drc500free

That's how a lot of cards (all?) make money. And then they add interest and annual fees. How do you make profit, while targeting a riskier consumer segment, and not charging those things?

This is like saying you are starting a walmart competitor with lower prices, and you make money because when people buy things they pay for them.

Or to have their entire careers sacrificed because politicians want to make a diplomatic statement with a boycott, and don't bother consulting the athletes.

Well, remember that the Arab "countries" didn't exist before the fall of the Ottoman empire just two decades before. It was all Ottoman land, then the Ottomans lost WWI and it became British and French land.

The British and French transferred control to certain ruling families based on support they had gotten during the war, and in the end gave nearly all of the middle east to the Arabs, who claimed they were an oppressed minority within the Ottoman Empire - and many of them did in fact fight for the Allies.

They promised one (important) corner of the region to the Jews, including access to the coast and access to Jerusalem. There was a lot of debate on whether to follow through, but then the Holocaust happened and no one wanted to take in the refugees from that. So they bowed out of the region, having given 95% of the Ottoman land to the formerly-Ottoman Arabs. The Palestinians got shafted, but they weren't the separate, unified ethnic group they are now. Gaza and WB are Jordanian and Egyptian land, where Jordanian and Egyptian citizens lived alongside Palestinian refugees who had been refused citizenship prior to 1967.

The surrounding countries have pretty much moved on from the conflict, and the narrative has become Israel against only the Palestinian Arabs that live in the territory captured during the 1967 counter-attacks. But Israel still views it as a united middle east against them, and views them as being part of the enemy armies that invaded in 1947, 1967, and 1973.

I think that, in general, the government over-estimates the effectiveness of policy and the public underestimates it.

In the technical community, a policy solution is considered to not be a solution at all. But they don't understand the government culture that (a) rabidly follows policy 99.9% of the time and (b) has the resources to break most technical solutions if unrestrained by policy.

Now that's an interesting differentiator!