Now and then, the politicians are good enough to make explicit what we at the Institute argue are their constant but usually implicit motives. So it is with the case of aid and the peace process. Regular readers of this page are surely familiar with our contention, supported constantly by events and the statements of office-holders, that Israel pursues the peace process in order to get aid.

 

The Institute has argued this point for years, framing it in economic policy papers, op-eds, a Research Paper in Strategy, and countless NBNs. Rarely, however, do we find examples so clear and distinct as the one pointed out in a recent NBN by Alvin Rabushka, director of the Institute's Division for Economic Policy Research.

 

As Rabushka points out, The Jerusalem Post recently reported that half of the $800 million Israel has asked of the United States has now been made contingent on Israel's implementation of the steps outlined in the report of the Mitchell Committee. That committee, our readers will recall, demanded that Israel resume the sort of behavior that undermined its security for eight years and that led to the war on the ground that broke out in the fall. The Mitchell report demanded that Israel continue to do what it has been doing, and insisted that this time the results will be different. As the Institute's President, Robert J. Loewenberg, recently pointed out, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is more or less the definition of insanity.

 

Now that Israel's most recent aid request has been, in large part, made contingent on Israel's continued complicity in this insanity, the case we at the Institute have been trying to make for years has become easier to see than it has been before: Israel is being paid to behave madly and self-destructively, and it is willing to behave that way in order to get the money it needs to allow its statist system to survive another day. As Alvin Rabushka put it in the NBN mentioned above, Israel has explicitly accepted a tradeoff of "lives for bucks."

 

In truth, of course, Israel accepted this trade-off years ago, but that acceptance was masked (even from many Israelis, including some in power) by the notion that Israel needed the aid funds, that they were helpful, even essential, and that the peace process served Israel's interest independent of other considerations. Events have, we hope, finally dispelled the latter unfounded notion; and the Institute has done its best to prove that the former ones are patently untrue as well.

 

The latest news acts to bring all this into sharp focus. The U.S. and Israel have now said it clearly: aid will come if Israel proceeds with the process; and Israel proceeds with the process so that aid will come.

 

Soon enough, the clouds of obfuscation will again close off this truth from easy view. We are grateful for this moment of clarity, and we will be sure not to let our readers or the policy community forget it.