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I confess, this is an uncomfortable subject among conservatives. I love the Israeli state, I have Israeli friends, I think there is nothing finer or more lovely in recent history than the flowering of Jewish culture which came from the re-founding of the Israeli state. It restored to Judaism pride and confidence of a kind that had been savagely oppressed through two thousand years in the Western and Islamic worlds. There is nothing finer than to remark on the lives of the heroes of the Israeli state and the amazing exploits of bringing life to the desert, reviving a dead language, and the countless feats of arms of Israel.
But demographics are an inexorable leveler, and as Herbert said in Dune, "The tighter you clench the grains of sand in your fist, the faster they run through your fingers." The failure of Israel to immediately annex the West Bank and Gaza after the Six Days War was a terrible error from my perspective. Since then these territories have become concentrated masses of poverty, and poverty is a perfect recipe for a very high birth rate. Perhaps if the Israeli state had annexed them in 1967 and provided identical economic outcomes, the matter would be far more confident because the birth rate of the Palestinian Arabs would be much lower. But they didn't, and the demographic situation is now a grave one.
Worse, of course, the Israeli State has trapped itself into all the attendant horrors of an extended occupation, committing crimes against the farmers of the West Bank and Gaza as a matter of course. Nobody can really seriously argue that the property rights to their native land, which they have occupied for centuries, has not been routinely violated. That a large number of city dwellers more recently moved to the area of Palestinian and are no more native than the recent Jewish immigrants does not change this fact. The long-term detention and the restriction on freedom of movement of the Palestinians has guaranteed a constant feeling of hatred and enmity between the peoples. The Palestinians will destroy the Israeli Jewish population the moment they get the chance, we all know that. The Israelis have guaranteed, for understandable reasons, that is irrevocably the case. A One-State Solution would mean ethnic cleansing and the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine.
Where do we stand then? I fear that Israel has trapped itself, and that the BDS movement and other efforts will only grow louder and more successful. I fear that the Palestinian population will continue to grow, and continue to resist, exactly like the local Arabs did during the Crusaders. They will remember each slight, and each wrong, and wait, another century if necessary. As the pressure grows against Israel and the attacks continue, Israelis will move to other welcoming countries. The pressure will grow from the international community, and Israel will gradually become a pariah state. Finally, the international community will force a union between Israel and Palestine, declare it a great victory, and then watch in confusion and denial as over the course of ten or twenty years the Palestinians complete the total expulsion of the Jewish population and are finally victorious, over a wrecked and destitute mirage in the desert.
In short, it's going to play out exactly like the Crusader States did, on roughly the same time-scale.
I am a tremendous supporter of Israel, but also a tremendous pessimist about her future. I think Ariel Sharon's death was almost as a Greek Tragedy, a working to guarantee in Fate that Israel is ultimately destroyed, as he was struck down just before completing (by a withdrawal behind the Wall in the West Bank) the successful extraction of his homeland from the trap. Can anyone at this point successfully extract Israel from the trap? Or is she, in fact, doomed?
But demographics are an inexorable leveler, and as Herbert said in Dune, "The tighter you clench the grains of sand in your fist, the faster they run through your fingers." The failure of Israel to immediately annex the West Bank and Gaza after the Six Days War was a terrible error from my perspective. Since then these territories have become concentrated masses of poverty, and poverty is a perfect recipe for a very high birth rate. Perhaps if the Israeli state had annexed them in 1967 and provided identical economic outcomes, the matter would be far more confident because the birth rate of the Palestinian Arabs would be much lower. But they didn't, and the demographic situation is now a grave one.
Worse, of course, the Israeli State has trapped itself into all the attendant horrors of an extended occupation, committing crimes against the farmers of the West Bank and Gaza as a matter of course. Nobody can really seriously argue that the property rights to their native land, which they have occupied for centuries, has not been routinely violated. That a large number of city dwellers more recently moved to the area of Palestinian and are no more native than the recent Jewish immigrants does not change this fact. The long-term detention and the restriction on freedom of movement of the Palestinians has guaranteed a constant feeling of hatred and enmity between the peoples. The Palestinians will destroy the Israeli Jewish population the moment they get the chance, we all know that. The Israelis have guaranteed, for understandable reasons, that is irrevocably the case. A One-State Solution would mean ethnic cleansing and the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine.
Where do we stand then? I fear that Israel has trapped itself, and that the BDS movement and other efforts will only grow louder and more successful. I fear that the Palestinian population will continue to grow, and continue to resist, exactly like the local Arabs did during the Crusaders. They will remember each slight, and each wrong, and wait, another century if necessary. As the pressure grows against Israel and the attacks continue, Israelis will move to other welcoming countries. The pressure will grow from the international community, and Israel will gradually become a pariah state. Finally, the international community will force a union between Israel and Palestine, declare it a great victory, and then watch in confusion and denial as over the course of ten or twenty years the Palestinians complete the total expulsion of the Jewish population and are finally victorious, over a wrecked and destitute mirage in the desert.
In short, it's going to play out exactly like the Crusader States did, on roughly the same time-scale.
I am a tremendous supporter of Israel, but also a tremendous pessimist about her future. I think Ariel Sharon's death was almost as a Greek Tragedy, a working to guarantee in Fate that Israel is ultimately destroyed, as he was struck down just before completing (by a withdrawal behind the Wall in the West Bank) the successful extraction of his homeland from the trap. Can anyone at this point successfully extract Israel from the trap? Or is she, in fact, doomed?
