Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

Some thoughts of former Netanyahu official Lenny Ben-David bear repeating:

Gaza is the “most overpopulated few square miles in the whole world,” wrote veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk in a recent dispatch in the British Independent. Both Israel’s Army Radio station and Al-Jazeera’s English television reported that “Gaza is the densest populated area in the world.” But the claim is simply not true.

About 9,713 Gazans are crowded into each square mile of the strip’s total 147 square miles, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But there are denser areas in the world such as Singapore (18,645 people per square mile on 241 sq. mi. of territory) and Hong Kong (18,176 per sq. mi. on 382 sq. mi.).

Population density need not translate to abject poverty and political unrest. Singapore and Hong Kong are situated along maritime trade routes and their per capita GDP surpasses $42,000. Gaza, however, despite its Mediterranean shoreline and an estimated $4 billion in offshore natural gas reserves, tallies only $1,100 per capita. Surely, Israel’s siege of the hostile Hamasland chokes Gaza and is a major factor in its astronomical unemployment. But, Gaza is not necessarily destined to remain a “rubbish dump of destitute people,” to use Fisk’s words.

Speaking in Sweden where he’s accepting a Nobel Prize for economics, Princeton economist and New York Times commentator Paul Krugman told Reuters the world is headed for a deep recession.

Paul Krugman … said the plan to recapitalize banks has the potential to heal financial institutions, unlike the U.S.-led plan to buy bad debt that preceded it. …

In his interview with Reuters, Krugman warned that the crisis has already inflicted serious damage on the world economy.

“There is a tremendous amount of downward momentum built into the real economy from this crisis,” he said. “Even if we unlock the credit markets, we probably still have a nasty recession ahead of us.”

A JTS and a YU rabbi wonder if halacha could have prevented the Wall Street crisis. Time magazine notes:

Wall Street

That may not be so exotic as it sounds. Every theology has a subdivision for business ethics, but Judaism’s is especially complete. It is said that more of the 613 commandments in the Jewish bible deal with keeping one’s money kosher (or “fit”) than pertain to one’s food; and the business literature springing from that concern may be the longest and most continuous in the world.

…

The question these days, [Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, professor of rabbinics at JTS,] says, is not whether Jews can be induced to be more ethical than the market, but whether the market can be made more ethical. “I think classic rabbinic tradition is certainly pro-regulatory,” he says.

An interesting and very short read.