Facts On The Ground

I get a feeling those 544 Israeli homesteads going up in East Jerusalem — Jerusalem's Palestinian neighborhood — are going to have their own mortgage foreclosure problems on November 3, the day after elections. We've already updated the Saudi Arabian air force, and truth to tell, the Israelis have drifted perhaps too far into the old Yiddish joke, "God will get us for this!"

Have you noticed Greece, England and France are having budgetary crises? Who props up the Israeli economy? With that many nukes laying around, and no nuclear power (except that one we don't talk about in Dimona), hydroelectric resources or petroreserves to speak of (except for that British-owned natural gas drilling platform Ariel Sharon bombed in offshore Gaza), wouldn't you expect a gross imbalance in the old guns and butter equation?

Not even AIPAC has pockets deep enough, so who's siphoning dollars into Israel? A country the size of New Jersey has a GDP ($194 billion) half the size of New Jersey's GSP ($440 billion)? A hundred nukes is only about $100 million, not counting U.S., British and/or French atomic research and the spies required to carry it away, but that standing army, now... That seems kind of high maintenance.