(Commentary) Evelyn Gordon - Europe grants tens of millions of dollars a year to Israeli NGOs for the ostensible purpose of promoting "democracy" and "human rights" in the one Middle Eastern country that already does a reasonable job of protecting both. In 2010, the British government gave 600,000 pounds to Israeli NGOs; if you exclude Iraq, that's six times as much as it gave NGOs in all other Arab countries combined. No other democracy gets nearly as much foreign government funding as Israel does. These funds go almost exclusively to organizations striving in some way to get Israel to adopt ever more concessions to the Palestinians. While Western countries believed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was the Mideast's main problem, recent events have amply proven that this belief was simply false. This conflict had nothing to do with any of the real problems now preoccupying the West. But those problems might not be the metastasizing crises they are had the West not spent decades ignoring all the region's other patent ills in order to obsess over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Diverting those millions of euros from Israeli NGOs to all the countries that really do need help with democracy and human rights might be an excellent way to focus on the Mideast's real problems.
2015-12-11 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive