Israel Analysis Micorcosm Of the NeoCon USA?

Thanks to Naomi Klein at The Nation for an interesting analysis. It makes clear connections to the real reason why NeoCons like their New World Order.

Laboratory for a Fortressed World

Editor's Note: This article has been updated with additional detail on recent developments in Gaza.

Gaza in the hands of Hamas, with masked militants sitting in the president's chair; the West Bank on the edge; Israeli army camps hastily assembled in the Golan Heights; a spy satellite over Iran and Syria; war with Hezbollah a hair trigger away; a scandal-plagued political class facing a total loss of public faith.

At a glance, things aren't going well for Israel. But here's a puzzle: Why, in the midst of such chaos and carnage, is the Israeli economy booming like it's 1999, with a roaring stock market and growth rates nearing China's?

Main stream media quotes administration friendly economist Friedman to explain the boom in Israel as support of venture capital and youthful innovation. There is an alternative explanation that points to the true reason for Middle East destabilization.

[...]
Here's another theory: Israel's economy isn't booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it.(emphasis added) This phase of development dates back to the mid-'90s, when Israel was in the vanguard of the information revolution--the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel's economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.

Within three years, large parts of Israel's tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms: Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the "flat world" to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country's most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel's status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom--a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.

This is truly the vision of the NeoCon New World Order. Fortress enclaves of Elites and their deluded middle class indentured servants. Outside, the barbaric masses that are regularly culled in order to test new weapons and tactics. Weapons and tactics needed to control the servants within the Elite fortress enclaves.

[...]
... Israel now sends $1.2 billion in "defense" products to the United States--up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products--well over a billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain. (emphasis added)

Just a reminder who the #1 arms dealer in the world is--The USA.

Much of this growth has been in the so-called "homeland security" sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion--an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems--precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.

And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror." (emphasis added)
It's no coincidence that the class projects at Ben Gurion that so impressed Friedman have names like "Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection in Hyperspectral Images" and "Algorithms for Obstacle Detection and Avoidance." Thirty homeland security companies were launched in Israel in the past six months alone, thanks in large part to lavish government subsidies that have transformed the Israeli army and the country's universities into incubators for security and weapons start-ups (something to keep in mind in the debates about the academic boycott).

[...]
Since Israel began its policy of sealing off the occupied territories with checkpoints and walls, human rights activists have often compared Gaza and the West Bank to open-air prisons. But in researching the explosion of Israel's homeland security sector, a topic I explore in greater detail in a forthcoming book (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), it strikes me that they are something else too: laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested. Palestinians--whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling "Hamasistan"--are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.

So in a way Friedman is right: Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn't the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target "suspects." And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource.(emphasis added)

Israel uses these devices to protect themselves from enemies outside their border.
NeoCons, via the NSA, have repeatedly demonstrated their desire to use tech. for monitoring their enemies within our border.
The war in Iraq,Afghanistan and the global war on terror are really just convenient manipulations.
Yes, there are very dangerous extremists that want to destroy our way of life and we must defend ourselves from them. That's a fact, no matter how it came about.
It is also an absolute fact that not all of those extremists are in the Middle East.
Some of the most dangerous ones are here, in America. We elected them to office. We admire them as Senators, Congressmen, and even Presidents.
I say again, read the NeoCon writings and learn about their plans for us all. They don't try and hide it. Their arrogance and disdain for the common people won't allow them to hide it.

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