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bonly saved the Arab farmers from ruin but opened the door to an bera of affluence they had never known. Immediately after the bwar a huge agricultural surplus existed which had always been bshipped to Jordan and the Persian Gulf. The entire rural popu- blace of Judea-Samaria depended on this. Had the surplus bspoiled, it would have been an economic disaster for the Arab bfarmers and a less-than-subtle signal that life under the occupa- btion would be very difficult. bBut the Israelis, incredibly, saved Judea-Samaria Arabs bfrom economic collapse. Joel Marcus, dovish writer for the liber- bal paper Ha’Aretz, painted an idyllic picture of all this in the bJewish Agency’s publication Midstream (June-July 1968): b“Thanks to this trade. . . the West Bank was saved from eco- bnomic collapse. Since the war, over $40 million worth of goods bhave passed over the Jordan in both directions. Everywhere in bthe West Bank trucks can be seen loading the harvest; when bthey get to the Allenby bridge, they change their Israeli license bplates for Jordanian ones and continue on to Amman where btheir cargo is sold to its traditional customers.” bThe government has made the Arabs of Judea-Samaria- bGaza richer than they ever dreamed they could be. Large sums bof money have been poured into these areas, and the best of bIsraeli technology has trained and advanced the Arabs there. bAnd so, Israel was delighted to learn on April 4, 1976, that “ag- bricultural production in the administered territories [sic] has bgrown at a faster rate than anywhere since 1968!” The speaker bwas Reuven Eiland, director general of the Ministry of Agricul- bture. He gladdened Jewish hearts by announcing that in eight byears the average per capita income of Judea-Samaria farmers bgrew from $133 to $666 (a jump of 500 percent!) and that this bincome was 4.5 times higher than the average Egyptian bfarmer’s. He added that “apart from receiving professional help bfrom Israel, they also get credit, loans, and export incentives.” bWorkers from the territories poured into Israel to work for bcheap wages, eliminating Jewish jobs, creating a steady pool of bcheap “dirty labor” that destroyed the Jewish work ethic, and bmaking Israel dependent on them. They did not pay taxes, and bthe territories became boom areas with houses built right and bleft, appliances filling homes that now had electricity, toilets, band things never imagined before the Israelis came.
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