Is privatizing West Bank checkpoints step 1 in an Orwellian ‘economic peace’?

by Philip Weiss on June 29, 2009 · 3 comments

Rob Browne writes:
I just saw this article by Amira Hass in Haaretz on a private Israeli security firm that is running a checkpoint and is implementing more severe restrictions on food that can be brought into Israel than the IDF-run checkpoints–including even large water bottles.  The checkpoint is at Sha'ar Efraim, south of Tul Karm, and is managed for the Defense Ministry by the private security company Modi'in Ezrahi.

An additional surprise came later in the article:

 
MachsomWatch activists said a security guard on duty told them the food restrictions were imposed due to "security and health risks." However, at the nearby Qalqilyah checkpoint, which is still run directly by the IDF, workers have been allowed to carry through all the food items banned at Sha'ar Efraim.

However, responsibility for the Qalqilyah checkpoint is supposed to be transferred to a private company this week, and workers voiced concerns that similar restrictions might be imposed there.
 
I wonder if we are watching the beginning of a Bush-Cheney-Netanyahu neocon privatization scheme of the checkpoints (a la Blackwater and Haliburton)?  If this happens, the rules for the Palestinians may become even more harsh and arbitrary.  There also may be less recourse for victims, since these guards may not be subject to IDF rules.  I am concerned that this will also allow Israelis to be even more removed from the troubles of the checkpoints, just as we, in America, have been able to distance ourselves from the atrocities committed by private soldiers.
 
If this is a sample of Netanyahu's neoconservative ideas at work, one can only imagine the horrors that will occur if he actually attempts to create an "economic peace" with the Palestinians.

Related posts:

  1. UN: Israel Has Increased Checkpoints and Roadblocks in West Bank
  2. Can Netanyahu have an ‘economic peace’ with Palestinians without political changes?
  3. Israel relaxes some checkpoints. But some are removed, then reinstated
  4. Peace Now and J Street should join the battle against tax breaks for the West Bank colonists
  5. I-dont-hate-Israel handcuffs, blindfolds and deports Gazan for being in West Bank

{ 3 comments }

1 patriot June 29, 2009 at 3:49 pm

Why not? A GI = a Hessian.

2 DICKERSON3870 June 29, 2009 at 4:49 pm

RE: "If this is a sample of Netanyahu's neoconservative ideas at work…" MY COMMENT: I read about plans for this long before Olmert resigned.

3 ThorsProvoni June 29, 2009 at 11:11 pm

From Nixon and Jewish Hate Politics:

In general, application of Friedman's economic theory corresponds so closely with the arenda system[281] and with the history of Jewish exploitation in the Ukraine that it could be considered to be an expression of an epistemic culture associated not merely with Zionist politics but with Zionist politics hybridized with traditional Yiddish economics. Because the Friedmanite profiteers are so far away from the modern equivalent of potentially enraged Cossacks or ethnically cleansed Palestinians, Friedmanism is a far superior as a form of theft or brutal exploitation than either Zionism today or the arenda system in the seventeenth century Ukraine. The counter-Marxist Friedmanist concept of withering away the state by selling off its functions to private enterprise worked well with Nixon's southern strategy because it was a way for the Republican party to promise racially anxious whites a theoretically weaker federal government less inclined in the future to engage in civil rights activism like the 1970 decision of the IRS to remove the tax-exempt contribution status of Bob Jones University on account of the school's rules against interracial dating.

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