from Arth’s forthcoming book, The Labors of Hercules: Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems, Volume I, due out in April. www.laborsofhercules.org. |
