If you look at the region based on the Fraser Institute index of economic freedom — which measures the freedom to make economic decisions, personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to enter markets and compete, and security of the person and privately-owned property — you can really see Israel as the lone representative of those democratic capitalist Western values and the prosperity they generate.
One reason a poll that finds that a quarter of Americans aged 18 to 24 think Israel should be “ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians” is so bizarre — and repugnant — is that Israel is the only country in the region that most of them would ever want to live in. The above map alone should dispel the notion that “colonialism” is to blame here.
As Azeem Ibrahim of the US Army War College has succinctly put it, “Is it Zionists and Crusaders who plunder the wealth of Muslim countries? Perhaps that was once the case, in the heyday of Western colonial expansion in the Middle East. But that was well over half a century ago. The world has moved on. And now those countries are plundered by their own political and military leaders.”
[‘Colonialism’ was an issue when Marx wrote Das Kapital. By the end of WWII, it was all but ancient history. Jews are hardly colonialists in Israel anyway, but even if one wanted to argue that, what natural resources would they have plundered from the ‘natives’? This region was dirt-poor during the Ottoman Empire, and the valuable natural resource of the region — oil — is almost entirely controlled by Arabs and Persians. What the Israelis built, they built through economic freedom and ingenuity. — Ed]
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