British-Israel Relations Seen Through Visiting Elite Opinionmaker Delegations

From Gloria-Centre.Org

BRITISH-ISRAEL RELATIONS SEEN THROUGH VISITING ELITE OPINIONMAKER DELEGATIONS
By Jonathan Cummings *
This article discusses visiting delegations of British elite opinionmakers in Israel, how this affects British views of Israel, and whether they create a more supportive environment for Israel in Britain.

INTRODUCTION

It might look like an unjustifiably expensive and time-intensive undertaking. Bringing British journalists, students, academics, and politicians to Israel in the hope of moderating increasingly negative popular perceptions can feel Sisyphean; and with more immediate and more significant threats to Israel’s national security, “lunching for Israel” may appear indulgent. In fact, it is none of these.

There should be no doubt about the relevance of the objective. Criticism of Israel threatens to elide into an assault on the very right of the State of Israel to exist as a democratic, Jewish state. Israel and Diaspora Jewish communities are transfixed by the phenomenon of “delegitimization,” and are frantically searching for explanations and remedies. Britain is at the forefront of this challenge. With media outlets like the BBC, the Guardian, and the Financial Times playing an increasingly significant part in framing the issue well beyond its own borders, British attitudes carry far. In the meantime, calls for a one-state solution–and with it the end of the Zionist project–are gaining ground.

However, making the case that introducing British elite opinionmakers to Israel represents a significant contribution to ensuring Israel’s survival requires challenging a well-rooted conception of Israel’s national security. Although never formalized, three principles have emerged over time as crucial to defending Israel. First, Israel seeks to avoid conflict by adopting a deterrence posture, keeping potential threats at arm’s distance. If conflict does erupt, early warning and intelligence seek to minimize the damage. Finally, campaigns should be short and decisive, preserving Israel’s limited resources and leaving future opponents discouraged from further attacks. However, such a conception of national security, dominated by military logic, is insufficient to deal with the full range of challenges Israel faces. Experience of bringing British opinionmakers to Israel, with direct feedback quoted below, indicates that in each case, a different mindset may be appropriate.

ENGAGEMENT, NOT DETERRENCE

“It’s the accessibility that makes it work. Authoritative, not pushy, informal and yet making sure our time wasn’t wasted.” –British journalist

Israel has historically been reliant on a national security doctrine that emphasizes the use of military power for protection. Its predominant characteristic is a strong deterrence posture, which aims to prevent opponents from initiating conflict. A small standing army can be transformed into a very large force by quick enlistment of the reserve. High-quality training and equipment ensure a qualitative edge. A policy of nuclear ambiguity carries a final level of deterrence.

The deterrence doctrine has been successful in limiting–although not entirely preventing–outbreaks of conventional military conflict. Since 1973, no opponent has mounted a credible conventional military threat to Israel. However, there is increasingly bitter public discourse on Israel on the international level, which–by promoting a one-state agenda–may yet have the capacity to defeat Israel decisively. Indeed, in this field, deterrence thinking may even be counter-productive.

In fact, confronting Israel’s critics demands engagement, not deterrence. There is no better way to build relationships with British elite opinionmakers–journalists, politicians, academics, and students–than to bring them to Israel. Britain is geographically close enough that a visit can be short enough not to present a serious disruption to normal routines. A subsidized visit certainly offers a solution for media outlets whose finances are limited. Still, it is the quality of the program, the blend of concentrated high-level access and otherwise inaccessible encounters with the “real” Israel that can make the difference in opening up dialogue.

What works?:

* Talking about Israel is critical. Knowing reams of historical facts and figures is important; being able to offer analysis of difficult issues in a way that is credible, sensible, and verifiable is far better. Conveying personal commitment and enthusiasm for Israel adds a human dimension.
* Israel’s best advocates are articulate and opinionated. Opinionmakers like to hear opinions, even if they don’t agree with all of them. Hearing a range of such views during a delegation–which should include some critical voices–is more effective than seeking to achieve “balance.” A range of opinions is appropriate as a starting point for an ongoing conversation, and not for a closing argument in a trial.
* Bringing like together with like works. The best way for a British visitor to understand Israel is through the eyes of an Israeli counterpart. Discussing professional dilemmas and challenges is more accessible than trying to master the facts. This kind of discourse encourages finding points of similarity, rather than difference. It seems to be the case that “I like people like me.”

However, a necessary word of caution. Engaging Israel’s critics in debate is not a religion. There are times when there is no conversation to be had and when investing in bringing people to Israel is of dubious value. There are times when deterring Israel’s critics from attacking remains the best policy. At its best, engaging critical voices in lively debate on these issues can be exhilarating, challenging, and reaffirming, and networks of communication that could be decisive in framing the ongoing discourse on Israel in Britain.

NETWORKS OF EARLY WARNING AND INTELLIGENCE

“Being able to collect the business cards of the various well-placed people you introduced us to was vital: next time something kicks off, we’ll all have a lot of people to contact” — British political advisor

Israel’s national security doctrine places high value on early warning and intelligence as a way of avoiding or limiting the cost of conflict. Over-reliance on this strategy can be high-risk; the cost of its failure was brutally exposed in 1973. The logic of early warning and intelligence translates effectively to confronting the threat of delegitimization by building networks of contacts. Any opportunity to bring British and Israeli policymakers or opinionmakers together can be used to share information, increasing what each knows about the other and reducing the possibility for surprise at each other’s positions. But the aim should be more strategic, encouraging sustainable networks of relationships to form and information and analysis flowing independently, long after the visit is over.

What works?:

* High-level access is important, but so is identifying new voices. Access to top-level leadership is perhaps the best indicator of relevance and caliber for the visitor. There is no better way to hear the authentic voice of Israeli politics than from an articulate and engaging Israeli politician. However, in the interest of long-term networking, it is important to identify and promote new voices. In a similar vein, specialists are more interesting than generalists. Part of the challenge of understanding Israel is to engage in complex detail, which is often only available on the ground. Even when time is limited, an insight into a previously impenetrable issue can be more valuable than another high-altitude survey–even if the issue in itself is only one of many that require unravelling.
* Identifying mutual interests helps create relevant relationships. If the editor of a newspaper’s comment pages is introduced to engaging and opinionated Israelis who can bring their insight to the readers of the British newspaper, there is a potential for greater exposure of Israeli voices in the British media. Connecting political advisors in Israel with counterparts in Britain facilitates a working-level policy conversation that can take account of each other’s narratives.
* Creating networks of relationships is a long-term process. Identifying the right people to bring to Israel is not an exact science. Recently, a prospective parliamentary candidate who had been in Israel 20 years ago as a student leader returned on a fact-finding visit. Picking up contacts he had made then, he returned to the Israel-Palestine issue as a foreign policy speciality. He knew that there was a good story, and that there were people to help him.

A further word of caution: An awareness of public opinion is a critical dimension of the early warning and intelligence task. Often, this translates into monitoring media output, since what is written and broadcast has an unrivalled capacity for framing what the public thinks, and what the public thinks about. There is no doubt that this task is important, relevant and legitimate. However, over-enthusiasm and short-termism has, in the past, resulted in fractures in relations when media coverage has been confused with national policy. Harassing the media is a counter-productive tactic, which limits dialogue. A decision to cut all relations with a media outlet, as in the five-month official Israeli boycott of the BBC in 2003, is an inexcusable admission of the failure of diplomacy.

THE PURSUIT OF SHORT, DECISIVE CAMPAIGNS

“I know you can’t possibly see everything in a few days. I’ll just have to come back–and back, and back…” –British student leader

Israel has traditionally preferred short, decisive military campaigns. Geographical vulnerability and the overwhelming dimensions of surrounding opponents have dictated a national security strategy that produces intense, but unsustainable, use of force to repel and deter. Yet the strategy of engaging critical audiences in order to arrest the slide into delegitimization appears to contradict that of the short, decisive campaign. Engaging with elite opinionmaking audiences from Britain–academics, journalists, politicians, and students–is a long-term proposition, and it is unlikely to be decisive.

The Israeli narrative is complex and detailed. It requires sustained engagement and contextualization. Moreover, it competes with a Palestinian narrative that boils the conflict with Israel down to a single, accusatory word–”occupation.” Although Zionism contains identifiable components–a secular, nationalist ideology for the self-determination of the Jewish people– taken as a whole, it is difficult to understand, at least for outsiders.

There are also plenty of red herrings along the way. Isn’t a Jewish state a theocracy in the mold of Iran? Isn’t a country at conflict, if not at war, for its entire existence a garrison state ruled by its military? Isn’t Israeli democracy an oxymoron while the Palestinians remain in political limbo? The answers to these questions, of which there are multiple versions, are best chewed over.

However, a short visit to Israel can provide an intense point of contact between Israel and Britain. It may be the start of a longer-term relationship, or in the context of an existing dialogue. Either way, visiting Israel can be an important element in forming elite British opinions on Israel.

What works?:

* Finding the right visitors is crucial. It may well be the case that the discourse is far less friendly to Britain among the general public than it is among elite opinionmakers. This can produce pressure to redirect energies to broad-based public campaigns in the UK. However, limited resources require prioritization. Bringing politicians, journalists, students, and academics to Israel can help to create barriers to delegitimization, insulating policy-making environments from the most destructive discourse.
* Visitors are often surprised by what they find on a short visit. Many expect a combat zone, a theocracy, or a failed state. They rarely find one. Although armed soldiers, mostly teenage conscripts, are a common sight, visitors rarely feel like they are in a state under arms. The discourse of what it means to be a Jewish state is lively and vigorous; none of those taking part is prepared to concede defeat at this point. For those who are already familiar with Israel, continuity is more obvious than change.
* Articulating an Israeli narrative is crucial. However, it is important not to ignore the interplay of domestic and regional factors on Israeli decisionmaking. Visitors are often surprised by the dilemmas facing Israel, and the difficult decisions policymakers face. It is easier to arrive at the conclusion that Israel is both the problem and the heart of the solution from a distance; in this case, familiarity may be the best response to contempt.

The best result of a short visit to Israel is the realization that the issues are complex and detailed, and that there are more questions than answers. The pursuit of a decisive encounter, or of a decisive answer, is probably fruitless. It is more constructive to show that Israel is open and accessible, and that long-term engagement with the issues is the best way to sharpen understanding.

CONCLUSIONS

Israel faces a potentially existential challenge of a new kind. Its traditional national security doctrine, narrowly defined in military terms, is insufficient. Israel must work to defend not only its borders, but its legitimacy in international opinion. Yet, visits to Israel by elite opinion formers are not a silver bullet. They are undoubtedly expensive and time-intensive for the organizer. They require being able to call on a large network of contacts on the ground to ensure that each trip is appropriately calibrated for the audience. They require follow-up, so that the relationships endure and are meaningful. They are long-term, sometimes speculative investments against a problem that is acute and immediate. Evaluating success is difficult, with the influence of a visit sometimes taking time to internalize fully and almost always impossible to isolate and ascribe to a particular conversation or experience.

Still, the benefits are clear. Engaging with elite opinionmakers creates a space for a deeper and more informed discussion in the UK on issues related to Israel. In the current climate, this is invaluable, and perhaps irreplaceable. Networks of relationships allow Israel to engage with critical discourses while isolating and marginalizing those who pose a grave threat by challenging its very legitimacy. These networks also allow a wider range of people to engage in the discourse–with the British Jewish community playing a crucial role in making the case for Israel in the UK. A short visit to Israel is the best catalyst for these types of relationships and the best opportunity for bringing content to them.

*Jonathan Cummings is the Director of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) office in Israel. He is writing in a personal capacity.

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How the United States has Benefited from its Alliance with Israel

From Gloria-Centre.Org

HOW THE UNITED STATES HAS BENEFITED FROM ITS ALLIANCE WITH ISRAEL
By Gil Ehrenkranz *
This article reviews Israel’s value as an American ally since 1967. It highlights the actions taken by Israel on behalf of the United States, including accommodating U.S. national interests at the expense of Israeli interests. The article explores the myth of Holocaust guilt as the primary reason for Israel’s creation and contrasts the actions of other regional U.S. allies with those of Israel. The steadily declining tangible support for U.S. policies by American allies in the twenty-first century has served to magnify Israel’s importance to the United States.

Amidst a budding nuclear arms race in the Middle East, the Obama administration is seen by many as “resetting” the relationship between the United States and its long-time ally, Israel. This recalibration of the U.S.-Israel alliance is occurring while Israel is facing the first genuine threat to its existence since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The threat emanates from the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Iranian quest for nuclear arms production capability is nearly complete as most analysts estimate that Iran will have mastered the ability to produce nuclear weapons by 2013.

[1] Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated pronouncements of his hope that Israel will disappear are simply a more bellicose statement of the policy Iran has had towards Israel since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.[2] Yet with Iran on the verge of acquiring an ability to produce nuclear weapons, Israel can no longer afford to ignore Iranian intentions. This article will focus on the history of Israel as a partner in its alliance with the United States.

OCCASIONAL FRICTION IN U.S.-ISRAEL RELATIONS

Tensions in the relationship between the United States and Israel are nothing new. While Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president is remembered as being very pro-Israel, few remember that his first two years in office were filled with serious disagreements with Israel. In 1981, he embargoed the delivery of F-16 aircraft to Israel in response to Israel’s raid on the Osirak reactor in Iraq.[3] A year later, his administration unveiled a unilateral blueprint for Middle East peace without consulting Israel. When it was finally presented simultaneously to Israel and its Arab neighbors, Prime Minister Begin was livid at Reagan’s failure to consult with Israel. Reagan also suspended diplomatic agreements with Israel following the Israeli Knesset vote to extend Israeli law to the Golan Heights. The Reagan approach to Israel began to change, however, following the almost universal rejection of his peace plan among Arab states as well as Hizballah’s attack, which killed hundreds of U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1983. Thus, Reagan’s preconceived notions about the causes of Middle Eastern instability and the lack of peace did not survive his experience. To his credit, Reagan recognized this and was able to shift U.S. policy from confrontation with Israel to one of cooperation.

The Clinton administration went through a similar learning curve, albeit a much slower one. Between 1993 and 2001, no world leader was invited to the White House as often as Yasir Arafat.[4] Clinton and Secretary of State Albright clung to the belief that Arafat was interested in peaceful coexistence with Israel. This belief even survived Arafat’s continued refusal to rein in terrorist groups and his initiation of the Second Intifada. Unfortunately for Israel, Clinton did not recognize until late in 2000 that Arafat was an unreconstructed terrorist at heart.

President Obama has hinted that he would like to redefine the terms of the U.S. relationship with Israel. This is not mere speculation. While the Obama administration has reacted tepidly to serious policy challenges such as North Korean threats to use its atomic weapons and to the remarkable protests in Iran following a rigged election,[5] Obama has focused vigorously on forcing Israel to cease any construction in the West Bank, even going so far as to condemn Israel for announcing a new housing project in Jerusalem. The cessation demanded by the Obama administration has not even been balanced with any request whatsoever from the Palestinian side. Presumably, by exerting pressure solely on Israel, he hopes to encourage the Palestinians and Arab states to embrace peace with Israel. Thus far, the only effect of his policy change toward Israel has been to retard any progress toward peace, as the Palestinians and Arab states have hardened their positions. They hope that Obama can deliver Israel solely on Arab terms.

The indicia of the changing relationship with Israel can be found in Obama’s insistence on a complete halt to settlement construction and his Cairo speech to the Islamic world. Prior to the Cairo speech, even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never predicated the resumption of peace negotiations on a complete construction freeze and natural growth of existing settlements had imposed no impediment to engaging in discussions with Israel. Yet with Obama’s call for a complete settlement freeze without any corresponding gesture on the Palestinians’ part, Abbas has decided to “pocket” this Israeli concession prior to engaging in any meaningful discussions about peace. The effect of Obama’s insistence of a settlement freeze on the Palestinians has served only to make the resumption of negotiations more difficult. But he has accomplished something that no Israeli politician has been able to do since the early 1970s. Obama has united both the Israeli left and right wings in support of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s opposition to a construction halt. This unity has as much to do with Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo as with his demand for unilateral Israeli concessions prior to commencing negotiations.

OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH & THE MYTH OF HOLOCAUST GUILT

Obama’s Cairo speech returned American policy back to the Clinton administration approach of assuming moral equivalence between the parties. Thus, each statement seeming to castigate the Arab countries for terrorist acts was balanced by a criticism of Israel. The fact that Obama was equating the targeting and murder of more than a thousand Israeli civilians since 2000 with Israeli construction of settlements was jarring to Israelis. Yet this alone would not have been enough to unite the wide range of political parties in Israel. After all, moral equivalence was part of both the Carter and Clinton administrations’ mantra, and Israel had survived those. It was Obama’s complete acceptance of Palestinian propaganda concerning Israel’s creation that alarmed Israelis most. For more than half a century, the Palestinians sought to convince the world that Israel’s creation was an act of usurpation of Palestinian land and that Israel owed its existence solely to European guilt over the Holocaust. Given that Obama’s only statement concerning Israel’s creation was in connection with the Holocaust, the Palestinians may well count Obama as their most important convert. What Obama (and those who vetted his speech beforehand) failed to realize was that Israeli independence owed far more to the fact that Jews had successfully revolted against British colonial occupation than to presumed multinational guilt over the Holocaust. Even Winston Churchill understood this point and said, “It was the Irgun Zvai Leumi that caused the British evacuation from Palestine. Members of the Irgun caused us so much trouble that we had to station eighty thousand troops in the country to cope with the situation. The military costs were too high for our economy to bear, and the Irgun was responsible for driving the costs to such a high level.”[6] Had European guilt over the Holocaust been the deciding factor, Israel would have been created immediately after August 1945. Instead, it was more than two years before a final partition plan was approved that Israel came into being in 1948. Moreover, during Israel’s War of Independence (1948-1949), no country sent troops to help protect Israel from annihilation. For its part, the United States refused to sell any weapons to Israel.

The reality was that World War II delayed the creation of a Jewish State much as it had placed India’s drive for independence in a state of suspended animation. As soon as the war ended and no progress was made concerning Britain’s departure from Palestine, the Jews of Mandate Palestine began their revolt against British rule in earnest. It should be noted that whatever guilt Britain may have experienced in the post-war environment, such guilt did not even motivate it to lift the restrictions on the immigration of Holocaust survivors to Israel. In fact, soon after the war’s end in 1945, Britain rejected an appeal from President Truman to admit 100,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors into Palestine immediately.[7]

In 1946, when death camp survivors attempted to reoccupy their own homes in Kielce, Poland, more than 39 of them were slaughtered by local residents. Before the year’s end, more than 2,000 additional Jews were killed by Poles;[8] and for those Jews who had been prescient enough to open Swiss bank accounts in the 1930s, they found the Swiss banks uncooperative in releasing funds to account holders (or their heirs) after the war.[9] To the extent that any post-war European guilt existed at all, it is unclear that such guilt motivated many European countries to make amends to the Jewish people, including the 1947 vote to partition Palestine. Furthermore, what is often overlooked is that the 1947 UN vote was an attempt to create two separate countries only one of which was the State of Israel. Obama’s Cairo speech distortion of the historical record regarding Israel’s creation is what most disturbed Israelis. For if Obama’s and the Palestinians’ position is correct, then what follows logically is that Israel’s very creation was an act of aggression against the Palestinian Arabs and reflects a permanent moral stain for which Israel should now be forced to make amends. Furthermore, if Obama believes what he said in Cairo, how can he continue the American policy of allying itself with Israel? Israelis are wondering whether the current tensions with the Obama administration are a mere replay of past stresses with the United States or whether the alliance is in danger of fraying. It is the first time since President Eisenhower forced Israel to vacate the gains it had won in its 1956 war against Egypt that Israelis are facing the question of whether the United States will continue to be a friend. Exacerbating their unease is the steady progress in the Iranian nuclear program coupled with the inaction of the international community. While the question of whether the United States is preparing to lessen its support of Israel is pending, what of the role Israel has played as an ally over the years?

AIPAC’S OVERESTIMATED INFLUENCE ON U.S. POLICY

The existence of the informal alliance between Israel and the United States has sometimes been explained as being the result of domestic political pressure in the United States and the undue influence of The America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).[10] Yet as David Verbeeten notes in his 2006 article, “How Important Is the Israel Lobby?” the myth of the all-powerful Israel lobby is, “a useful illusion.”[11] For pro-Israel lobbyists, the specter of a powerful AIPAC represents a significant political resource while opponents of the Israel lobby use the myth of the invincible Israeli lobby to excuse U.S. support for Israel as merely the product of this all-powerful domestic lobby and not as the result of broad-based support within the United States for Israel. Within the Arab world, the latter explanation makes more palatable U.S. support for Israel. While AIPAC may be effective, it is hardly invincible. In fact, on some very high profile issues of concern to Israel, AIPAC has either suffered defeat or been proven ineffectual. For example, in 1981, AIPAC lobbied hard to prevent the planned sale of advanced AWACs to Saudi Arabia. The sale went through as planned. In fact, no major sale of arms to a country in a state of war with Israel has ever been defeated by the pro-Israel lobby. Indeed, AIPAC’s impotence on this issue has apparently resulted in a tactical change, as AIPAC appears to have given up the idea of opposing such sales altogether.

During the Bush administration, AIPAC lobbied for U.S. loan guarantees to house the hundreds of thousands of Jewish émigrés from Russia. George Bush opposed the loan guarantees and such guarantees were not granted until a more pliable Israeli prime minister (Yitzchak Rabin) was elected. AIPAC has been unable to convince either the Bush or Obama administrations to take forceful action to forestall Iranian nuclear ambitions or to permit the IAF to flyover Iraq for an attack on Iranian nuclear sites. The reality is that broad-based support for Israel among Americans has been rather constant over the past 40 years. In fact, a February 2008 Gallup Poll showed that 71 percent of those polled had either a very favorable or mostly favorable opinion of Israel. Israel outranked India, France, and Egypt in this survey. Only 14 percent of respondents characterized the Palestinian Authority with a very/mostly favorable rating.[12] Other commentators explain the foundation of the close Israeli-American relationship as based upon “shared values.” These values include a fundamental respect for human rights, an independent judicial system, a stable democratic form of government, and mutual admiration of the pioneering spirit manifest in both country’s histories. While these shared values played an important part in President Truman’s decision to recognize the State of Israel in 1948, they do not adequately explain how the United States came to regard Israel as a valuable ally or the depth of the alliance.

OVERVIEW OF ISRAEL’S RECORD AS AN ALLY

Israel began playing an important role for its allies (i.e., France and Britain) soon after the War of Independence. In 1956, Israel, France, and Britain undertook a joint invasion of Egypt. During an incipient revolution against Jordan’s King Hussein in 1958, Israel permitted Britain to airlift its troops from Cyprus over Israeli airspace in order to quell the disturbances in Jordan even though Jordan was then in a state of war with Israel.[13] This was not the last time that Israel would support the request of its ally with respect to aiding Jordan. Yet within 11 years, both Britain and France would abandon any semblance of an alliance with Israel. In the case of France, there were almost no lengths to which it would not go to distance itself from Israel. Not only did France refuse to deliver Mirage aircraft and missile boats already paid for by Israel, but it agreed to arm a significant number of Israel’s enemies including Egypt, Iraq, and Libya. In fact, the Osirak nuclear reactor Israel destroyed in Baghdad in 1981 was built primarily with French expertise.

Yet what of the record of Israel as a U.S. ally? During the 1940s and 1950s, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations did not regard Israel as a worthwhile ally. It wasn’t that Israel was deemed to be unreliable or even at cross-purposes with American foreign policy goals. Rather, it was that Israel was not deemed powerful enough to advance American interests in the region. Yet given the steady rapid growth of the Israeli population, economy, and armed forces, as well as Israeli diplomatic successes in the third world (particularly sub-Saharan Africa), Israel’s potential value to the United States grew. Any hope that the Cold War would subside with the death of Joseph Stalin faded with Nikita Khruschev’s increasingly bellicose pronouncements.

As many of the Arab states became client states of the Soviet Union, it was only natural that Israel and the United States would draw closer as their respective national interests began to coincide. For the United States, the budding alliance among Egypt, Syria, and the Soviet Union was troubling. Of particular concern was that the Soviet navy would finally be able to establish a base in a warm water port, long a goal of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, if the Soviet Union could establish a naval base in the Mediterranean Sea, NATO could no longer count on bottling-up the Black Sea fleet in the Dardanelles. While the atheist nature of Soviet Communism was anathema to the Arab world, it was clear that the Soviets were making steady progress with many Arab states. For Israel, the Soviet Union’s willingness to provide substantial quantities of tanks, aircraft, artillery, anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank guns, and ships, caused Israel to cast about for as many of its own allies as possible. However, until the Kennedy administration, no arms sales of any substance were ever authorized by the United States. Further, even the Kennedy administration authorized only the sale of HAWK anti-aircraft missiles to Israel, not any tanks, jet aircraft, or other equipment that could be used for military offensives. This reticence lasted well into the Johnson administration. For example, during the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel had no jets of American manufacture and only 200 American-made M-48 Patton tanks. Israeli Air Force (IAF) combat jets were comprised solely of French aircraft, and more than half of the tanks in Israel’s arsenal were supplied by Britain and France.[14]

After the Six-Day War, both Britain and France decided that an alliance with Israel, even an informal one, would not be in their best interests. They could afford to jettison Israel as an ally because they were resigned to let the sun set on their international influence and evolved from major powers into regional ones. Their waning power as major international actors continued through the 1990s until the present day.[15] Israel and the United States found themselves drawing ever closer to each other as each recognized the increasing value of a more intimate relationship. For Israel, a steady supplier of key weapons systems was of paramount concern and U.S. support in the UN had some value; for the United States, Israel represented a client state that could provide victories against client states of the U.S. nemesis, the Soviet Union. That was a commodity, which had been in short supply in the 1950s and 1960s with the Iron Curtain being drawn down on Europe, the Korean police action fought to a stalemate, the abortive uprising in Hungary (1956), Cuban Revolution (1959), Prague Spring (1968), and the long Vietnam conflict heading toward failure. Israel’s continuing economic and military growth–and especially the decisive Israeli victories over the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the Six-Day War[16]–transformed the view that Israel was teetering on the edge of being obliterated to that of a forceful regional power capable of defeating regional allies of the Soviet Union.

With no end of the Cold War in view, President Johnson authorized the first American sale of attack aircraft to Israel in 1966, the Skyhawk. The Skyhawk was a subsonic light bomber used primarily by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Following the Six-Day War, in 1968, President Johnson approved the sale of the much more versatile supersonic F-4 Phantom. By 1973, the combat jet inventory of the IAF had changed from 100 percent reliance on French aircraft to a mere 18 percent. The remainder of IAF combat aircraft was now American, with 150 Skyhawks and 140 Phantoms.[17] The rearming of the IAF was to pay dividends to the United States much faster than anyone had imagined when the aircraft sales were first authorized.

In September 1970, the Syrian army invaded Jordan for the purpose of supporting the Palestinian insurrection, which began earlier that month. At first, the United States was unsure about the extent of the invasion. Was it merely a border raid or something more? Yet after a phone call to the U.S. Ambassador from King Hussein confirming that the city of Irbid had fallen to the Syrians and his observation that, “air strikes were imperative to save his country,“ the United States decided to act to preserve Jordanian independence. The United States did not want to stand by idly while yet another pro-Western nation fell into the orbit of the Soviet Union. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger asked Israel to fly reconnaissance over the battle area and report back the extent of the incursion. Reconnaissance confirmed that the Syrians had invaded in force. At that point, President Nixon made the decision that if conditions deteriorated further, he would request that Israel intervene with air strikes against Syrian forces in Jordan and be prepared to attack Syrian forces with ground troops.

Israel responded by immediately sending two brigades onto the Golan Heights threatening Syria’s flank in Jordan. Israel also began a limited mobilization of its reserve units in preparation for action in Jordan. The combination of the threat of Israeli intervention and successful Jordanian airstrikes against Syrian forces near Irbid helped convince Syria that it was advisable to withdraw its invasion forces.

This episode is striking for several reasons. First, at American request, Israel was prepared to expend its blood and treasure to support a country with which it had been at war just three years prior. Second, unlike the threat to Jordan 12 years earlier, the United States did not turn to Britain for help in saving the Jordanian regime but instead reached out to Israel. Last, the approach of some of America’s other “allies” during this crisis is instructive. French President Pompidou sent a message to President Nixon expressing his “great concern” about possible American intervention and urged Nixon to weigh his decisions with care. Henry Kissinger noted that, “The message was not especially helpful, nor did we fail to notice France’s attempt to dissociate from us in the midst of a crisis.”[18] Israeli willingness to intervene had preserved the balance of power in the region. Future and more dramatic Israeli actions would have the same effect.

Nine months prior to the Jordanian crisis, the Soviet Union had provided Egypt with an advanced radar station. Such an advanced radar had never been deployed outside of the Warsaw Pact. Egypt immediately installed the radar near the Suez Canal. The extent of this radar’s capabilities was unknown to the West and to Israel. In late 1969, Israel decided that it was imperative to learn the full capabilities of this radar. Therefore, Israel decided to embark on a mission never before attempted. It planned to land commandos near the unit and airlift the entire radar back to Israel for study rather than merely destroy it. The raid was successful and within two weeks after being brought to Israel, the radar unit was shipped to the United States for further evaluation.[19] At the time, this was an enormous intelligence coup for the United States as its aircraft had proven vulnerable to Soviet supplied radars over Vietnam. In addition, it is likely that possession and testing of this intact advanced radar aided the United States in developing stealth technology used in designing the first U.S. stealth aircraft in the 1970s.

Toward the end of the 1973 war, Israel was able to capture intact SAM 6 missile batteries and associated radar from the Egyptians. Israel shipped these items to the United States. As United States Air Force (USAF) losses to SAMS during the Vietnam Conflict were heavy, the United States welcomed its first opportunity to examine a fully operational SAM 6 battery. It is likely that data gleaned from testing the SAM 6 further aided U.S. development of stealth technology. It also permitted the United States to discover weaknesses in the SAM 6 that would enable the USAF to exploit the weaknesses by combat jets then in the U.S. arsenal well before stealth aircraft could be deployed. The IDF also captured other Russian-supplied equipment such as the T-55 and T-62 main battle tanks. Sharing these tanks with the United States permitted the United States to discover weaknesses that would be kept in mind as the United States was developing a new main battle tank of its own, the M-1 Abrams. Israel gave these captured weapons systems to the United States even though it was the United States that had coerced Israel into stopping short of achieving a clear-cut victory in its war with Egypt.[20]

In 1979, with the fall of pro-Western Iran to Islamist radicals, the United States found itself even more reliant on its remaining allies in the region. Beginning with Ronald Reagan and continuing through the George Bush Republican administrations, Israel and the United States entered into important formal agreements. In 1981, the two countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) establishing a framework for consultation and cooperation on issues of national security. This was followed in 1983 with the formation of a Joint Political Military Group, which meets twice a year to implement the provisions of the MOU. The United States and Israel began joint military exercises in 1984 and the U.S. navy has paid periodic visits to the port of Haifa since 1978. In 1988, Israel was designated as a major non-NATO ally of the United States. The United States stockpiled $200 million of weapons in Israeli depots for American use in a crisis; and all of this occurred during 12 consecutive years of Republican presidents. Ronald Reagan and George Bush were keenly aware that Jewish-American voters voted overwhelmingly for their Democratic opponents in each election and if they were inclined to forget that fact, none other than James Baker was present to provide a not-so-gentle reminder. Yet they acted to cement Israel as a key ally though they knew that they would reap no personal benefit at the polls.

ACCOMMODATING THE UNITED STATES AT THE EXPENSE OF ISRAEL’S NATIONAL INTEREST

Which American allies would honor a request to refrain from retaliation as its cities were bombed repeatedly or agree to give the United States veto power over its armament sales or stop short of decisively defeating its enemy during wartime at U.S. insistence? Israel is the only country that fits this description. In fact, Israel may be the sole U.S. ally that has repeatedly put the interests of the United States above its own national interests.

During the First Gulf War, President Bush went to great lengths to convince Israel not to retaliate for missile attacks against its cities. Bush feared that the fragile (and temporary) coalition he had assembled would disintegrate if Israel (a non-combatant in the First Gulf War), retaliated. While it is difficult to understand why anyone feared Saudi Arabia would leave a coalition designed to safeguard its existence simply because Israel bombed Baghdad, that was the thinking in the Bush administration at the time. The First Gulf War was a prime example of how Israel bent its own national interest to accommodate the United States. In fact, the decision not to retaliate in any way has cost Israel a great deal. Between 1949-1991, it was axiomatic that any attacks on Israeli cities would invite a massive retaliatory response from the IAF. Even during the period of the 1973 war when Egypt and Syria were winning, they each refrained from launching their arsenal of ballistic missiles against Israeli cities. When the war turned against them, with one or two exceptions, they still did not launch their missiles. The threat of massive retaliation by the IAF in response to attacks on Israeli cities was a well-known “redline” that the combatants wouldn’t cross even during wartime. Saddam Hussein crossed that redline in a desperate hope that the coalition would disintegrate once Israel retaliated. For him, it was a win-win scenario. Either his gambit broke the coalition or Israel refrained from retaliating and he became the hero to the entire Arab world. After much hand-wringing, Israel did not retaliate, the coalition remained intact, and Kuwait was liberated but Saddam Hussein’s regime remained in power and became a major irritant to the United States for the better part of the next 11 years. For Israel, the consequences of honoring the request of the Bush administration reverberate to the present. Later administrations would request Israeli forbearance relating to other redlines. For example, both the Bush and Obama administrations have pressured Israel to refrain from attacking Iranian nuclear installations and have even refused overflight permission by the IAF over Iraq.

In Israel’s case, by not attacking Iraq forcefully in retaliation for the 39 Scud missiles launched against Israeli cities, groups such as Hizballah and Hamas stocked their armories with thousands of rockets, mortar rounds, and missiles, and eventually launched them against Israeli towns and cities. Moreover, looming ominously is the growing ballistic missile arsenal Iran is building. When Israel acceded to America’s request to refrain from retaliating, it sacrificed its own important national security interests for the sake of an ally. There are not many U.S. allies that would have done this for the United States

Even today, the United States cannot even convince France (with a population of 64,000,000) to take in more than a single Guantanamo Bay prisoner off its hands, even though France has been agitating for the United States to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for six years.[21] On occasion, the United States’ own NATO allies have refused overflight permission for U.S. transport aircraft. For its part, New Zealand won’t permit any U.S. warships to dock in their ports unless the ships announce that they are not carrying any nuclear warheads.

It is hard to imagine any other allies permitting their cities to be attacked over several weeks by ballistic missiles simply to accommodate the United States. Since 2002, the NATO members committed to spend a minimum of two percent of their gross national product on defense expenditures to support the alliance. As of 2009, only Turkey and the United States are satisfying that commitment. And presumably, a stronger NATO would directly benefit its European members and even under those circumstances, they continue to arrange matters so that the United States bears the lion’s burden of European defense. The United States is having trouble convincing the NATO members to spend enough to defend themselves on their own continent. In other words, U.S. allies can’t even be counted on to defend themselves. Other than Britain, Poland, and perhaps a handful of other nations, how can the United States count on any of its allies to expend blood or treasure on its behalf as the United States pursues its own national interests?

During the Iraq War, other than Britain and Italy, precious few of America’s traditional allies have aided the United States. Israel, however, has provided significant support to the United States. U.S. units have undergone anti-insurgency warfare training within Israel. Israeli intelligence operatives have also assisted U.S. intelligence services within Iraq (especially in the areas controlled by the Kurds). In addition, at one point, the United States requested that shipments of armor plated Humvees that had been ordered, paid for, and were ready for shipment to Israel, be diverted to U.S. forces in Iraq.[22] Israel acquiesced to this request notwithstanding that this decision put their own troops in harm’s way in operations in the Gaza Strip. Unmanned aerial vehicles manufactured by Israel have also been sold to the United States and have been used in Iraq by U.S. ground forces.

As with most international relations, the U.S. relationship with Israel has had some low points. What is interesting to note is that these low points never resulted in a complete rupture and in some cases, the relationship has been strengthened. For example, the Reagan administration was upset enough with Israel’s raid on Iraq’s nuclear reactor that it suspended delivery of F-16 jets schedule for delivery to Israel. Ultimately, the embargo was lifted and the jets were delivered. Just ten years later, after the First Gulf War, Dick Cheney remarked that Israel had done a great favor to the United States in destroying the reactor. In the mid-1980s, Israel announced that is was developing its own jet fighter, the Lavi. Israel produced a prototype but under pressure from the United States, Israel refrained from entering the Lavi into production. In exchange, the United States agreed to sell Israel additional F-16 aircraft. In 2000, Israel entered into a sale agreement with China for sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, and reconnaissance aircraft (the “Phalcon”). After strenuous objections from the United States, Israel breached its sales agreement with China, at least with respect to the Phalcon sale and with regard to technical upgrades for equipment already delivered. Yet as in the past, in 2005, Israel accommodated U.S. concerns by entering into an understanding which gave the United States a virtual veto power over Israeli sales of advanced military hardware.[23] No other U.S. ally has consented to a restriction of this type.

While the Pentagon views sales of advanced military equipment to China as posting a direct threat to U.S. interests, as noted below, the United States routinely sells advanced military hardware to countries in a state of war with Israel. While many have accused Israel of being “tone-deaf” in its attempt to sell arms to a country with which the United States may someday find itself in a state of war, the fact is that the United States has not fought the Chinese army for more than two-thirds of a century. Given the U.S. willingness to sell arms to countries with which Israel is currently in a state of war, Israelis logically assumed that its own arms sales to China would not raise the outcry it did. However, when faced with these objections, Israel accommodated the United States in a manner in which no other U.S. ally has.

In addition, arms sales constitute a significant source of revenue to Israel. Israel accounts for ten percent of the world’s defense exports and in 2004–such sales amounted to $3.5 billion.[24] Contrast Israeli flexibility on this issue to the activities of the United States. Israel has objected repeatedly to U.S. arms sales to countries with which Israel is in a state of war. Yet there isn’t a single instance in which the United States has cancelled a sale to Saudi Arabia or any other Gulf State, and the weapons systems have included advanced F-16 aircraft, M-1 Abrams tanks, and sophisticated AWACS aircraft.

THE U.S.- ISRAEL ALLIANCE AND U.S.-ARAB RELATIONS

Critics of the U.S. alliance with Israel cite the damage this has caused in U.S. relations with the Arab world. While there can be no doubt that the Arab world would prefer American-Israeli relations to be more distant, in writing about this “irritant” in U.S.-Arab relations, Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution observed:

Overall, American support for Israel has been something more than an irritant in U.S. relations with the Arab world but something considerably less than a strategic dilemma. It has not precluded strong relationships with key Arab states. It has not prevented the United States from becoming the dominant power in the region. It has zero impact on America’s oil imports. It has had a very modest impact on the profits of American oil companies. It has created a number of complications for issues like basing, but it is only one of several complicating factors there and the problems have typically been tactical, not strategic, in their nature and impact. The price that the United States pays in diplomatic frustration and even the occasional lost opportunity, thought sometimes considerable to the individuals who have to endure it, is negligible from the perspective of our nation’s economic and strategic interests.[25]

It is fair to say that the value the United States has received from its close relationship with Israel far outweighs the negligible negative effect on U.S. economic and strategic interests in the region.

As a superpower, the United States has an interest in maintaining a reasonable balance of power in regions in which it has important interests. Israel, on its own and without U.S. assistance, has done much to preserve the balance of power in the region. Two prime examples were the 1981 Israeli raid on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor and the 2007 raid on Syria’s nuclear reactor. Although the former action was initially opposed by the Reagan administration, in time, its value was appreciated and many U.S. officials doubt that the United States would have reversed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had Iraq been a nuclear power. With regard to the raid on the Syrian reactor, not only did the United States refrain from criticizing the raid but no Arab country criticized it either. The next major challenge to the balance of power relates to Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. It has become clear that the United States will take no military action whatsoever to prevent Iran from going nuclear. It remains to be seen whether Israel will, once again, take dramatic action to preserve the current balance of power. The stakes are far higher for the region this time because if Shi’i Iran becomes a nuclear power, the regional Sunni Arab countries will seek nuclear weapons and a nuclear arms race in that part of the world will likely not end well.

UTILITARIAN VALUE OF U.S.-ISRAEL ALLIANCE COMPARED WITH OTHER U.S. ALLIES

When one compares what the United States has received as a result of its informal alliance with Israel and contrasts the costs to the United States of its other alliances, one can only come to the conclusion that the United States has found itself a bargain. The Obama administration recently requested more than $96 billion to assist Iraqi and Afghanistan allies in their counterinsurgency efforts assisted by U.S. forces.[26] U.S. troops are deployed in Europe to protect its allies there, and the U.S. navy patrols the Pacific Ocean to protect Japan and Taiwan.

By contrast, Israel has repeatedly announced that it wants no U.S. troops to fight for Israel. Israel simply requests the tools to defend itself. When compared with enormous outlays for most of the United States’ other allies, the $2.7 billion per year in military assistance given to Israel seems cheap. Moreover, unlike some of the other U.S. allies, Israel does not harbor sworn enemies of the United States such as nuclear proliferator A. Q. Kahn or Osama bin Laden (as Pakistan does). Osama bin Laden has been resident in Pakistan for several years now, but it does not appear that the Pakistanis are even attempting to look for him (as Hillary Clinton noted publicly in 2009). Furthermore, the Taliban have operated without significant interference within Pakistan.[27] Whether the new $7.5 billion aid package for Pakistan alters Pakistani policy remains to be seen.

Israel does not fund Madrasas across the globe teaching contempt for non-Islamic peoples as Saudi Arabia does. In 2003, Turkey refused permission for U.S. troops to pass through Turkey on the eve of the U.S. attack on Iraq. In terms of voting with the United States in the UN General Assembly votes, whereas Israel votes with the United States more than 87 percent of the time, the United States is supported by Turkey 33 percent of the time, Pakistan is at 19 percent, and Egypt is at 7 percent;[28] and yet the United States continues to count these countries as allies and sell them advanced arms without any preconditions.

Israel’s importance as an American ally is often underestimated. In part, this due to Israel’s continuing inability to articulate effectively its case in the press. This is understandable to a certain degree given the fact that public support of Israel in the United States has always tended to be high and so Israel could take U.S. support for granted. Most U.S. administrations tend to be pro-Israel in any case. Thus, the necessity for a vigorous public relations campaign has never been a necessity. Yet with Barack Obama’s election, Israelis are beginning to realize that the White House’s support can no longer be taken for granted. What is different about the Obama administration is that he has no personal affinity for Israel and has already made demands of Israel that exceeded those of the Palestinian Authority (i.e., demanding a complete settlement freeze as a precondition to renewing peace talks). It is just now beginning to dawn on Israel that it is facing an administration that may well be unsympathetic to Israel’s national interests.[29] As a result, the Netanyahu government unveiled a plan to explain more aggressively its positions to foreign audiences, as it suspects that it may not now have an ally in the U.S. president.

While there is little doubt that Israel has benefitted greatly from its alliance with the United States, the United States too has benefitted greatly from its alliance with Israel. In fact, although the relative benefit it has received has been magnified over time by the ever increasing reticence of most of the other U.S. allies to assist in any meaningful way, the fact is that Israel was and remains an important ally of the United States. Yet whether the Obama administration views the alliance this way is now open to question. In fact, the administration almost seems eager to find and to magnify policy differences with Israel as witnessed by the recent controversy over the announcement of a housing project in East Jerusalem. In addition, how the Obama administration would react to an Israeli strike against some of Iran’s nuclear installations in unknown. Given the administration’s record to date, it is possible that in opposing an Israeli strike, that–like De Gaulle before him–Obama may use Israeli actions of self defense as a pretext to sever the alliance. This possibility has to be taken into account by Israel in its decision whether or not to strike Iran.

*Gil Ehrenkranz is a lawyer in the District of Columbia specializing in telecommunications law and international transactions. He has been published in Midstream Magazine, including an article concerning Israeli military options regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

NOTES

[1] “U.S. Juggles Two Iran Timetables,” The Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2009, p. A2.

[2] “Iranian’s Oratoroy Reflects Devotion to ’79 Revolution,” The New York Times, December 20, 2005, p. A3.

[3] “Israel Hits New U.S. Plane Suspension,” The Boston Globe, August 12, 1981, p. 1.

[4] “Bush to Meet with Sharon, Keeping Arafat at Arm’s Length,” The New York Times, June 20, 2001, p. A3.

[5] “Obama Warns Against Direct Involvement by the U.S. in Iran,” The New York Times, June 16, 2009.

[6] Ben Hecht, Perfidy (New York: Messner, 1961), p. 40.

[7] Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 12.

[8] “50 Years After Pogrom, City Shrinks at Memory,” The New York Times, July 6, 1996.

[9] “Saving History from the Shredder: Swiss Bank Guard Christoph Meili, No Hero at Home, Now Lives in California,” The Nation, September 6, 1999.

[10] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007).

[11] “How Important Is the Israel Lobby?,” Middle East Quarterly (Fall 2006).

[12] Lydia Saad, “Americans’ Most and Least Favored Nations,” Gallup.com, March 3, 2008.

[13] Douglas Little, American Orientalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 93.

[14] A.J. Barker, Six Day War (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 37.

[15] In the 1990s, Britain and France would not even undertake joint military action on their own continent against Slobodan Milosevic over Kosovo without relying on the United States to do most of the heavy lifting. Both countries have also refused President Obama’s requests for troop increases in Afghanistan. Worthy of note is that neither Britain nor France has significant troop commitments outside of their borders at the moment.

[16] Besides losing the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula to Israel, the ratio of Arab soldiers to Israeli soldiers killed in action was 5:1, the ratio of combat aircraft lost was 11:1, and the ratio of tanks lost was 2.5:1 according to T.N. Dupuy, Elusive Victory (New York: Hero Books, 1984), p. 333.

[17] Ibid, p. 606.

[18] Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1979), p. 627.

[19] Author’s 2007 conversation with the helicopter pilot who airlifted the radar unit across the Suez Canal.

[20] Although U.S. pressure was the main reason the IDF failed to achieve another decisive victory, Israel likely provided important weapons systems to the United States in recognition of the value of the U.S. airlift during the war.

[21] “Europe Seen Willing to Taking Detainees; Holder ‘Pleasantly Surprised’ by Allies’,” The Washington Post, April 30, 2009, p. A12.

[22] “Armored Hummers Shipment to Iraq Instead of Israel,” The Jerusalem Post, April 14, 2004.

[23] Congressional Research Service, Israel: Background and Relations with the United States, May 18, 2006.

[24] Ibid, p. 12.

[25] Kenneth M. Pollack, A Path Out of the Desert, (New York: Random House, 2008), p. 48.

[26] “House Passes War Funds as 51 Democrats Dissent,” The Washington Post, May 15, 2009, p. A3.

[27] “U.S. Says Taliban Has a New Haven in Pakistan,” The Washington Post, September 29, 2009, p. A11.

[28] U.S. State Department, Voting Practices in the United Nations, 2008.

[29] “Obama Speech Signals a U.S. Shift on Middle East,” The New York Times, April 14, 2010.

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Abu Dhabi’s Nuclear Power Plant Folly

From Gloria-Centre.Org

ABU DHABI’S NUCLEAR POWER PLANT FOLLY
By Elie Elhadj *
In December 2009, Abu Dhabi awarded South Korean companies a four-reactor BOT contract to generate 5,600 MW of electricity. In two contradictions, the emirate announced in February 2008 the plan to build Masdar City, a zero carbon, zero waste, and 100 percent renewable energy powered town; and in July 2009, it became the secretariat headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). This article argues that Abu Dhabi’s non-representative, non-participatory governance enables a poorly informed ruling elite enjoying rentier economic circumstances to reach such decisions. It concludes that the Masdar spirit and IRENA’s principles require Abu Dhabi to abandon nuclear energy for safe solar and wind power.

THE NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

On December 28, 2009, Abu Dhabi awarded a contract [1] to build, operate, and transfer a 5,600 MW nuclear power plant composed of four reactors of 1,400 megawatt (MW) each to a consortium of South Korean firms.[2] The firms are led by Korea Electric Power Corporation and include Hyundai Engineering and Construction as well as Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction Company. The project is to be completed in three phases between 2017 and 2020. Its estimated cost is reported between $20 and $40 billion.

In contradiction, Abu Dhabi has been simultaneously involved in two projects that are the antithesis of nuclear energy in terms of safety, environmental protection, and the promotion of renewable energy alternatives. The first is construction of the futuristic Masdar project. The second is becoming the secretariat headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). In what follows is a description of the two projects.

CONTRADICTION I: THE MASDAR PROJECT

In February 2008, Abu Dhabi announced a futuristic environmentally friendly project called “Masdar,”[3] the Arabic word for “source.” Costing $22 billion, the Masdar project includes the construction of a six square kilometer zero carbon, zero waste, and a 100 percent renewable energy-powered city, called Masdar City, for about 50,000 residents specializing in the research and application of renewable energy and sustainable technologies. The electricity for Masdar City will be generated by solar power. Drinking water will be provided through a solar-powered desalination plant. Landscaping and agriculture will be irrigated with treated wastewater.[4] A part of the Masdar project involves the making of hydrogen power commercially viable. To that end, Masdar is developing in Abu Dhabi a 500 MW hydrogen-fired power plant.[5]

CONTRADICTION II: HOSTING IRENA’S SECRETARIAT HEADQUARTERS

Abu Dhabi’s decision to build the Masdar project may have been driven by its eagerness to become the first city in the Middle East to host the headquarters of an international organization. The Masdar project was announced in February 2008, just a few months prior to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) establishment in January 2009. A well-orchestrated campaign by Abu Dhabi offered IRENA a package worth $136 million, including a $22 million headquarters building in Masdar City that would be “energy positive” with a solar photovoltaic (PV) roof, rent free for life, plus $3 million annually for facility operations, a $50 million fund for renewable energy projects in developing countries, scholarships, and a host of other features.[6] In July 2009, Abu Dhabi won the vote to host the agency’s secretariat headquarters, while Bonn, Germany, was named the site of an IRENA Center for Science and Technology, and Vienna, Austria, became the site of an IRENA liaison office for cooperation with other organizations active in the field of renewable energy.

In December 2009, five months after becoming IRENA’s secretariat headquarter city, Abu Dhabi announced its four-reactor nuclear power plant. The emirate’s decision to build not one, two, or three, but a four-reactor power plant was the antithesis of the Masdar project’s ideals and a betrayal of IRENA’s principles, as appears in its mission statement: “To promote the widespread and increased adoption and sustainable use of all forms of renewable energy. IRENA’s Member States pledge to advance renewables in their own national policies and programs, and to promote, both domestically and through international cooperation, the transition to a sustainable and secure energy supply.”[7]

IGNORING WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT

The lessons from the disasters at Three Mile Island[8] in the United States in 1979 and at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986,[9] the scores of radiation incidents since the 1940s,[10] and the challenge of safe disposal of spent reactor fuel all seem to have been overlooked in the decision to develop nuclear energy.[11]

The decision to build a four-reactor plant is particularly disconcerting because it is oblivious to the fact that environmentally friendly and safe technologies for harnessing the sun, wind, and other renewable energy sources to generate electricity on a commercial scale are already available. A report by the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21) demonstrates that in 2008 global power capacity from new renewable energy sources (excluding large hydro) reached 280,000 MW, a 16 percent rise from 2007.[12] This represents nearly three times the capacity of the United States nuclear sector. Further, the report states that for the first time, more renewable energy than conventional power capacity was added in 2008 in both the European Union (EU) and United States.

Below is a brief review of the two nuclear disasters at Three Mile Island in the United States and at Chernobyl in the Ukraine. This will be followed by a discussion on why alternative energy resources to nuclear electricity generation should be pursued. Last, the motives for Abu Dhabi’s contradictory decisions regarding Masdar City and its nuclear energy project are explored.

The Three Mile Island Accident

On March 28, 1979, a partial reactor core meltdown at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania severely damaged a brand new reactor–online for only three months.[13] The experts, who had argued that an accident like this could not happen, initially described it as a “minor malfunction.” Within days, 140,000 people had left the area. Radiation releases from the accident were contained, so that no perceptible effect on cancer incidence was observed, though one team of researchers contested these findings.

Cleanup of the accident took 14 years (from August 1979 to December 1993) and cost around $975 million. Initially, efforts focused on the cleanup and decontamination of the site. Starting in 1985, radioactive fuel was removed. The defueling process was completed in 1990. The damaged fuel was removed and disposed of in 1993. The contaminated cooling water that leaked into the containment building had seeped into the building’s concrete, leaving the radioactive residue impossible to remove. The accident dented the popularity of nuclear energy–from 1980 to 1984, 51 American nuclear reactors were cancelled.

The Chernobyl Disaster

On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine had a fatal meltdown.[14] A plume was released into the atmosphere containing four hundred times more radioactive fallout than had been by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Rain contaminated with radioactive material fell as far away as Ireland. 600,000 people were exposed to high levels of radiation. Over 336,000 people were evacuated and resettled. Farming and other types of agricultural industry would be dangerous for at least 200 years in a large area, and it would be at least 20,000 years before the site of the meltdown were safe.

While Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have been the most serious nuclear accidents thus far, scores of less serious nuclear and radiation accidents have afflicted this industry since the 1940s.[15]

THE CASE FOR ABANDONING NUCLEAR POWER GENERATION

The development in recent years of safe and environmentally friendly renewable resources of energy to generate electricity from the sun and wind, among other means, has raised the standards of safety and environmental protection for the nuclear power industry. Given the catastrophic consequences on the lives and well-being of millions of people in the event of a major reactor accident, nuclear power plants must be 100 percent safe, not only 99.99 percent safe.

There cannot be disagreement among proponents and opponents of nuclear energy regarding the catastrophic loss to life and property resulting from a major reactor accident. The disagreement between the two camps, however, surrounds the probability that such an accident might materialize. Evaluating such probability is a subjective matter.

The nuclear power industry claims that reactor design since the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents has improved and that nuclear energy is now safe and environmentally friendly. The industry’s lobbyists are working to convince world leaders that nuclear energy should be part of the solution to the world’s future energy needs.

Yet opponents of nuclear energy contend that such claims ignore the carbon footprint created by the processes that turn uranium ore to nuclear fuel. Such claims also ignore the millennia-long damage to the environment resulting from the toxic waste left by the operations of nuclear reactors. Opponents of nuclear power plants believe that all things mechanical are likely to break down at some point due to design defect or human error. They believe that regardless of how infinitesimal the probability might be of a major reactor accident materializing, discounting the monumental losses that would result from such an accident by the infinitesimally tiny probability of the accident occurring would still leave a prohibitively high potential loss to accept.

In the case of a major nuclear accident, the UAE and its neighbors would suffer horribly. They do not possess–indeed, no country possesses–enough hospitals, surgeons, or scientists to cope with a sudden and unexpected flood of tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of casualties. Further, in Abu Dhabi’s case, there is the added danger of radioactivity contaminating regional seawaters and disabling the desalination plants that provide millions of people with clean drinking and household water. This issue will be discussed next, followed by the challenge of dealing with nuclear waste.

Radioactive Accidents Might Disable Desalination Plants

The possibility must not be ruled out that a major radiation leak might force the closure of some–possibly all–of the desalination plants that dot the shores of the eastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula. These plants supply drinking and household water to the entire populations of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and the cities and towns of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia such as Dammam and al-Khobar, as well as the cities and towns of the Qasim region and the capital, Riyadh. If such an accident were ever to occur, the scale of the resulting human calamity would be unimaginable. Twenty-five million people could be affected. They use some 2.5 billion cubic meters per annum of desalinated water, or seven million cubic meters per day for drinking and household purposes. To put such a daily volume in perspective, it is equivalent to the combined cargos of 14 super-tankers of 500,000 tons each. No emergency preparedness could deliver even a quarter of such a massive volume of clean water on a daily basis for extended periods of time. Indeed, not only would the existing water supplies be radioactive, but the rescue tanker deliveries would become contaminated once they reached the affected areas. Evacuation of millions of people might become necessary, a nightmare of epic proportions in an area bordered by the forbidding Empty Quarter Desert and the sea. As to where these millions might go, that is a whole different challenge to deal with.

The Challenge of Nuclear Waste

Even if all four reactors were to operate without any problem, there would still be the grim task of safely disposing of toxic waste. Reactor waste is radioactive and must be isolated from the biosphere until the radioactivity has diminished to a safe level. Special physical, chemical, and thermal characteristics must be met before a burial site is deemed suitable for the decaying radioactive waste, which may require even a million years until it becomes safe.[16]

Meanwhile, during the long sweep of the millennia, an earthquake, a volcano, or some other natural disaster might force the decaying waste to the Earth’s surface. Disturbing nuclear waste accidents have already occurred. For example, in the former Soviet Union, waste stored in Lake Karachay was blown over the area in the spring of 1968 as the lake began to dry up, and the wind carried away a substantial volume of radioactive dust, irradiating half a million people.[17] At Maxey Flat, a low-level radioactive waste facility located in Kentucky, containment trenches collapsed under heavy rainfall and became radioactive.[18] In France, at the Areva plant in Tricastin, liquid containing untreated uranium overflowed out of a faulty tank and about 75 kg of the radioactive material seeped into the ground and, from there, into two nearby rivers.[19]

Safe and environmentally friendly solar and wind power are available on a commercial scale and should replace the potentially disastrous 5,600 MW of Abu Dhabi’s four reactors. Even if the cost of nuclear electricity is a fraction of the cost of alternative technologies, it is a matter of safety and environmental protection, not economics or finance.

Further, it is doubtful whether nuclear energy is truly cost effective when taking into account the costs beyond the construction and operation of the nuclear power plant. First, there is the cost of decommissioning the reactor at the end of its useful life as well as the costs of disposal of the toxic nuclear waste. Decommissioning costs are enormous. The cleanup costs of decommissioning in the United Kingdom, for example, stood at $110 billion in 2008. In the United States, even if no new reactors are built, getting rid of the country’s nuclear waste will cost $96.2 billion, according to the Department of Energy.[20] Second, there is the capital investment and maintenance of the emergency preparedness assets required to deal with the tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of casualties from a sudden major reactor accident. Last and above all, the loss of life and property damage alone should dissuade decisionmakers from pursuing the nuclear option altogether.

THE CASE FOR SOLAR AND WIND POWER

A number of alternative renewable power resources to generate electricity are available today on a commercial scale; such as, geothermal, sea waves, solar, and wind, among others. Following is a brief description of two renewable resources: solar power and wind power, both resources in great abundance in the Middle East in general, and the Arabian Peninsula and the UAE in particular.

Solar Power

Solar power is the generation of electricity from sunlight. The solar power industry is growing rapidly with almost 14,000 MW to be added globally through 2014.[21] Using a technology known as Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) built the world’s largest commercially successful solar power generating network in California’s Mojave Desert. SEGS is composed of nine plants built between 1984 and 1990 covering more than 900,000 mirrors over 1,500 acres. It generates 310 MW, sufficient to meet the electricity demand of more than 230,000 homes at peak production during the day.[22] CSP relies on mirrors or lenses to heat water to drive steam generators.

In 2008, photovoltaic (PV) technology was introduced on a commercial scale. Photovoltaics is the direct conversion of light into electricity. Some materials exhibit a property that causes them to absorb photons of light and release electrons. When these free electrons are captured, this creates an electric.[23] PV cells are constructed of two thin layers of semi-conducting materials (usually silicon) that have been treated chemically. When sunlight hits the PV cells, it creates an electric field across the two layers.

As of October 2009, the largest PV power plant was the Olmedilla Photovoltaic Park in Spain, a 60 MW facility (meeting the electricity needs of more than 40,000 homes).[24] Larger PV power plants are currently under construction. These include the 550 MW Topaz Solar Farm in California, expected to begin power delivery in 2011 and be fully operational by 2013[25] as well as the 600 MW Ranch Cielo Solar Farm in New Mexico expected to open in 2010 and estimated at $840 million.[26] To put 600 MW-capacity in perspective, two of the Rancho Cielo safe and environmentally friendly plants could produce 86 percent of the capacity of one 1,400 MW of Abu Dhabi’s potentially dangerous four nuclear reactors.

While cost is not the focus here, it is compelling, to note that the capacity of Abu Dhabi’s 5,600 MW nuclear power plant could possibly be produced using solar power plants of the Rancho Cielo type for around $8 billion, as compared to between $20 and $40 billion (see above). On the individual dwelling level, solar heated water in Germany marked record growth in 2008, with over 200,000 systems installed.[27]

Wind Power

Wind power is the conversion of wind energy using wind turbines to make electricity. A 2005 study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research found that wind power could satisfy up to seven times the world’s electricity needs.[28] World wind generation capacity has been growing rapidly in recent years. Existing wind power capacity grew by 29 percent in 2008 to reach 121 GW, or more than double the 59 GW of capacity in place at the end of 2005.[29] Wind power accounted for 42 percent of new capacity additions in the United States and for 36 percent of new installations in Europe. As of May 2009, 80 countries around the world were using wind power on a commercial basis.[30]

The EU climate and energy strategy released on January 23, 2008, commits the community as a whole to source 20 per cent of its total energy demand from renewable sources by 2020.[31] In the United Kingdom, over 40,000 MW of offshore wind projects are at various stages of development. When completed, by around 2020, a third of the UK’s electricity will be generated by wind power.[32] Such capacity is equivalent to more than seven times the capacity of Abu Dhabi’s four nuclear driven generators, which will go on line about the same time in 2020.

In 2008, China installed approximately 6,300 megawatts, doubling the nation’s cumulative wind capacity for the fourth year in a row. The Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association projects wind capacity to reach 50,000 MW by 2015.[33]

ABU DHABI’S DECISION TO SEEK NUCLEAR POWER GENERATION

Abu Dhabi’s decision to purchase a huge nuclear power plant at a time when safe alternatives are readily available is inexplicable. How and what kind of decisionmaking processes would produce such potentially disastrous decisions? In response to this question, Abu Dhabi’s style of national governance should be considered.

Abu Dhabi’s governance is autocratic, non-representative, and non-participatory. Like other Arab kings, emirs, sultans, and presidents Abu Dhabi’s ruler Shaykh Khalifa bin Zayid al-Nahyan, also president of the United Arab Emirates is an absolute tribal/clan ruler. Under this power pyramid, the national decisionmaking coalition is very narrow. It consists of a few senior members of the ruler’s immediate family. It is easy, therefore, to see why the contract to import four reactors to generate electricity represents a politically driven energy policy with the negative consequences of a poorly informed and self-absorbed ruling elite enjoying rentier economic circumstances of an economy awash with crude oil exports.

In pursuit of tens of billions of dollars in export revenues, foreign suppliers–in this case of nuclear power plant manufacturers and their agents, supported by their governments and politicians–closely associate themselves with the political and business elites in Arab oil exporting countries in general, including Abu Dhabi. Unsafe and potentially disastrous schemes such as nuclear reactors are attractively packaged and propagated with nationalist slogans. In the absence of political parties, a free press, environmental groups, or non-partisan non-governmental organizations, it is impossible to introduce a sound balancing economic or environmental perspective into energy policy.

There has been no effective dissent in Abu Dhabi against the new nuclear power plant. Nor were there calls to explain the contradiction between the environmentally friendly Masdar project and the emirate’s potentially disastrous nuclear power project. Two possible motives for Abu Dhabi’s decision are discussed next.

Enriching the Business Elite

The business elite in the UAE, similar to those in the rest of GCC states and the wider Arab world supports its ruler in return for a business environment conducive to making money. The Abu Dhabi merchant families import a myriad of goods, represent foreign companies, engage in joint ventures with outside partners, manufacture light goods, etc. In conducting these businesses, the merchants enjoy privileges such as beneficial monetary, fiscal, and foreign exchange policies; protection from foreign competition; and a labor law that tolerates ill treatment of foreign workers, including the absence of a minimum wage legislation, debilitating work conditions for manual laborers, extremely poor living accommodations, no right to change employment or to leave without employer’s permission. Actions taken by the foreign workers such as strikes often instigate brutal police reactions, severe penalties, and deportation.

Merchant families are important for the emirate’s internal security. Foreign workers, mainly employed by the business sector constitute around 85 percent of the UAE’s estimated population of six million. Given that the government bans political parties, social associations, and labor unions, employers become the eyes and ears of an elaborate internal security force–a first line of defense against political dissent and labor unrest.

It is safe to consider that a certain proportion of the $20 to $40 billion nuclear power plant contract as well as the $22 billion Masdar project, among other government schemes, will benefit Abu Dhabi’s merchant families. Foreign companies work locally through local sponsors in return for hefty commissions to the sponsors. Also, while foreign companies are the primary contractors, there will be a good deal of sub-contract work for local companies to perform.

Egoism and Regional Posturing

The second motive behind Abu Dhabi’s contradictory decisions is egoism, that is the desire to show that it is also important, rich, modern, on the edge of technology, and in a sense powerful. Gulf Cooperation Council states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates), with trillions of dollars in revenues and reserves from crude oil exports, are locked into a wealth-flaunting contest. They compete with one another on who has the tallest building, owns the biggest airline, the largest airport, the most gigantic indoor theme park, hotel, golf course, ice skating rink, even who attracts the most foreign conventions and sporting tournaments, and so on. Specifically, in Abu Dhabi, egoism may explain Abu Dhabi’s eye-catching projects. Following are three examples.

The first is the world’s most expensively constructed hotel. Opened in 2005, the Abu Dhabi government-owned Emirates Palace cost $3 billion.[34] It has an entrance arch just slightly smaller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and a lobby-atrium with a dome larger than St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, topped by a two-meter finial made of solid gold.[35]

The second is a Louvre Museum clone in Abu Dhabi, to be completed by 2012. A 30-year agreement for a Louvre in Abu Dhabi was announced on March 7, 2007. Abu Dhabi paid $525 million to be associated with the Louvre name, and an additional $747 million in exchange for art loans, special exhibitions, and management advice.[36] By around 2020, Abu Dhabi is also expected to spend about $500 million building its own collection, with the French Museums Agency expected to play an advisory role. These figures do not include the cost of the museum’s construction, estimated at around $110 million.[37]

The third is the world’s largest indoor theme park at a cost of $40 billion. The highlight of this development is the Yas Island Circuit, which hosts the Formula One Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.[38]

While there is of course a strategic element here–to increase the emirate’s regional political standing–building national morale and confidence is also an important factor. Abu Dhabi’s importation of four nuclear reactors may be seen as a way for its leaders to flaunt the vast financial reserves their emirate has accumulated in recent years and assert itself both regionally and internationally. For example, in a clear challenge to Saudi Arabia and in order to share the limelight with Riyadh, Abu Dhabi was forceful in its effort to become the headquarters of the proposed Gulf Monetary Union, or the GCC’s Central Bank. Riyadh won the contest on May 6, 2009, and on May 21, 2009, the UAE quit the proposed union in retaliation.[39]

Regarding Iran, the UAE is in a serious dispute with Teheran over three small islands near the Strait of Hormuz: Abu Musa, Greater Tunb, and Lesser Tunb. The islands were invaded on November 30, 1971, by the Shah’s forces and forcibly seized. Bilateral talks between the UAE and Iran in 1992 failed. The UAE have attempted to bring the dispute before the International Court of Justice, but Iran refuses to do so. Frustrated by its inability–despite its riches–to challenge Tehran over the three islands, Abu Dhabi’s four 5,600 MW reactors, which dwarfs in size Iran’s single 1,000 MW reactor at Bushehr, might go a certain way toward restoring some of the lost national pride felt at home in the UAE for domestic consumption.

CONCLUSION

As a member of IRENA and the location of the IRENA secretariat headquarters, Abu Dhabi is obligated to promote the agency’s objectives faithfully and vigorously. Yet Abu Dhabi has paradoxically contracted to import from South Korea a huge state-of-the-art nuclear power plant, which will serve as a showcase for the nuclear power industry to promote sales. IRENA faces a major challenge from the nuclear power industry (as well as the oil industry), one which could derail its mission. The coalition of the nuclear industry’s executives, lobbyists, and politicians among IRENA’s industrialized members who are heavily invested in selling nuclear power plants–particularly to Arab states–would want to sell more nuclear power plants. To prove its genuine commitment to IRENA’s ideals of renewable energy, Abu Dhabi’s nuclear power plant should thus be scrapped in favor of solar and wind electricity generation.

It may also be said that Abu Dhabi’s Masdar project, its gigantic nuclear power plant, IRENA’s headquarters, and the failed attempt to host the GCC’s Central Bank are all expressions of the same mind-set that built the Emirates Palace Hotel, is cloning the Louvre, and building the indoor Yas Island theme park.

*Elie Elhadj, born in Syria, is a veteran international banker. He was Chief Executive Officer of Arab National Bank in Saudi Arabia during most of the 1990s. After retiring, he received his Ph.D. from London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

NOTES

[1] Christ Stanton, “Abu Dhabi Signs Nuclear Power Deal with South Korean Group,” December 28, 2009, The National,

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091228/NATIONAL/712279860/1010.

[2] Zawiya Projects, “Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC) – Nuclear Power Plant, May 27, 2010, http://www.zawya.com/projects/project.cfm/pid220307020544?cc.

[3] Masdar Website, Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, “Masdar City, Overview,” http://www.masdar.ae/en/Menu/index.aspx?MenuID=48&CatID=60&mnu=Cat.

[4] Environment News Services, “Bush Previews Abu Dhabi’s Planned Carbon Neutral, Car Free City,” http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2008/2008-01-14-01.asp.

[5] Masdar, Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, “Masdar Power,” http://www.masdar.ae/en/Menu/index.aspx?MenuID=48&CatID=62&mnu=Cat.

[6] American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), “US Joins International Renewable Energy Agency; Abu Dhabi Selected as Headquarters,” January 29, 2009,

http://www.acore.org/news/article/2009/07/01/us_joins_international_renewable_energy_agency_abu_dhabi_selected_headquarte.

[7] International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Mission Statement,

http://www.irena.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=345&Itemid=182

[8] United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC), “Background on the Three Mile Island Incident,” http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html.

[9] World Nuclear Association, “Chernobyl Accident,” Updated November 2009,

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/inf07.html.

[10] NuclearFiles.org. Project of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/accidents/index.htm.
[11] “Worries Can’t Be Buried as Nuclear Waste Piles Up,” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2008, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/21/business/ft-nuclearwaste21.
[12] Renewable Energy and Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), “Renewables Global Status Report: Energy Transformation Continues Despite Economic Slowdown,” May 13, 2009, http://www.ren21.net/globalstatusreport/g2009.asp.
[13] USNRC, “Backgrounder on the Three Mile Island Accident.”

[14] World Nuclear Association, “Chernobyl Accident,” Updated November 2009,

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/inf07.html.

[15] NuclearFiles.org. Project of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,

http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/accidents/index.htm.

[16] World Nuclear Association, “Waste Management,” http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/wast.htm; Greenpeace UK, http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/nuclear/nuclear-waste-how-long-will-it-take.

[17] Global Security.org, “Chelyabinsk-65/Ozersk, Combine 817/Production Association Mayak,”

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/russia/chelyabinsk-65_nuc.htm.

[18] United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Maxey Flats Nuclear Disposal,”

http://www.epa.gov/region4/waste/npl/nplky/maxfltky.htm.

[19] Angelique Chrisafis, “River Use Banned After French Uranium Leak,” Guardian, July 10, 2008,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/10/nuclearpower.pollution.

[20] Mae-Wan Ho, “Old Nuclear Cash Cows Exposed,” Institute of Science in Technology, September 24, 2008, http://www.i-sis.org.uk/OldNuclearCashCowsExposed.php.

[21] Renewable Energy World, “Global Concentrated Solar Power Industry to Reach 25 GW by 2020,”

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/05/global-concentrated-solar-power-industry-to-reach-25-gw-by-2020?cmpid=WNL-Friday-May8-2009.

[22] Next Era Energy Resources, “Solar Electric Generating System,” http://www.nexteraenergyresources.com/content/where/portfolio/pdf/segs.pdf.

[23] Gil Knier, “How do Photovoltaics Work?,” NASA Science,

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2002/solarcells/.

[24] Scientific American, “Slide Show: The World’s 10 Largest Renewable Energy Projects,”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=10-largest-renewable-energy-projects&photo_id=ACAC0F2E-EC36-52B7-F3F55FE60D5CE59C.

[25] “PG&E Signs Historic 800 Mw Photovoltaic Solar Power Agreements with Optisolar and Sunpower Solar Projects,” PG&E News Release, August 14, 2008,

http://www.pge.com/about/news/mediarelations/newsreleases/q3_2008/080814.shtml.

[26] Michael Fickes, “Signet Solar to Build $840M Plant in New Mexico,” Hollywood Reporter, December 18, 2008, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3ic41d147829e712a637dd272d2fd086c5.[27] REN21, “Renewables Global Status Report.”
[28] Cristina L. Archer, and Mark Z. Jacobson, “Evaluation of Global Wind Power,” Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/global_winds.html.

[29] REN21, “Renewables Global Status Report.”

[30] Janet L. Sawin, “Wind Power Increase in 2008 Exceeds 10-year Average,” Worldwatch Institute, May 7, 2009, http://vitalsigns.worldwatch.org/vs-trend/wind-power-increase-2008-exceeds-10-year-average.

[31] Michael McCarthy, “Britain Will Need 12,500 Wind Farms to Satisfy EU Targets,” Independent, January 24, 2008,

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/britain-will-need-12500-wind-farms-to-satisfy-eu-targets-773145.html.

[32] “Extensions to Offshore Zones Prove Sector Strength,” RenewableUK, May 11, 2010, http://www.bwea.com/media/news/articles/pr20100511.html.

[33] Sawin, “Wind Power Increase in 2008 Exceeds 10-year Average.”

[34] Katherine Zoepf, “The Land with the Golden Hotel,” New York Times, March 8, 2006, http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/travel/08abuletter.html.

[35] Susan d’Arcy, “The World’s Most Expensive Hotel,” Sunday Times, February 27, 2005,

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/destinations/middle_east/article416495.ece.

[36] Alan Riding, “The Louvre’s Art: Priceless. The Louvre’s Name: Expensive,” New York Times, March 7, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/arts/design/07louv.html?_r=2&oref=slogin.

[37] “Louvre Abu Dhabi – Art Gallery and Museum, United Arab Emirates,” Designbuild-network.com, http://www.designbuild-network.com/projects/louvre-abu-dhabi/.

[38] “Yas Island,” Dubai, FAQs, http://www.dubaifaqs.com/yas-island.php.

[39] Nour Malas, Maria Abu-Habib, and Tahini Karrar, “U.A.E. Quits Gulf Monetary Union,” Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124285038025540481.html.

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Which Side Are You On?: The “Moderate Muslim” Litmus Tests

From Rubin Reports.Blogspot.Com

Which Side Are You On?: The “Moderate Muslim” Litmus Tests
Posted: 27 Aug 2010 08:37 AM PDT
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We depend on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation through PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, upper-right hand corner of this page: http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. By check: “American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.

By Barry Rubin

In the controversy over the “Ground Zero” mosque in New York and other issues, Muslims are often asked if they condemn terrorism, Iran, or Hamas and other revolutionary Islamist groups, along with other questions. The idea is to determine whether they are moderates or radicals. Each of these questions also has an unnoticed “internal Muslim” aspect as well that makes them all the more important.

Yet this question is often placed in the context of whether or not they support murderous attacks on non-Muslims or calls to wipe out Israel. This is a valid consideration, but it misses a key point about why Islamic activists should be asked and how they should answer such questions.

There is an important additional factor embedded in this question. One is that these are revolutionary Islamist groups or countries. If you don’t condemn them you are in effect accepting their program for a radical transformation of Muslim-majority (and even other) countries, the imposition of a radical interpretation of Sharia law on every aspect of society. If you are a nationalist, or a liberal, or a moderate Islamist the prospect of your enemies seizing state power and perhaps repressing you would be a most upsetting prospect.

In other words, a moderate would condemn these groups and Iran not for the sake of Israel or the West, but for the sake of his own people and anti-Islamist cause. It is impossible to be neutral on this point: Do you want to live (or see most other Muslims live) under a caliphate, a theocratic dictatorship, a repressive regime as exists in Iran or the Taliban’s Afghanistan or not?

The request to show yourself to be moderate is not a demand for some concession but to declare that you don’t want to see Muslims as well as others subjected to an authoritarian, would-be totalitarian regime that crushes all dissent, murders critics, persecutes Christians and Jews, and outlaws alternative interpretations of Islam, among other things.

Would a moderate like to see what should be his worst nightmare triumph, interpreting Islam in its own extremist way, and destroying any chance that he might realize his vision? Well, he could if his vision was roughly the same as theirs.

Another question asked–Do you condemn terrorism not only against “innocent Muslims” but also non-Muslims?–has a similar twist. Again, by refusing to reject terrorism against Jews, Christians, and (in Thailand, at least) Buddhists, the political activist is accepting some types of deliberate murder of civilians.

Yet this is not the only issue going on here. An “innocent Muslim” is a regular person, a bystander. But that would not include government officials or employees or those deemed too secular or liberal, people revolutionary Islamists want to kill. Perhaps this category of the non-innocent might include whole Muslim communities (Shias in Iraq, for example; African groups in Sudan). Moreover, failing to condemn all terrorism shows either a misunderstanding (or support) for the anarchy and destruction that this tactic imposes on Muslim-majority societies. In other words, it shows both ruthlessness toward one’s own people and indicates that one is on the side of the radical Islamists.

Still another indicator is adherence to the Muslim Brotherhood or its front groups. It is somewhat understandable but ultimately quite foolish to focus only on the threat of currently violent terrorist Islamist groups, notably al-Qaida, to the exclusion of everyone else (even Hizballah or elements of the Taliban, according to some Obama Administration officials.)

The Brotherhood is more dangerous precisely because it takes a long-term, tactically flexible view that is more likely to be effective in both Muslim-majority and Western states. Moreover, for the Brotherhood, violence is merely a matter of timing, wrong to engage in only because the mass base has not yet been prepared and success not assured.

One of the Brotherhood’s tactics is dissimulation or to use the plainer word: lying. Its agents speak of dialogue, moderation, and bridge-building to the suckers (I mean interlocutors) while indoctrinating their Muslim audience with anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism, anti-Christianism, and antisemitism. Many of them have mastered the rhetoric of human rights and victimhood.

And they have become used to the fact that few in the West will look deeply into their doctrine, what is said in Arabic or other non-Western languages, or political positions. Thus, in most of the Muslim-majority world it is between incredibly difficult and impossible to build or repair any church or synagogue (according to Islamic doctrine which sought to ensure that non-Muslim institutions literally collapsed).

Does this mean that Western societies should do the same to Muslims? No, but it means that these societies should inquire into their “moderate” friends views on the issue, pressing for them to protest and demand change in the countries their religion controls (they won’t) and to cover such matters in schools and media.

A final point of great importance. There are relatively few “moderate Muslims” but there are millions of Muslims who are relatively moderate. The former term refers to people whose main identity is as a Muslim and who explicitly want to reform normative Islam. In contrast, the latter are those who are equally Muslim in faith but whose primary identity formed by some ethnic (Turkish, Arab, Persian, Kurd, Berber, etc.) or national (Egyptian, Indonesian, Indian, Moroccan) loyalty and who practice Islam in traditional, non-Islamist ways.

Almost a decade after the September 11 attacks, it is remarkable to see how primitive, censored, and misinformed is the Western debate over Islam and Islamism. Yet this is an issue of the greatest importance in the world today. The fate of the Middle East and the future of the West hangs in the balance.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.

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The Malicious and the Scornful

The Malicious and the Scornful.
________________________________________
Proverbs 24:7-9
7 Wisdom is too high for a fool: he openeth not his mouth in the gate. 8 He that deviseth to do evil shall be called a mischievous person. 9 The thought of foolishness is sin: and the scorner is an abomination to men.

Here is the description, 1. Of a weak man: Wisdom is too high for him; he thinks it so, and therefore, despairing to attain it, he will take no pains in the pursuit of it, but sit down content without it. And really it is so; he has not capacity for it, and therefore the advantages he has for getting it are all in vain to him. It is no easy thing to get wisdom; those that have natural parts good enough, yet if they be foolish, that is, if they be slothful and will not take pains, if they be playful and trifling, and given to their pleasures, if they be viciously inclined and keep bad company, it is too high for them; they are not likely to reach it. And, for want of it, they are unfit for the service of their country: They open not their mouth in the gate; they are not admitted into the council or magistracy, or, if they are, they are dumb statues, and stand for cyphers; they say nothing, because they have nothing to say, and they know that if they should offer any thing it would not be heeded, nay, it would be hissed at. Let young men take pains to get wisdom, that they may be qualified for public business, and do it with reputation.

2. Of a wicked man, who is not only despised as a fool is, but detested. Two sorts of wicked men are so:–

(1.) Such as are secretly malicious. Though they speak courteously and conduct themselves plausibly, they devise to do evil, are contriving to do an ill turn to those they bear a grudge to, or have an envious eye at. He that does so shall be called a mischievous person, or a master of mischief, which perhaps was then a common name of reproach; he shall be branded as an inventor of evil things (Rom. 1:30), or if any mischief be done, he shall be suspected as the author of it, or at least accessory to it. This devising evil is the thought of foolishness, v. 9. It is made light of, and turned off with a jest, as only a foolish thing, but really it is sin, it is exceedingly sinful; you cannot call it by a worse name than to call it sin. It is bad to do evil, but it is worse to devise it; for that has in it the subtlety and poison of the old serpent. But it may be taken more generally. We contract guilt, not only by the act of foolishness, but by the thought of it, though it go no further; the first risings of sin in the heart are sin, offensive to God, and must be repented of or we are undone. Not only malicious, unclean, proud thoughts, but even foolish thoughts, are sinful thoughts. If vain thoughts lodge in the heart, they defile it (Jer. 4:14), which is a reason why we should keep our hearts with all diligence, and harbour no thoughts there which cannot give a good account of themselves, Gen. 6:5.

(2.) Such as are openly abusive: The scorner, who gives ill-language to every body, takes a pleasure in affronting people and reflecting upon them, is an abomination to men; none that have any sense of honour and virtue will care to keep company with him. The seat of the scornful is the pestilential chair (as the LXX. calls it, Ps. 1:1), which no wise man will come near, for fear of taking the infection. Those that strive to make others odious do but make themselves so.
- Matthew Henry Commentary

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The measure of your strength

Proverbs 24:10
10 If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.

Note, 1. In the day of adversity we are apt to faint, to droop and be discouraged, to desist from our work, and to despair of relief. Our spirits sink, and then our hands hang down and our knees grow feeble, and we become unfit for anything. And often those that are most cheerful when they are well droop most, and are most dejected, when any thing ails them.

2. This is an evidence that our strength is small, and is a means of weakening it more. “It is a sign that thou art not a man of any resolution, any firmness of thought, any consideration, any faith (for that is the strength of a soul), if thou canst not bear up under an afflictive change of thy condition.” Some are so feeble that they can bear nothing; if a trouble does but touch them (Job 4:5), nay, if it does but threaten them, they faint immediately and are ready to give up all for gone; and by this means they render themselves unfit to grapple with their trouble and unable to help themselves. Be of good courage therefore, and God shall strengthen thy heart.
- Matthew Henry Commentary

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Promise of Eternal Glory

Ezekiel 48:35
The name of the city henceforth shall be, The Lord is there.

Jahweh Shammah – the Lord is there. Here in these two words is the promise of eternal glory. The Christian life is spent in the past, in the present, and in the future; and if we leave out any one of those three dimensions our Christian life will be unbalanced.

We live in the past: yes, we do! We constantly look back to the deliverance that God has wrought for us. We look back to our own experience in the past, to how God saved us – and never lose the wonder of your conversion; even if it was a gradual conversion still look back to the life as it was before you knew Christ, and let the difference between past and present constantly remain in your thinking. Live in the past.

And live in the present, because you’ve got to live it out here and now. And unless you stress the importance of the present, alongside the past and the future, you’ll be a very poor Christian indeed.

But also live in the future, because the future is what God has reserved for you in heaven, and you are entitled to look occasionally into those wonderful experiences that will one day be yours.

You are entitled to look at the book of Revelation, and to wonder at the marvels of the great and glorious city where there will be no need of sun nor moon, for He will be the glory there: He will be the light.

And Jesus Christ, yes, the real Christ: you’ll be able to see and to know Him in a way that you have never been able to on earth. He will be there: He will be there to welcome you; He will be there to take away all the sorrow, all the sighing, and all the pain; He will be there to give us that eternal crown of glory that fadeth not away.

Look forward to it, Christian brethren. One day you will be there, and you will find the Lord. And what a meeting, what a welcome that will be. – John B. Taylor: The Water of Life, 1971.
- Daily Thoughts From Keswick.

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Czech List: Sometimes Even A Conference Can Teach Vivid Political Realities

From Rubin Reports.Blogspot.Com

Czech List: Sometimes Even A Conference Can Teach Vivid Political Realities
Posted: 26 Aug 2010 07:49 AM PDT
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By Barry Rubin

I’m not a big fan of conferences. There’s nothing more repetitive than sitting in a panel where the presentations have interesting titles but are otherwise disappointing. Or listening to a speaker who may be very good but says absolutely nothing you don’t know already.

But sometimes you have fascinating experiences which are not exactly on the agenda. Here are three from a conference I attended in Prague a few years ago, each of which contains its own lessons. Incidentally, the events below weren’t of the record, but names and some details have been omitted since this is about points, not personalities.

1. The German parliamentarian was well-dressed, angry, and red in the face. He raised his voice in righteous indignation. Why, he complained, were there a number of Israelis at the meeting but no Palestinians. Obviously he thought that he had caught the Czech hosts in some politically incorrect indiscretion.

After he finished his somewhat insulting remarks and sat down, one of the Czechs stood up and explained very politely that plenty of Palestinians had been invited; all expenses paid, and had accepted but had simply not shown up. That’s something I’ve seen plenty of times.

A Lesson: Why get rewarded for deciding not to succeed? Hamas refuses to act peacefully, and then is rewarded for having committed aggression and been soundly defeated as a result (2008-2009). Same applies for Hizballah (2006). The Palestinian Authority refuses to make peace and then is rewarded for alleged suffering under an occupation it has the power to end when it so wishes.

Recently, a reader made a startling suggestion to me that I think is a brilliant insight. In this day when not only equal opportunity but equal results is supposedly supposed (yes, that double use is deliberate) guaranteed, Israel is being “unfair” at doing so well socially and economically.

In past decades, the failure of a nation to achieve democracy or prosperity would have been attributed to its own choices. That’s a good thing because its people can then realize their mistakes, correct them, and succeed. Today, however, failure is often attributed to being a victim of racism, imperialism, and pure meanness.

Woody Allen allegedly said (it isn’t clear that he did) that 99 percent of life is showing up. Yes, indeed. Showing up and performing well. But in the counter-Calvinism of our time, material achievement is a proof of damnation.

The development theory of the 1950s and 1960s focused on how a country could achieve take-off to progress and prosperity. It is a model followed nowadays by China, South Korea, and some others.

The currently dominant view, at least in intellectual circles and among fashionable dictators and terrorists is the idea that underdevelopment is not a result of history, culture, society, and bad choices but of imperialist exploitation. Instead of reforming yourself, the object is to wage war and other struggle to get the West to hand over the loot. This leads to violence, social intransigence, political stagnation, and failure. But at least it is a popular, rationalized failure.

2. The pompous American intellectual made a stirring speech about how great things were going in Afghanistan, a country he obviously knew nothing about. He was playing those Washington and academic games in which the lives of distant people are toyed with on the basis of book learning and theories. The fact that this particular fool happened to be conservative didn’t change anything in the usual pattern.

My Afghan friend, who had been analyzing his own country for years and seen, as he put it, half his family murdered by the Communists and the other half murdered by the Islamists, could take no more. He stood up and countered with facts and details. His talk was a devastating response. The police in Kabul wouldn’t leave their barracks to deal with violence. The war lords were out of control. Despite official optimism, Afghanistan was still Afghanistan and American plans were just illusions.

A lesson: One would have thought that the arrogant fool would have been forever silenced by the graphic demonstration that he knew nothing and was speaking nonsense. Of course, such people are never influenced by that kind of humiliation. I’ve heard and read him since saying similar things. These “masters of the universe,” to use Tom Wolfe’s phrase—historically on the right but nowadays much more common on the left—think about their egos and careers, not the lives being affected by their prattling.

Nevertheless, the experience provided a stirring example of the difference between the real and fantasy worlds, between those who know and those who blow hot air, between those who merely articulate their ideological desires and those who have the courage to speak the truth.

I’m cynical enough to ask: Guess who gets the bigger honors and rewards? But not so pessimistic or craven to stop trying to do what’s right.

3. Its one thing to be a pacifist but quite another to talk like a pacifist while being a high-ranking official at the French Defense Ministry. The well-dressed, debonair, and relatively young man was explaining how nothing was worth fighting for, how conflict had to be avoided at virtually any cost. Naturally, he would object to my summary but it is nonetheless accurate.

I have a friend, though, who loves being provocative in a funny way. In personal life, he is a sweet and considerate person but he loves to play the role of the nasty, arrogant hardliner. You could see in his glittering eyes and slight smile that he saw a big fat target of opportunity.

And so as the French bureaucrat proclaimed that no one should go to war without prior approval of the UN, my friend stood up and pointed out that France had intervened dozens of times in Africa—overthrown governments, put down revolts, backed up oppressive regimes—without any reference to the UN whatsoever.

Up on stage, the French guy was livid, totally losing his temper, rose menacingly, and as I remember it threatened to punch out my friend. The spiritual man of peace had instantly turned into macho man cruising for a bruising. I think someone physically restrained him.

A lesson: When others advise that you have no right of self-defense, are using excessive force, and similar such stuff, note how ferocious they become and totally indifferent to moral or legal considerations when their interests are at stake.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.

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To say you knew not when God knows you knew

Proverbs 24:11
11 If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; 12 If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?

Here is, 1. A great duty required of us, and that is to appear for the relief of oppressed innocency. If we see the lives or livelihoods of any in danger of being taken away unjustly, we ought to bestir ourselves all we can to save them, by disproving the false accusations on which they are condemned and seeking out proofs of their innocency. Though the persons be not such as we are under any particular obligation to, we must help them, out of a general zeal for justice. If any be set upon by force and violence, and it be in our power to rescue them, we ought to do it. Nay, if we see any through ignorance exposing themselves to danger, or fallen in distress, as travellers upon the road, ships at sea, or any the like, it is our duty, though it be with peril to ourselves, to hasten with help to them and not forbear to deliver them, not to be slack, or remiss, or indifferent, in such a case.

2. An answer to the excuse that is commonly made for the omission of this duty. Thou wilt say, “Behold, we knew it not; we were not aware of the imminency of the danger the person was in; we could not be sure that he was innocent, nor did we know how to prove his innocence, nor which way to do any thing in favour of him, else we would have helped him.”

Now, (1.) It is easy to make such an excuse as this, sufficient to avoid the censures of men, for perhaps they cannot disprove us when we say, We knew it not, or, We forgot; and the temptation to tell a lie for the excusing of a fault is very strong when we know that it is impossible to be disproved, the truth lying wholly in our own breast, as when we say, We thought so and so, and really designed it, which no one is conscious of but ourselves.

(2.) It is not so easy with such excuses to evade the judgment of God; and to the discovery of that we lie open and by the determination of that we must abide.

Now, [1.] God ponders the heart and keeps the soul; he keeps an eye upon it, observes all the motions of it; its most secret thoughts and intents are all naked and open before him. It is his prerogative to do so, and that in which he glories. Jer. xvii. 10, I the Lord search the heart. He keeps the soul, holds it in life. This is a good reason why we should be tender of the lives of others, and do all we can to preserve them, because our lives have been precious in the sight of God and he has graciously kept them.

[2.] He knows and considers whether the excuse we make be true or no, whether it was because we did not know it or whether the true reason was not because we did not love our neighbour as we ought, but were selfish, and regardless both of God and man. Let this serve to silence all our frivolous pleas, by which we think to stop the mouth of conscience when it charges us with the omission of plain duty: Does not he that ponders the heart consider it?

[3.] He will judge us accordingly. As his knowledge cannot be imposed upon, so his justice cannot be biassed, but he will render to every man according to his works, not only the commission of evil works, but the omission of good works.
- Matthew Henry Commentary

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Experience the power of truth and godliness

Proverbs 24:13-14
13 My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste: 14 So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul: when thou hast found it, then there shall be a reward, and thy expectation shall not be cut off.

We are here quickened to the study of wisdom by the consideration both of the pleasure and the profit of it.

1. It will be very pleasant. We eat honey because it is sweet to the taste, and upon that account we call it good, especially that which runs first from the honey-comb. Canaan was said to flow with milk and honey, and honey was the common food of the country (Luke 24:41, 42), even for children, Isa. 7:15. Thus should we feed upon wisdom, and relish the good instructions of it. Those that have tasted honey need no further proof that it is sweet, nor can they by any argument be convinced of the contrary; so those that have experienced the power of truth and godliness are abundantly satisfied of the pleasure of both; they have tasted the sweetness of them, and all the atheists in the world with their sophistry, and the profane with their banter, cannot alter their sentiments.

2. It will be very profitable. Honey may be sweet to the taste and yet not wholesome, but wisdom has a future recompence attending it, as well as a present sweetness in it. “Thou art permitted to eat honey, and the agreeableness of it to thy taste invites thee to it; but thou hast much more reason to relish and digest the precepts of wisdom, for when thou hast found that, there shall be a reward; thou shalt be paid for thy pleasure, while the servants of sin pay dearly for their pains. Wisdom does indeed set thee to work, but there shall be a reward; it does indeed raise great expectations in thee, but as thy labour, so thy hope, shall not be in vain; thy expectation shall not be cut off (ch. 23:18), nay, it shall be infinitely outdone.”
- Matthew Henry Commentary

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