Was former Israeli MK, Loba Eliav, who in the fifties, dumped loads of new immigrants out of the truck and onto the barren ground in Dimona (where they were brought against their will so that they would “settle the Negev”) a bad person? Everyone who knew him knows that the opposite is true. So what makes a good person do such a shocking thing?
It is easy enough to understand the roots of the evil of racism and impenetrability, and it is fairly easy to deal with them. But that evil cannot exist without some good, and that is our question. Why were good people involved with that evil?
The answer is…ideology. Ideology that sees the State - not the citizen - as sovereign. Ideology that preaches that the citizen belongs to the State, instead of the opposite. A collective ideology that scoffs at the hidden hand expressed in man’s free spirit. Ideology, which from an honest place of good will (at least that is how it begins) seeks to control our lives by means of an army of bucolic bureaucrats.
After all, if we do not place limits on egg production, we will all turn into one large sunny-side-up. And if we do not limit shoe production, the citizens will not have pants, because nobody will produce them or import them without being told to do so. And if we do not educate their children, they will remain illiterate. And if we do not pour them out of the truck in Dimonah, the Negev will remain empty. Socialism really wants to help.
Somehow, however, in other countries where the citizen is sovereign, the price of eggs and milk is much lower than here in Israel – and the quality is better than ever. Everything is in the market and abundant. A new car is completely affordable. Housing is magically cheap (because the State did not appropriate all the land for itself) and towns rise in the most far-flung places. There is no Absorption Basket for immigrants, no metal beds courtesy of the Jewish Agency, no housing benefits for first generation and second generation and no Workers’ Union that minimizes social gaps.
Nevertheless, approximately one million Israeli citizens have left our socialist paradise since 1948 and moved to the US. For some reason, the waves of Aliyah that have come to Israel in all the years of Zionism have always come from countries less free and capitalistic than Israel. Something in the centralized paradise that we have created left the Jewish young people in the US there – happy to donate from afar.
The lands of the Negev, which were appropriated by the State, were not allocated for free to whoever would be willing to build and farm them (as was the practice in the US and Australia). They were settled quite successfully, however. By the Bedouins… who do not understand how socialism works…and simply took the land! There were no Israeli citizens there to guard the land. Most of those people dumped out of the truck found their way out of the Negev socialist paradise and returned to the slightly more free atmosphere of Tel Aviv…
Now the children of those immigrants have brought us a centralized economy from the Right side of the map. Yes, G-d’s Invisible Hand is working behind the scenes and the small measure of open market that we do have in high-tech and more is hugely successful. But just think how wonderful it would be if the young generation now entering the market wouldn’t have to work the most hours of all western economies, to earn the least and to pay the most. All that the State has to do is to stop interfering. Everything could be the best. Masses of young Jews coming here to get rich. Our Land is already flowing with milk and honey. G-d is already blessing us with abundance, but it is getting stuck in corruption and centralization. Let us open the economy and let Israel shine!
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