Avi Aharon

Picturing the future Objectivist state of Israel, I consider it trivial to imagine how it would look. Business and employment-wise, the last two decades had already provided lot more opportunities than the decades before them. Sure, you had no government position waiting for you when you were 21, but with a little resourcefulness and imagination, you had many doors open to you and many directions to chose from.
What about education? I went to government-owned schools. Out of five schools and a university, one was excellent, one was terrible and the others were somewhere in between. How’s my son’s kindergarden doing in comparison? I think it’s doing pretty good. Kids at the ages of 4 and 5 know more math than I knew at the age of 7 (they count to 100, add to 20 and subtract to 10, most of them read at least a little, they group child books by authors, and so on). Kindergardens in Israel are mostly private, and they influence the government-owned as well. I’ll return to this fact later on: the fact that you have a privately held kindergarden, and free competition, improves the government-owned kindergardens.
Now, what about defending the state of Israel?
What if we had 5 to 10 private armies? What if the army unit that is in charge for the border with Gaza were private? The common believe is that the last time a western civilization had more than a single, centralized army, it looked like hell.
How do we know? Well, we all read Hobbs at school.
I believe that the basic concept that gets someone to win a war is not the concept of a centralized government and a single army. The concept is to be always prepared (invented by the Romans, and helped them to last for a thousand years). To what extent, and how to accomplish this preparedness? The Objectivist answer is that the it is up to you.
The IDF – the Israeli army – is doing very lousy. Should the southern command be privatized as a whole? Maybe not. Should tank and infantry divisions all be privatized? Again, maybe not. Should a contractor apply for a government contract for defeating Hamas? This is an option I’d consider a good sandbox to gather information from.
Is this contractor going to take us to 12th century England (here’s an excellent Atlasphere article on Ken Folett’s mediavel novells)? not if you don’t subject yourself to the church and accept the fact that practicing your sword for several hours a week can’t be all to bad.
I guess we all agree privatization is good. Starting a private business won’t corrupt you, right? Getting you close to money won’t corrupt you, either.
The privatization of the army shouldn’t scare the Objectivist mind, certainly not for Hobbsian reasons.

The Netanyahu UN speech (YouTube) is widely accepted as a success. For the first time for two decades, certainly ever since the October 2000 war, Israel stands for its own.

Nice, isn’t it?

It’s always nice to hear that Israel has a right to exist and wage defencive wars whenever it finds appropriate. If you have a problem with that, Israel with stand for its own and tell you that calling for its annihilation is unheard of. The Netanyahu speech, if given right after the 1948 war of independence, would be considered as a success.

In 1948, Israel was a newborn political body, where some people didn’t like that, waged a war, got defeated, got their population kicked out, end of story. However, by 2009 the state of Israel has been losing wars for four decades consecutively (1970, 1973, 1982, 1987, 2000, 2006, 2009).

The UN – a political body that for some reason finds itself closely related to genocides all over the world – had published its report exactly because Israel is so weak. The UN report – dealing with the way Israel has acted in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead (December 2008 – January 2009) – tested Israel’s will to further destroy itself. After all, it worked in 1991 (following Israel’s inability to react to the Iraqi missiles shot during Operation Desert Storm). The UN justly identified Israel’s weakness, and initiated a move that ended up in the Oslo accord, and almost ended Israel itself.

Netanyahu should have taken these facts into account. Instead of playing the UN game (you give a speech, we take a further step towards ruining you), he should have pulled Israel form the UN. In addition, as the UN report deals with Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, it would be nice to launch a new operation, commemorating the UN report with additional killed terrorists.

I’d further suggest that from now on, The Gladstone report day – Sep-16 – will be a day of broad Israeli attacks on Gaza, a reminder to the entire free world for the proper way to deal with the UN.