|
Follow the Middle East Forum
|
|
Please take a moment to
visit and log in at the subscriber
area, and submit your city & country location. We will use this
information in future to invite you to any events that we organize in
your area.
The
One-State Solution Is on Our Doorstep
Be the first of
your friends to like this.
Originally published under the title, "Between the
Settlers and the Unsettlers, the One-State Solution Is on Our
Doorstep."
A one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is upon us.
It won't arrive by Naftali Bennett's proposal
to annex the West Bank's Area C, or through the efforts of BDS
campaigners and Jewish Voice
for Peace to alter the Jewish state. But it will happen, sooner
rather than later, as the states on Israel's borders disintegrate and
other regional players annex whatever they can. As that happens, Israeli
sovereignty in Judea and Samaria is becoming inevitable.
Last week's rocket attacks from Gaza failed to inflict many casualties
in Israel—but they administered a mortal wound to Palestinian
self-governance. Hamas launched its deepest strikes ever into Israel
after the IDF cracked down on its West Bank operations following the
murder last month of three Israeli boys, arresting nearly
900 members of Hamas and other terrorist groups. Humiliated in the territories,
and unable
to pay its 44,000 Gaza employees , Hamas acted from weakness,
gambling that missile attacks would elicit a new Intifada on the West
Bank. Although Fatah militias joined in the rocket attacks from Gaza, for
now the Palestinian organizations are in their worst disarray in 20
years.
The settlers of Judea and Samaria have stood in the cross-hairs of
Western diplomacy for two decades, during which the word "settler"
has become a term of the highest international opprobrium. Yet the past
decade of spiraling conflicts in the Middle East have revealed that what
is settled in the region is far less significant than what is unsettled.
Iran's intervention into the Syrian civil conflict has drawn the Sunni
powers into a war of attrition that already has displaced more than 10
million people, mostly Sunnis, and put many more at risk. The settled,
traditional, tribal life of the Levant has been shattered. Never before
in the history of the region have so many young men had so little hope,
so few communal ties, and so many reasons to take up arms.
As a result, the central premise of Western diplomacy in the region
has been pulled inside-out, namely that a resolution of the Palestinian
refugee issue was the key to long-term stability in the Middle East. Now
the whole of the surrounding region has become one big refugee crisis.
Yet the seemingly spontaneous emergence of irregular armies like the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) now rampaging through northern
Mesopotamia should be no surprise. The misnamed Arab Spring of 2011 began
with an incipient food crisis
in Egypt and a water
crisis in Syria . Subsidies from the Gulf States keep Egypt on life
support. In Syria and Iraq, though, displaced populations become foraging
armies that loot available resources, particularly oil, and divert the
proceeds into armaments that allow the irregulars to keep foraging. ISIS
is selling $800 million a year of Syrian oil to Turkey, according to one
estimate , as well as selling electricity from captured power plants
back to the Assad government. On June 11 it seized the Bajii
power plant oil refinery in northern Iraq, the country's largest.
The region has seen nothing like it since the Mongol invasion of the
13th century. Perpetual war has turned into a snowball that accumulates
people and resources as it rolls downhill and strips the ground bare of
sustenance. Those who are left shiver in tents in refugee camps, and
their young men go off to the war. There is nothing new about this way of
waging war; it was invented in the West during the Thirty Years War by
the imperial general Albrecht von Wallenstein, and it caused the death of
nearly half the population of Central Europe between 1618 and 1648.
As a result of this spiraling warfare, four Arab states—Libya,
Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—have effectively ceased to exist. Lebanon, once
a Christian majority country, became a Shia country during the past two
decades under the increased domination of Hezbollah. Nearly 2 million
Syrian Sunnis have taken refuge in Lebanon, as Israeli analyst Pinhas
Inbari observes, and comprise almost half of Lebanon's total
population of 4 million, shifting the demographic balance to the
Sunnis—while the mass Sunni exodus tilts the balance of power in Syria
toward the Alawites and other religious minorities, who are largely
allied with Iran. Jordan, meanwhile, has taken in a million Syrian
Sunnis, making Palestinians a minority inside Jordan for the first time
in a generation. A region that struggled to find sustenance for its people
before 2011 has now been flooded with millions of refugees without
resources or means of support. They are living for the most part on
largesse from the Gulf States, and their young men are prospective cannon
fodder.
The remaining states in the region—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran—will
alternately support and suppress the new irregular armies as their
interests require. Where does ISIS get its support, apart from oil
hijacking in Syria and bank
robberies in Mosul ? There are allegations that ISIS receives support
from Turkey
, the Sunni
Gulf States , and Iran
. Pinhas
Inbari claims that Shiite Iran is funding Sunni extremists "to
be certain that a strong Iraqi state does not emerge again along its
western border." There are equally credible reports that each of
these powers wants to stop ISIS. Saudi Arabia fears
that Sunni extremists might overthrow the monarchy. Turkey fears that the
depredations of ISIS on its border will trigger the formation of an
independent Kurdish state, which it has opposed vehemently for decades.
Iran views ISIS as a Sunni competitor for influence in the region.
To some extent, I believe, all these reports are true. The mess in the
Middle East brings to mind the machinations around Swedish intervention
in the Thirty Years War between 1627 and 1635, when France's Cardinal
Richelieu paid Sweden's King Gustavus Adolphus to intervene on the
Protestant side in order to weaken France's Catholic rival Austria. At
different times, Protestant Saxony and Catholic Bavaria allied with
France, Austria, and each other, respectively. France and Sweden began as
allies, briefly became enemies, and then were allies again. Looming over
this snake-pit of religious, dynastic, and national rivalries was the
figure of Albrecht von Wallenstein, the Austrian generalissimo who twice
saved the Empire from defeat at the hands of the Protestants.
Wallenstein, commanding a polyglot mercenary army with no national or
religious loyalty, played both sides, and Austria had him murdered in
1634.
There is more than coincidence to the parallels between the Middle
East today and 17th-century Europe. Iran's intervention into Syria's
civil conflict inaugurated a new kind of war in the region, the sort that
Richelieu practiced in the 1620s. Iran's war objectives are not national
or territorial in the usual sense; rather, the objective is the war
itself, that is, the uprooting and destruction of potentially hostile
populations. With a third of Syria's population displaced and several
million expelled, the Assad regime has sought to change Syria's
demographics to make the country more congenial to Shiite rule. That in
turn elicits a new kind of existential desperation from the Saudis, who
are fighting for not only the survival of their sclerotic and corrupt
monarchy, but also for the continuation of Sunni life around them. Today
Iraq's Sunnis, including elements of Saddam Hussein's mainly Sunni army and
the 100,000 strong "Sons of Iraq" force hired by then-U.S.
commander Gen. David Petraeus during the 2007-2008 surge, are making
common cause with ISIS. Tomorrow they might be shooting at each other.
The expectation that the waves of sectarian and tribal violence that have
caused national borders to crumble across the Middle East will die down
in 30 years may be both incredibly grim and wildly optimistic.
In the background of the region's disrupted demographics, a great
demographic change overshadows the actions of all the contenders. That is
decline of Muslim fertility, and the unexpected rise in Jewish fertility.
The fall in Muslim birth rate is most extreme in Iran and Turkey, with
different but related consequences. When Ayatollah Khomeini took power in
1979, the average Iranian woman had seven children; today the total
fertility rate has fallen to just 1.6 children, the sharpest drop in
demographic history. Iran still has a young population, but it has no
children to succeed them. By mid-century Iran will have a higher
proportion of elderly dependents than Europe, an impossible and
unprecedented burden for a poor country. Iran's sudden aging will be
followed by Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia.
Source:
U.N. World Population Prospects
|
Iran's disappearing fertility is in a sense the Shah's revenge. Iran
is the most literate Muslim country, thanks in large part to an ambitious
literacy campaign introduced by the Shah in the early 1970s. As I showed
in my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too),
literacy is the best predictor of fertility in the Muslim world: Muslim
women who attend high school and university marry late or not at all and
have fewer children. This has grave strategic implications, as Iran's
leaders unabashedly discuss.
Between 2005 and 2020, Iran's population aged 15 to 24, that is, its
pool of potential army recruits, will have fallen by nearly half. To put
this in perspective, Pakistan's military-age population will have risen
by about half. In 2000, Iran had half the military-age men of its eastern
Sunni neighbor; by 2020 it will have one-fourth as many. Iran's bulge
generation of youth born in the 1980s is likely to be its last, and its
window for asserting Shiite power in the region will close within a
decade.
The Obama Administration wants to contain Iranian aggression by
accommodating Iran's ambitions to become a regional power. As the president
told Bloomberg's Jeffrey Goldberg in March, "What I'll
say is that if you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and
they're not impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their
interests, and they respond to costs and benefits. And that isn't to say
that they aren't a theocracy that embraces all kinds of ideas that I find
abhorrent, but they're not North Korea. They are a large, powerful
country that sees itself as an important player on the world stage, and I
do not think has a suicide wish, and can respond to incentives." Any
deal with Iran is therefore a good deal from Obama's point of view. But
that is precisely wrong: Iran does not have a suicide wish, but it knows
that it is dying, and has nothing to lose by rolling the dice today.
The Sunni powers view Iran's desperate expansionist drive with as much
dismay as do the Israelis. The Saudis already worry about Iranian
subversion in their Shia-majority eastern province. Turkey, meanwhile,
sees the sand running out in the hourglass. After decades of civil war
with its Kurdish minority and 40,000 deaths, Turkey is gradually becoming
Kurdish. The Kurds have 3.3 children per female versus only 1.8 for
ethnic Turks, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt estimates, which means that
within a generation, half the recruits to the Turkish army will come from
Kurdish-speaking homes. Turkey has done all it can to forestall the emergence
of a Kurdish state on its border, but it has failed. Iraq's breakup has
given rise to a Kurdish state de facto if not yet de jure, and it is only
a matter of time before Turkey itself shows territorial cracks.
Israel is the great exception to the decline in fertility from North
Africa to Iran, as I argued in a 2011
essay for Tablet magazine. The evidence is now overwhelming that a
Jewish majority between the Jordan River and the sea is baked in the
cake.
The CIA World Factbook estimates
total fertility of Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza at just 2.83 in
2014, versus 3.05 in 2011. The total fertility of Israeli Jews,
meanwhile, has risen above three children per female. Yakov Faitelson reported in
the Middle East Quarterly:
From the beginning of the twenty-first century the TFR of Israeli
Muslims decreased considerably, from 4.7 in 2000 to 3.5 children per
woman in 2011. The TFR of all Arabs decreased still further to 3.3 children
per woman, very close to the 3.09 for Jews born in Israel. In November
2011, a new comprehensive ICBS projection was published in which the
government office admitted that in the past it had overestimated Israeli
Arab fertility and underestimated Jewish fertility.
Jewish immigration is consistently positive and accelerating, while
Palestinian emigration, at an estimated
10,000 per year since 1967, is reducing the total Arab population
west of the Jordan River. Palestine Authority data exaggerated Arab
numbers in Judea and Samaria by about 30 percent, or 648,000 people, as
of the 1997 census. As Caroline Glick observes in her 2014 book The
Israeli Solution, Jews will constitute a 60 percent majority between
the river and the sea, and "some anticipate that due almost entirely
to Jewish immigration, Jews could comprise an 80 percent majority within
the 1949 armistice lines and Judea and Samaria by 2035."
Source:
U.N. World Population Prospects
|
Israel therefore has little to fear demographically from annexation.
Net Jewish immigration and net Arab emigration will combine with higher
Jewish fertility to establish a Jewish supermajority over time. The
character of the West Bank population is changing: It is becoming older
and more educated, and increasing numbers of Arabs are benefiting from
the strong Israeli economy. Over time, West Bank Arabs may embrace
Israeli citizenship—when it is offered—as firmly as their counterparts
inside the Green Line. The so-called apartheid issue is a canard. Israeli
Arabs lived under martial law between the end of the War of Independence
in 1949 and 1966, and no one spoke of apartheid. Israel's most pressing
problem in the near future may be Arab refugees trying to get in.
As a non-Israeli, I do not wish to recommend a particular course of
action to Israel's government. But the notion that the Palestinians could
stay clear of the riptide that has engulfed their neighbors was fanciful
to begin with and has now been trampled by events. Over the past two
decades, since the Oslo agreements were signed, the Palestine Authority
shown little ability to govern anything. After Egypt's military
government suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood, it turned viciously against
the Brotherhood's Palestinian wing, Hamas, and blockaded Gaza. If the PA
were capable of ruling the West Bank, it would have allied with Egypt and
Saudi Arabia to further isolate Hamas: Instead the PA formed a national
unity government with Hamas. Events have shown that the PA cannot rule
without Hamas, and it cannot rule with Hamas; it can neither support nor
suppress terrorism on the West Bank. The inability of the Palestine
Authority to govern, the inability of Hamas to distance itself from its
patron in Tehran, and the collapse of the surrounding states eventually
will require Israel to assume control over the West Bank. This time the
Israelis will stay.
Israel can't rely on the PA to conduct counterterrorism operations
against Hamas, its coalition partner. Israel's border with the Hashemite
Kingdom in the Jordan Valley, meanwhile, has become a strategic pivot.
ISIS is now operating in strength at the common border of Israel, Syria,
Jordan, and occupied Iraqi-Syrian border towns close to the common
frontier with Jordan. Jordan's own security requires a strong IDF
presence on its western border.
When Israel absorbs Judea and Samaria—and it is a when, not an if—the
chancelleries of the West will wag their fingers, and the Gulf States
will breathe a sigh of relief.
The historical homeland of the Jewish people will pass into Israeli
sovereignty not because the national-religious will it to be so, or
because an Israeli government seeks territorial aggrandizement, but
because Israel will be the last man standing in the region, the only
state able to govern Judea and Samaria, and the only military force
capable of securing its borders. It will happen without fanfare, de
facto rather than de jure, at some moment in the
not-too-distant future when the foreign ministries of the West are locked
in crisis session over Iraq or Syria. And it will happen with the tacit
support of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
Israeli authority will replace the feckless regime of the Palestine
Authority in order to maintain public order and ensure that the
electricity works, and the roads are secure, and that bands of jihadist
marauders or Shiite terrorists do not massacre entire villages; this
action will elicit the reflex condemnation from bored and dispirited
Western diplomats. The realization of the Zionist dream will then be consummated
not with a bang, but a whimper; the bangs will be much louder elsewhere.
David P. Goldman, Tablet Magazine's classical music critic, is the
Spengler columnist for Asia Times
Online, Wax Family Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and
the author of How
Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too) and the essay
collection It's
Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You.
|
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment