Job losses pose a threat to stability worldwide
The International Monetary Fund expects that by the end of the year, global economic growth will reach its lowest point since the Depression, according to Charles Collyns, deputy director of the fund’s research department. The fund said that growth had come to “a virtual halt,” with developed economies expected to shrink by 2 percent in 2009.
“This is the worst we’ve had since 1929,” said Laurent Wauquiez, France’s employment minister. “The thing that is new is that it is global, and we are always talking about that. It is in every country, and it makes the whole difference.”
In Asia, any smugness at having escaped losses on American subprime debt has been erased by growing despair over a plunge in sales among major exporters. On Thursday, Pioneer of Japan said it would abandon the flat-screen television business and cut 10,000 jobs worldwide in response to sagging demand for consumer electronics.
Millions of migrant workers in mainland China are searching for jobs but finding that factories are shutting down. Though not as large as the disturbances in Greece or the Baltics, there have been dozens of protests at individual factories in China and Indonesia where workers were laid off with little or no notice. [continued…]
For Israel, handling the relationship with its Arab minority is more crucial even than dealing with Hizbullah or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Israel needs to decide how it will deal with the Arabs in its midst. As extreme as it may sound, Lieberman’s call to disown them seems to have resonated with many of his fellow Israelis. Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that Israel’s Arabs constitute a demographic time bomb. He calls it unacceptable. Benny Morris, the once dovish historian who chronicled the forced expulsion of most Palestinians from the Jewish state in 1948, has turned to arguing that Israel needs to protect itself from the Arabs now living within its borders. “They are a potential fifth column,” he warned five years ago in an interview with Haaretz. “In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state … If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified.” It’s a dangerous spiral: the worse the distrust gets, the less loyalty Israel’s Arabs feel toward their country—and vice versa. Last week’s election has brought the issue into the open. Its resolution will define the future of Israel as a country, as a Jewish state, and as a democracy. [continued…]
Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, campaigned on a platform of “no loyalty, no citizenship,” arguing that Arabs in Israel should be required to sign loyalty oaths and accept its flag and national anthem. If they refused, he said, they should be stripped of their citizenship. Lieberman also wants to transfer Israel’s Arabs into the jurisdiction of a future Palestinian state, and has proposed the death penalty for Arab politicians who talk with Hamas. In Tuesday’s election, Yisrael Beiteinu became the third-largest party in the Knesset and a likely member of the next governing coalition.
These developments present very basic and very obvious civil rights concerns. But they also raise a deeper, fundamental question that Israelis generally prefer to avoid: Is it possible to be both a Jewish state and a democratic state? Or, put another way: Can a nation founded as a Jewish homeland — with a “right of return” for diaspora Jews but no one else, a Star of David on the flag and a national anthem that evokes the “yearning” of Jews for Zion — ever treat non-Jews as true, equal citizens? [continued…]
I remember being scared. Very scared. I remember I was having a conversation with a friend from Haifa who told me about his feeling that something had changed in the city. He talked about a different look he had started to see in the eyes of some people. A look of desire for revenge, he described it. I told him he was wrong and accused him of unnecessary paranoia, especially in an attempt to ally the fears I have. Fears that more than ever before, at least as far as I remember, there is a feeling that it’s legitimate to harass Arabs. Continue reading
