Banking on the West Bank

The rise of modern Islamic fundamentalism can be traced to one overriding concept: betrayal. The militancy that has flowed within this tide has been a gesture of empowerment, power that negates the humiliation of Muslim nations that have slid, first as colonial holdings of the West, and second as undereducated barbarians with too much oil money, as the Western perception goes.

During our “Dark Ages,” the Islamic world preserved the classic books that were being burned in Europe, they invented modern mathematics (try working with Roman numerals; algebra is an Arabic word), advanced modern geography and expanded scientific research. During the Spanish Inquisition, as non-Christians were tortured and slaughtered, Jews fled to Islamic lands where they could live without fear. How times have changed.

The collapse of the decadent Ottoman Empire, described in the 1800s as the “sick man of Europe,” a fate firmly sealed with the loss in World War I, brought the Islamic world, particularly in the Middle East, down into the mire of second and third class citizenship. Even as Muslim nations found “independence” in the years following World War II, it was often in the form of a Western-appointed monarchy (the CIA has its hand it establishing the Pahlavi regime in Iran, a monarchy that was toppled in the 1979 Islamic revolution) or a dictator with a very large Swiss bank account.

As a teenaged step-son of a U.S. diplomat stationed in Beirut, Lebanon during the 1960s, I witnessed firsthand the general belief across most of the Middle East that their standards of living would rise to match those in the West, often depicted in American film and television programs. But educational, health and economic prospects, outside of the big oil-producing regions, were then dimmed. Corrupt leaders fattened their bank accounts. Bribery was a way of life. Anger seeped in. the local leadership need “Israel” to refocus that anger – initially directed at Arab leadership – towards an extrinsic scapegoat. The plan worked brilliantly.

Which brings me to one of the possible longer-term solutions to Islamist fundamentalism and the Palestinian “problem”: prosperity. In American geo-political “speak,” “it’s the economy stupid.” People with nothing to lose are a whole lot more dangerous than people with a genuine sense of economic well-being. There are seeds of a positive economic shift in what was once the hotbed of Palestinian radicalism under one of the most corrupt factions of local government: the West bank – that slot of land still under Israeli control that is home to the more moderate, Fatah-controlled, Palestinian leadership.

Fatah, the party of now-deceased Yasser Arafat and once viewed to be profoundly corrupt, was toppled in recent elections by the profoundly anti-Israeli Islamist Hamas, a party that still rules in that other parcel of Palestinian land wedged at the Egyptian border, Gaza. In January of 2006, the unthinkable happened. A Reuters report at the time: “Hamas's capture of 76 seats in the 132-member parliament against 43 for Fatah was widely seen as a political earthquake in the Middle East, triggered by voter disenchantment with corruption and the failure of peace efforts.” Israel and the West could not support the Hamas victory, and the split of Hamas and Fatah rule (Gaza/West Bank, respectively) came about.

Fatah seemed to understand how far it had fallen, how removed its corrupt leadership had become from the people it claimed to represent. The July 17^th New York Times writes about a different West Bank (from the town of Nablus) today: “The first movie theater to operate in this Palestinian city in two decades opened its doors in late June. Palestinian policemen standing beneath new traffic lights are checking cars for seat belt violations. One-month-old parking meters are filling with the coins of shoppers. Music stores are blasting love songs into the street, and no nationalist or Islamist scold is forcing them to stop…

“The International Monetary Fund is about to issue its first upbeat report in years for the West Bank, forecasting a 7 percent growth rate for 2009. Car sales in 2008 were double those of 2007. Construction on the first new Palestinian town in decades, for 40,000, will begin early next year north of Ramallah. In Jenin, a seven-story store called Herbawi Home Furnishings has opened, containing the latest espresso machines. Two weeks ago, the Israeli military shut its obtrusive nine-year-old checkpoint at the entrance to this city, part of a series of reductions in security measures…

“[A recent opinion poll] in the West Bank and Gaza by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, a Palestinian news agency, found that Fatah was seen as far more trustworthy than Hamas — 35 percent versus 19 percent — a significant shift from the organization’s poll in January, when Hamas appeared to be at least as trustworthy.” If there is to be peace and security in the region, it seems obvious that there also must be prosperity… and in the long run, economic support may be considerably less expensive that the vast military machine required for any other solution.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.