Inversion

[Valin]

City Journal:

Fred Siegel

15 August 2014

 

As a young graduate student in the early 1970s, I had the pleasure of listening to E. P. Thompson, the British labor historian whose book, The Making of the English Working Class, rippled like an electric current through liberal academia. As the aristocratic Thompson understood it, the imposition of a market economy on once self-sufficient English farmers led to the food riots in remote sections of the British countryside during the early eighteenth century. But when my mentor, Julius Rubin—a rumpled, soft-spoken economic historian at the University of Pittsburgh—responded that the towns where the food riots occurred were precisely those lacking roads to connect them with the emerging market economy, Thompson seemed taken aback. He had assumed, with ideological certainty, that capitalism induces poverty. But Rubin argued, with supporting evidence, that it was the absence of roads—that is, the absence of capitalism—that sparked the food riots. As they jousted back and forth, Rubin asked if Thompson could name a developed market economy that had suffered a food riot. The question left the loquacious academic celebrity temporarily speechless.

 

(Snip)

 

CNN anchor Jake Tapper offers up another perverse argument, this one to explain the violence in Gaza. Tapper suggests that it is “hopelessness” in Gaza that’s produced the imperative to fire missiles and build tunnels into Israel. As Tapper and others who spout the Hamas line see it, Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza has engendered the poverty that leaves no choice but war. This is a bizarre argument, since Hamas needed massive quantities of imported concrete to construct the electricity-laden tunnels it used to attack Israel. Here, too, as with Broken Windows policing, an empirical record is available if Tapper had the inclination to consult it. When Israel, led by Ariel Sharon, withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it left behind a system of greenhouses which could have been used to employ and feed thousands of Gazans. But in an act of savagery, Hamas leveled those greenhouses. In the years since Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza, Hamas has started three wars with Israel, each time claiming that it had no choice but to initiate hostilities—often seconded by a suborned press that, whether by ideology, intimidation, or a mixture of both, has toed the Hamas line. Even if you take Tapper’s argument seriously, the three wars have done nothing to alleviate Gaza’s hopelessness.

 

If an honest reporter were to take Julius Rubin’s approach to Edward Thompson and look for examples of Israel initiating hostilities with Hamas, he would have to conclude that none exist. Just as capitalism doesn’t create poverty outside the precincts of academia and its anti-modern adjuncts, Israeli policy doesn’t create poverty in Gaza. Not even Jimmy Carter was foolish enough to buy that sort of “reasoning.”