Thanks

Given the acrimony of the Somerville divestment debate, it's worth noting a few things to be thankful for on this holiday dedicated to thanks and appreciation.

To begin with, let's be thankful $2.3 billion dollars in exports from Massachusetts to the State of Israel since 1991, trade that translates to thousands of jobs for Massachusetts citizens. If the Somerville Divestment Group really wants to begin to harm Israel financially, they will have to contend with the fact that Massachusetts is Israel's 23rd largest trading partner, bigger than even many European countries.

The positive economic relationship between the Commonwealth and the Jewish state should not be too surprising. Both of us are small lands with highly educated citizens committed to investment and innovation in technology, agriculture and medicine. The list of hospitals, universities and companies that have benefited from trade and partnership with the Jewish state looks like a Who's Who of what is best in Massachusetts (do the names EMC, Genzyme, Beth Israel Hospital, Mass General, MIT and Tufts ring a bell?).

The boycott Israel movement likes to stress their opposition to investment in military organizations that they present as translating to one thing only: weapons supposedly used against Palestinian civilians. Yet how much joint cooperation between Israel and American defense companies has gone into security technology used, among other things, to protect Americans from flying in planes that might get blown up or flown into skyscrapers? If it's a choice between importing Israeli know-how to prevent another 9/11 vs. importing more pilots interested in repeating that horror a hundred times over, most Americans know what represents a better trade policy.

When listening to the long litany of condemnations of the Jewish state which routinely pour out of the UN, Arab and European capitals and now the Somerville Divestment Group, it brings up the question: how best to judge a society when considering punishment or praise.

For me, the accountant's balance sheet, with its credit and debit columns, has always been the most useful model when making such decisions. If one were to draw up such a balance sheet for the Jewish state, it would include not just Isreal's economic success and outreach to the world, but also it's ability to provide a home to millions of persecuted Jews and to provide an Arab population (over a quarter of Israel's citizenry) more political freedom than is enjoyed by any other Arab in the Middle East. Even if the debit side of Israel's balance sheet is populated by all of the accusations thrown against it (once cleansed, of course, of those that even the UN has exposed as lies - such as Jenin, Jenin), the Jewish state does not do too badly.

The other part of the balance-sheet process is to only compare one country's balance sheet with another's, not decide that certain nations (such as Israel and the USA) must be judged solely by their shortcomings and vices, while judging others by their rhetoric or theoretical perfection or, in the case of most of Israel's most vocal critics, ensuring that they are judged by no standard at all.

How thankful we could all be if such fairness broke out among the world's capitals, replacing condemnation and bitterness with reasonable discourse and honesty. Perhaps Somerville can actually set the example for the rest of the world by saying that an unfair, unbalanced, resolution to punish one state and one state only, a resolution that tried (and failed) to enter our lawbooks without the public's awareness, should not be part of a civil and civilized debate.