Save Improvident Farmers or Intransigent Israelis? The Cost is the Same

You hear the sobering statistics over and over. Of 2.2 million farms remaining in the United States, 74,000 will fail this year. The economists say consolidation is inevitable. After all, there were 10 million American farms not so long ago. But what if we decided that the US has enough agro-industrial complexes? That family farms are a national asset? That the US Government should save those 74,000 farms?

In fact it does have the money, and a precedent too. Israel is economically non-viable, and it has been failing ever since it was founded in 1948. Every year for 39 years the US taxpayer has bailed it out, for a total of $38,684,000,000in direct grants and loans since 1948. That's $65,000 for every Israeli Jewish family of five.

That might have been enough to save all of the American farmers who failed over the same period. But since it's been spent, we can't use it now. What we could use to save our remaining farmers, however, is the $3 billion we give Israel—$1,000 for every Jewish citizen—every year. That's $1,364 for every remaining farm in the United States. A lot of money, but perhaps not enough for a farmer in deep trouble. Suppose, however, we had used this year's $3 billion only for the 74,000 farmers in trouble this year? That's $41,895 per farm in trouble. And the same amount would be available every year to help that year's farmers in trouble pay off or at least consolidate their debts.

There might be no more American farm failures, and little further decline in the number of American farm families. Consolidation that continued would be voluntary, not as the result of bankruptcy.

Hold on, you say? Some of those farmers don't deserve the bailout? They spent their money buying expensive equipment they didn't need? Took over more land than they could work profitably? Made their own bed, so let them lie in it?

Why, then, don't we apply exactly the same standard to the Israelis? Instead of giving back the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights in exchange for peace with the Arabs, the Israelis loaded up with tanks and planes to hold on to land they'll never use themselves. Policing lands occupied by a million and a half hostile Arabs creates more security problems than it solves. We've told them so, repeatedly. They've told us to mind our own business, repeatedly.

So who should Americans use their $3 billion to save each year? Our desperate family farmers, probably our greatest single national asset, or the intransigent Israelis, certainly our greatest single foreign policy liability?

Shouldn't we at least vote on it?—Richard Curtiss

Richard Curtiss, a retired US Foreign Service Officer, is Chief Editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute.