MER Article Israel's Private Arms Network Arms and military goods have become Israel’s main export item, to the tune of well over $2 billion per year. [1] Israel has exported arms to more than 60 countries and an undetermined number of armed groups worldwide. A peculiar feature of Israel’s arms business is that up to one third of sales are Bishara Bahbah • 8 min read
MER Article Recipe for an Israeli Nuclear Arsenal Ten years ago, 62 percent of Israelis questioned in a poll were convinced that their nation had the nuclear bomb; 77 percent thought that if it didn’t already have it, it should. Only four percent believed Israel was nuclear-free. [1] In October 1986, an Israeli nuclear technician revealed to the Su Martha Wenger • 19 min read
MER Article Private Capital in Israel The overwhelming majority of big capitalists in Israel today emerged from a group of no more than 60,000 “veterans” of the Jewish settlement in Palestine who arrived before the creation of the state or are descendants of such veterans. Some, especially from Sephardic families who settled in Palestin Joel Beinin • 11 min read
MER Article Black, Garrison Guatemala George Black with Milton Jamail and Norma Stoltz Chincilla, Garrison Guatemala (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984). A Chicana from California on a recent political study trip to Guatemala elicited a special tour from guards at Guatemala’s seat of government, the National Palace, by putting on Martha Wenger • 1 min read
MER Article Findley, They Dare to Speak Out Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1985). Beshara Doumani • 4 min read
MER Article Israel in Central America What is Israel’s role in Central America, and why have the nations there sought arms and military advisers from Israel? There seem to be four reasons for this curious relationship. The foremost has to do with the reliability of the main military patron in the region, the United States. At one point Margo Gutierrez, Milton Jamail • 25 min read
MER Article Israel and Guatemala From the May-June 1986 issue of Middle East Report: Israel’s increasingly visible presence throughout the Third World, including such disparate places as the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Zaire, Botswana, El Salvador and Argentina, raises a number of questions about the objectives and chara Cheryl Rubenberg • 30 min read
MER Article Document: The Mind of the Censor Gaza Ghetto, a documentary film about a Palestinian family in the occupied Gaza Strip by MERIP editor Joan Mandell and Swedish filmmakers Pea Holmquist and Pierre Bjorklund, premiered in Stockholm in November 1984. In January 1985, a Palestinian theater company in Jerusalem, El-Hakawati, purchased a (Author not identified) • 4 min read
MER Article Israeli Spies in the US November 21, 1985, was a remarkable day. FBI agents arrested a civilian terrorism analyst working for the US Navy, Jonathan Jay Pollard, outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, where he had gone seeking political asylum. Six days later, Pollard was arraigned in federal district court on several c Jeff McConnell • 13 min read
Benvenisti, Israeli Censorship of Arab Publications Meron Benvenisti, Israeli Censorship of Arab Publications: A Survey (New York: Fund for Free Expression, 1984). Sarah J Graham-Brown • 2 min read
Who Votes for Kahane? The election of Rabbi Meir Kahane was undoubtedly the most traumatic outcome of the elections to the eleventh Knesset. His party, Kach, obtained 25,907 votes, or 1.2 percent of all valid votes, five times as many as in the previous elections. To understand this, we have examined the economic, social (Author not identified) • 3 min read
Israel's Economic Crisis In the middle of August 1985, Minister of Science and Development Gideon Pat called on the Israeli public to disregard government declarations that the shekel would not be devaluated. The minister, on national radio, advised the public to purchase American dollars. The broadcast was aired on Friday Shlomo Frenkel • 12 min read
