Naomi Klein on Putting Jews in Context
Stability breeds prosperity, or so we thought. How to explain, then, Israel’s strikingly rosy economic situation? Hamas uses the southern Negev as a missile range, Iran is developing a nuclear arsenal, tensions are rising between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank, and a prime minister fell amidst a flurry of scandals. Through it all, the Israeli economy has soared, growing 5 percent in 2007 alone. In her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan Books, 2007), journalist Naomi Klein argues that Israel’s economic growth relies on political turmoil and regional violence, a sign of a dark future in which peace has no economic incentive.
An award-winning journalist for The Nation and The Guardian, Klein’s previous book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, established her as a superstar among left-wing thinkers. In The Shock Doctrine, she traces the history of the neo-liberal economic reforms associated with the University of Chicago’s economics department under Milton Friedman. Klein posits that such reforms have been implemented not by popular will but in the wake of “massive collective shocks,” such as natural disasters and wars, when the public was in no position to resist. Klein points to the massive transformation of the Chilean economy following the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power, the use of “shock and awe” in Iraq immediately preceding the privatization of the Iraqi economy, and the major reform of the New Orleans school system following Hurricane Katrina. Her chapter on Israel argues that the country is a case study of the “shock doctrine” carried to its logical endpoint: a state that has turned its perpetual state of war into an economic asset by developing military technologies into a key export.
Klein joined New Voices by phone to speak about recent developments in Israel, what it means to be a Jewish intellectual, and how the lessons of the Holocaust influence her thought.
You make the case that the Israeli economy is now booming thanks to its investments in military and security technology. Why don’t we hear more about this from the Palestinians and other critics of Israeli policy in the West Bank?
This is becoming more overt now because for the first time the checkpoints themselves are being privatized. The privatization of the military and the privatization of security in Israel was a little hard to see at first, compared to Iraq or Colombia where the presence of mercenary troops is really in people’s faces. In Israel, there is a very strong state military sector; the army is very large and public. Because of the mandatory military service, there isn’t a shortage of troops that you have to bolster with mercenaries. [The privatization of the military] really happened … after the dot-com bubble burst, [and tech companies] realized that the homeland security sector was a very viable growth sector. It’s a pretty easy jump to make from being a dot-com information company to becoming a war on terror security company. They’re still working in technology, but now they’re working in biometrics, surveillance technologies, security technologies. And so then you have another disincentive for peace. What Israel is selling to the world is its particular expertise in fighting this broadly defined war on terror, which has been framed by the Bush administration as a war that will go on indefinitely.
You write in The Shock Doctrine that the economic inequality that often results from neo-liberal economic programs is not resisted in part because of “shocks” like terrorist attacks and natural disasters. In the case of Israel, the barrier separating Israel from the West Bank has been highly effective in decreasing the frequency of terrorist attacks. Is it possible that the barrier could be “too successful”? What if the “shock” wears off and Israelis begin to notice deepening economic inequalities? Should we be viewing the recent saber rattling over Iran as an attempt to prolong the conflict?
Israel is one of a handful of countries in the world that exists in a state of perpetual crisis. And what happens in a country where a state of crisis is the natural state is that [the political leadership] is able to constantly defer any issue as being not as urgent as the crisis. Whatever your grievance is, it will always be pushed down and delayed and deferred until after the crisis. And then the crisis never ends. A country in a perpetual state of crisis values a certain type of authoritarian politician, because in a crisis you need strong figures. It doesn’t breed a very democratic culture. And frankly, I think Israel’s politicians are panicked by the idea of normalcy because they have no experience with it and they haven’t been trained to deal with it.
In terms of Iran, it’s a more complicated discussion. There are various reasons why this saber rattling is happening, and I wouldn’t want to attribute it exclusively to the need to maintain a perpetual state of crisis. I don’t think Israel’s politicians know how to not have a crisis.
You also have chapters in your book about Africa, Latin America, and Iraq. Is it different for you, as a Jew, to write critically about Israel?
Israel is always more emotionally difficult for me. I think mainly it’s because of the force of the reaction and the closeness [of the] reaction. It’s not a stranger that is upset about [what I write], it’s people in my family who write me long letters saying, ‘Oh, I hate you!’ So it obviously strikes closer to home.
There’s a way in which we want to exclude Israel from the world and say it is so special, so different, that no analysis except for one specific to the Jews and the Holocaust is allowed to have any place in the discussion. For so many Jews, there’s a deep defensiveness around Israel, a profound desire to see Israel as an exception in every way. I get letters from people saying, I agreed with you about everything in the book, but you lost me completely on Israel.’
Do you see yourself as a Jewish intellectual?
I don’t know what it means to see yourself as a Jewish intellectual. I see that I’m a Jew, and I’m a writer. When I was doing this research I [did have in mind] the history that I was taught in Jewish schools when I was a kid; how the Holocaust happened, [that it] had a strong economic component. I don’t know how you were taught the Holocaust, but what they taught me was that there was an economic depression in Germany, and when that happens people look for scapegoats, and they went after the Jews. So I do think that my interests have been informed by my understanding of that history and my understanding of just how dangerous it is when you shock an economy. I think we see an example of that in this moment in the United States, where you have all of this economic rage. That rage is either going to go up or it’s going to go down. It’s going to go after the corporations that have imposed this economic model, or it’s going to be effectively redirected to Mexicans. And there are a lot of people working really hard to make sure it’s effectively redirected to Mexicans. So I feel a particular responsibility as a Jew to remind people of this history.
One of the most disturbing reactions that I got to the book was when I presented it in Germany. Some of the right-wing economists I’m writing about are Jewish, like [Milton] Friedman. Talking to German journalists who were essentially accusing me of anti-Semitism was a really unique phenomenon. I never make an issue in the book of Friedman being Jewish, but I can tell you on a personal level that I find it shocking that Jewish economists, of all people, knowing the history of the conditions in the Weimar Republic that created the rise of fascism, willfully shocked economies and created conditions where tens of thousands of people were suddenly thrown into poverty.
Speaking of reactions to your work, you were asked in an interview on Fox Business News whether you were an “anti-Capitalist.” You replied that The Shock Doctrine is not an argument against capitalism, but for democracy. You weren’t really allowed to explain this argument on Fox Business News. What did you mean?
I think that the impulse to trade goods and services is human nature, but we need economic models that have room for diversity. I think we should have democracy in as many parts of our lives as we can, including, if we want, in the work place. I [favor] cooperatively run work places that have as their goal not just the creation of profit for shareholders, but the creation of jobs for communities and the creation of the goods that communities need. Capital needs big profit to survive, but what people need are jobs and food. If business flees because profits aren’t good enough, people find innovative ways to meet those needs. That’s the way that people responded to the Great Depression. Crises can be moments of innovation and of deep democratization. That’s the message that I try to end the book on. But it’s at the end of a long and arduous journey.
