Israel's last big military venture into Gaza began soon after
Barack Obama's 2008 election and before his 2009 inauguration. It's
more than ironic that this is happening again between Obama's
re-election and his coming re-installation.
But here I won't get into conspiracy theories or into "who
started it" in 1936, 1948, 1967, 1973, 2006, 2009, or now. Been
there, done that, and, tragically, not enough has
changed since the last time.
What I do have now that I didn't in 2009 is a small part of the
story of Israel's militarization that sheds light on Israel's
inclinations and strategic judgments. Before telling it, let me
emphasize that ever since I assessed the first Gaza war, online and
on
NPR, I've considered Hamas' end game and how it
does business inexcusable. But equally so -- and arguably more
stupid, because unsustainable -- has been Israel's long "holding
pen" strategy against Gaza and, arguably, the West Bank.
Now that each side has again provoked the other's darkest
impulses, I can offer only a bit of background to the tactically
and technologically clever but strategically and politically
bone-headed conduct of Israeli politicians. It concerns a country
whose similarities to Israel are a lot more striking than its
obvious differences.
In 1965, when Singapore declared its independence, its first
prime-minister (and, for many years, its virtual dictator) Lee Kuan
Yew asked Israel to design, set up, and supervise its military
machine. Israel did precisely that. How successfully? Just this
month, the Bonn International Center for Conversion published a
world-wide survey ranking Israel the world's most militarized
nation -- and Singapore the second-most.
You can read about the Bonn Center's ranking here. To find out how Israel
and Singapore actually got together on this, you'd have to have
been reading accounts like this one on "Israel's Deep Dark Secret Love
Affair" in Haaretz, one of several
Israeli newspapers that, even when partisan, are far more open
about Israel itself than major U.S. news organizations are.
I knew nothing about this love affair in 2009, when, while
watching office parks and eight-lane expressways gliding by my
window on a Tel Aviv-to-Haifa train, I mentioned to my wife that
Israel has become the Singapore of the Middle East. I had no idea
then that Singapore had long been the Israel of Southeast Asia not
only economically and geo-politically -- as a glance at a couple of
maps and statistical tables will suggest -- but militarily, with
all the intimacy of that "Deep, Dark, Secret Love Affair" that's
now nearly 50 years old.
The similarities of these two little engines that could (and
did) become models of state capitalism with high per capita incomes
and growth rates haven't often been noted. Both have been governed
and stamped by the British. Both have populations of 5 or 6
million, including 2 or 3 million second-class citizens and
non-citizens, some of them migrants, some of them openly
despised.
Both Israel and Singapore are non-Muslim, and both face much
larger, less-than-friendly Muslim neighbors -- in Singapore's case,
Indonesia and Malaysia, the latter of which expelled Singapore in
1965 (or lost it, depending on who's telling), amid high racial
tensions.
Yet another striking analogy involves the fact that the
politically dominant majority of Singapore's population consists
not of indigenous natives but of "overseas" Han Chinese," whose
literary and commercial strengths long ago earned them the
sobriquet "the Jews of Southeast Asia" and the envy and resentment
due a wealthy, elitist, and supple minority.
Like Jews who live outside Israel, the Han Chinese are
minorities in most countries outside China, but here a real
difference dogs the similarity. The similarity is that in
Singapore, the Chinese are 75% of the population, and Malays are
15%, Indians 8%' in Israel, Jews are 76%, with the rest mostly
Palestinian Arabs, most of them Muslim some of them Christian. In
Singapore the Chinese have a status, power, and reputation that
will sound familiar to Palestinians and others who regard Israel's
Jews as arrogant interlopers.
The difference is that Israel's Jews, unlike Singapore's
Chinese, have never been the rooted, dominant majority in any other
country besides ancient Israel itself, where Hebrew was spoken 700
years before Arabic. And there are other differences of
consequence: Singapore is an island, a micro-state smaller in area
and population than New York City's five boroughs. Israel is 30
times larger, geographically, and in some ways more dangerous and
endangered.
That said, Singapore's and Israel's situations at international
crossroads of trade and power at opposite ends of the Asian
continent incline them both to serve as investment and cultural
entrepots and as political mediators. Without oil, water, or
minerals to speak of, both live mainly by their wits, which is to
say by trade. But both are compelled to militarize, and both have
formidable armed forces, with defense budgets that consume 5 or 6%
of GDP, a proportion much higher than that of all but a few other
nations, including even China.
The International Political Review calls Singapore's
armed forces "the most technologically advanced military in
Southeast Asia" and notes that while everyone in the region fears
China and no one could prevail against a Chinese onslaught, China
fears that any such onslaught would bring a very painful Singapore
Sting.
The punchline to all this, not very funny but very, very true,
is that no sooner had Singapore gained its independence in August
1965 than its British-educated founder and first prime minister,
Lee Kuan Yew (whose eldest son is now prime minister), invited
Israel to organize his armed forces, because he saw all the
parallels between the two young nations that I've just noted.
On Christmas Eve, 1965, six Israel Defense Force officers and
their families moved to Singapore, followed by waves of consulting
teams that established the country's "Total Defense" combat
doctrines, its recruitment and training regimens, its intelligence
services, and its state-of-art arms procurement.
"We are not going to turn Singapore into an Israeli colony,"
chief of staff and future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin admonished
these teams. He needn't have worried. Singapore's highly
intelligent, eloquent, ruthlessly energetic dictator knew how to
collaborate without being colonized, something one couldn't say
about some of the Americans he's been collaborating with most
recently. He was as deft and determined as the Han Chinese in other
countries who, even as minorities, dominate major industries,
banks, and even English-language media in the Philippines,
Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.
The Israelis militarized Singaporean society, even with Israeli
military songs, to which Lee's soldiers marched in one of
Singapore's first real Independence Day parades. Less symbolically,
they showed Singapore how to establish military conscription in a
hitherto un-militaristic populace that, according to at least one
survey, ranked the profession of soldier far below that of thief,
while placing artists, teachers and merchants on top.
So determined was Lee to adjust this that when Israel won the
Six-Day War in 1967, vindicating his decision to work with it and
boosting Singaporeans' confidence in their Jewish military mentors,
Singapore's UN delegation surprised other Third World nations by
abstaining on a resolution condemning Israel.
Israelis persuaded Lee to make conscription universal to tap
well-educated, prosperous Han Chinese as well as the Malay, Indian,
and other minorities. That produced an intelligent, dynamic army
and a disciplined male student population: Singaporean university
students receive substantial tuition subsidies after military
service but must accept what the National University of Singapore
calls "a service bond under the terms of the tuition grant to work
for a Singapore-registered company for three years upon completion
of their degrees so as to discharge some of their obligations to
the Singapore public." In some professions, the mandatory service
is to government agencies, for up to six years. The whole regimen,
as most Israelis would recognize, produces more than a little
griping, but little softness or self-indulgence.
All this has posed an exquisitely discomfiting dilemma for
Yale's neoconservatives, who never hesitate to ridicule leftists
who've collaborated with authoritarian "Third World" regimes. Now
they find themselves looking into a mirror and falling spookily
silent about Yale's collaboration with Singapore in
setting up an undergraduate liberal arts college.
When Shaunziming Tan published a damning essay about Yale's
and other Western universities' collaborations with such regimes,
Michael Rubin of the neoconservative flagship Commentary Magazine
commented that
"Foreigners flock to American universities because of their
freedom and opportunity. How sad it is then, as Tan describes, that
so many American university presidents are willing to compromise
basic values in order to make a quick buck, often padding
endowments which already reach billions of dollars. That will not
bring progress; it is simply intellectual prostitution."
On the other hand, Yale is only following in the footsteps of
Israel, which has so few friends and whose fate so preoccupies
neoconservatives that a few years ago they established a Yale
Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, some of
whose offerings prompted me to dub it "The Yale Institute for
Jewish Nationalism and War With Iran."
The Yale administration wisely abolished the institute and
replaced it with a legitimately scholarly entity, but
neoconservatives' difficulty in reconciling their American
patriotism with their protectiveness toward Israel in this case has
kept them silent about the Singapore deal.
One big difference between Yale's gamble in Singapore and
Israel's investment there is that Israel, unlike its neo-con
cheerleaders, was smart enough to keep its name out of the public
eye at the time, eager though it was to advance its national
interests and prestige.
So it's noteworthy that last month the influential
neoconservative Commentary blogger Michael Rubin, who has
propagandized for war with Iran, condemned Yale and other
universities for accommodating to an authoritarian regime that has
worked so closely with Israelis.
At least this should teach other neoconservatives what Yitzhak
Rabin and Lee Kuan Yew always understood and what I learned after
my epiphany on the road to Haifa: matters like these cannot be
viewed clearly through binary, left-vs.-right lenses: Leftists who
supported "people's liberation struggles" by helping to harvest
sugar cane in Cuba or crops in early Israeli socialist kibbutzim
believed that nation-building requires disciplined struggle and
sacrifice to lay the groundwork for prosperity and, with it,
national pride, often at cost to individual freedom.
But even in the 1960's, when Singapore was getting underway, it
was already more authoritarian in its nation-building than Israel
had been, at least among its own Jewish citizens, but even to some
extent among Arabs who became citizens of Israel. Perhaps that was
because Jews, fleeing recent destruction and facing new/ancient
enemies with Western Enlightenment traditions, some of them as
socialists, bonded in relatively more democratic, egalitarian
ways.
Although Singaporean society hasn't had to be on military alert
as much as Israel, neither has it become the Switzerland of
Southeast Asia, a region bristling with huge armies. Singapore does
have enough economic and military power to take another bit of
advice that the Israelis of Rabin's time gave it and should take
more seriously themselves than they have under Netanyahu: Keep your
vast military under the radar, if possible while strengthening and
showcasing your diplomatic, cultural, and educational
offerings.
Singapore is trying to become the education center of Southeast
Asia by setting up a liberal arts college that bears Yale's
imprimatur, while controlling the showcase as tightly as it does
the military. "Increasingly we are noted for taking up the
knowledge industries and doing cutting edge stuff," says Ambassador
Chan.
Note, though, that, in this official view, education is an
"industry," perhaps even a "cutting edge" weapon of sorts. Can any
liberal democracy ever hope to flourish while pacing a gilded but
iron cage?
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hey jiani..its me hit.u arent some schoolkid are u?u are posting
way too much comlplex stuff for a schoolkid your age.
