Who Rules Israel – Shir Hever pt2

While the Israeli billionaires control much of the economy, the political and military class mostly control the state. Many of the billionaires just want to find ways to invest outside of the country. Shir Hever pt2 on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay. Transcript Paul Jay Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. I'm continuing my conversation with Shir Hever about Palestine, the situation in Israel, and not just the current conflict, but some of the context that you don't usually hear. We'll be back in a second. So again, now joining us to discuss the situation in Palestine, particularly in Israel, is Shir Hever. He's a political economist living in Heidelberg, Germany. He was born and raised in Jerusalem. And his recent book is The Privatization of Israeli Security. Thanks for joining me. Shir Hever Thanks for having me, Paul. Paul Jay So when you get beyond public opinion and the factions of Israeli society, the thing that rarely gets talked about is the oligarchy of Israel. There's a lot of conversation even about the oligarchy of the United States. Bernie Sanders talks about it. We talk about the oligarchy and Russia and some other places. But the oligarchs of Israel rarely get talked about. And also what's rarely talked about is the state of not just militarization of Israel, in terms of the IDF and the suppression of Palestine, but the importance of that to the Israeli economy. So give us a sense of who actually owns the preponderance of Israel and where the real power lies? Shir Hever The Israeli economic system is very centralized. There is a very, very small group of billionaires who control a very large proportion of the stock market of large companies. But very interestingly, they don't necessarily control a lot of influence politically. And I think in that sense, Israel is very different from the United States, for example. And the reason is that Israel is rather small. You can have one billionaire from the United States who dwarfs all of these Israeli billionaires and decides to support his favorite candidate. And the name of that billionaire was Sheldon Adelson, who passed away recently. And he decided to give so much money to create a newspaper in Israel which is free. So it's distributed all over. And this is a pro-Netanyahu newspaper that crushed the chances of all the other political opponents, even if they had some backing of this or that local Israeli billionaire to compete with Netanyahu. So these Israeli billionaires, it's a very interesting phenomenon. A lot of them, especially the bigger and more successful ones, dedicate their time to try to get out. And they're looking for investments outside of Israel and they're leveraging their investments in foreign companies, like in Switzerland or in Russia or in Canada, which they don't fully explore and study all the way. And sometimes they make the wrong gamble. And so we had, especially with the economic crisis of 2008, but not only then, a series of very heavy, crashing bankruptcies of Israel's biggest billionaires. One after the other, creating a lot of impact on the Israeli market. And I think that is a very interesting feature of the Israeli economic system, where sometimes you have local Israeli billionaires saying, "We really want to see peace. We want to see a two-state solution. We want to see the end of the occupation because it's not good for business", but it doesn't help them to say that. They could pour as much money as they want on leftist candidates and it's not going to change the election results because in the end, the right wing populism,