Cutting the Middle East’s Gordian knot: Why Israel Cannot Survive in Its Present Form
by John Chuckman
October 31, 2013
Some Israelis are fond of comparing Israel’s displacement of Palestinians to the historical experience of North
Americans in displacing indigenous people, but the comparison is inaccurate on almost every level. First, comparing
events of two hundred years ago and today is misleading: norms of human rights and ethics and law have changed
tremendously in that time. Besides, people all over the world see and read of such injustices today, something not
possible at an earlier time.
Second, the indigenous people of, for example, Canada consist of roughly one million out of a national population of 35
million, whereas Palestinians have reached slightly more than half the population of Israel-Palestine which is about
eleven million. The scale and relative size of any event are important, as we are reminded time and again concerning the
Holocaust
Third, the original indigenous North American people lived in a non-intensive economy of hunting and gathering and early
agriculture, activities not compatible by their very nature with European settlement and development in a given region.
But the Palestinians often are shopkeepers and farmers and tradesmen and professionals, activities fully compatible with
the European development Israel represents.
Fourth, and most importantly, all of North America’s indigenous people are full citizens of their countries with rights
to move and to work anywhere and the right to vote in elections and the freedom to marry anyone or claim any benefit
owing to a citizen, whereas Israel holds the best part of five million Palestinians (Gaza, West Bank, and East
Jerusalem) in a seemingly perpetual state of having no rights and no citizenship. A Jewish Israeli cannot even marry a
Palestinian Israeli without serious consequences. The million or so Palestinians who are Israeli citizens - owing to the
accidents of war in 1948 and certainly not to Israel’s embrace of diversity - are only technically so, having passports
but having many restrictions and constant suspicions placed upon them. More than a few influential Israelis have spoken
to the idea of driving them entirely out of the country at some point.
If, as Israel always insists as a pre-condition for peace talks, Israel were to be formally recognized by Palestinians
as “the Jewish state,” what happens to the million or so Palestinians who are now (nominally) Israeli citizens?
Israel long has been concerned with the relative rates of growth of Jewish and non-Jewish populations in Israel proper
and in the occupied territories. The populations are now roughly equal for the first time, and from now on the Jewish
population likely will diminish as a fraction of the whole. These relative growth rates reflect the advanced European
and American status of many Ashkenazi Jews, the people who largely run and own Israel. Advanced people today in all
Western countries do not replace their populations. That is why even stable old European states are experiencing social
difficulties with large in-migrations.
Significant in-migration always changes a country. Even a country such as Britain which we are used to thinking of in a
well-defined set of characteristics is undergoing change, but the truth is our thinking about the character of a place
like Britain is illusory. Britain over a longer time horizon was Celtic, Roman, Germanic, and Norman French with bits of
others such as Vikings thrown in – all these going into the make-up of what we call the British people, what we think of
as represented by, say, Winston Churchill with derby, umbrella, cigar, and distinctive accent, but, of course, Sir
Winston also was half American (his mother).
Ethnic purity of any sort is a nonsense, and one hesitates even to use the phrase after the lunacies of the Nazis.
Oddly, early in the Third Reich, the Nazis had considerable difficulty agreeing on what defined a Jew for purposes of
the infamous 1935 Nuremberg Laws. After years of preaching hatred against Jews during their rise to power, you might
think the Nazis clearly understood exactly what the object of all that hatred was, but that proved not to be the case.
Under the compromise reached between various factions of the party, “three-quarter Jews,” those with three Jewish
grandparents, were considered Jews. “Half-Jews,” those with two Jewish grandparents and two “Aryan” grandparents, were
considered Jews only if they practiced the faith. “Quarter Jews” were considered as non-Jews. Attempting to rationalize
the irrational always leads to absurd, not to say dangerous, results.
And yet, in a bitter paradox, Israel perpetuates a version of this thinking. A conception of just who is a Jew is
necessary because all those regarded as Jews have the right to immigrate to Israel and to receive generous assistance in
settling there. But as with any such conception, it suffers disagreements and adjustments over time, a recent one
involving whether to recognize certain African groups holding to ancient variations of Jewish belief. Moreover, inside
Israel there are great disagreements about rules set by one group of Jews, the ultra-orthodox, governing important parts
of the lives of other groups of Jews.
As for today’s population shifts, the larger a country’s population, the more easily it absorbs in-migrants with minimal
disturbance, but countries the size of Denmark or even Holland have experienced serious disturbances given the
generosity of their past acceptance of refugees. And just so Israel, whose small population has struggled with huge
in-migrations of Russians and others in recent decades. Many older Israelis have been irritated by them, and many of the
Russians irritated at what they find in Israel. Smaller groups of in-migrant Jews and of refugees, ones with dark skins,
have aroused some very ugly scenes recently in Israel, especially among the ultra-orthodox, scenes not altogether
different to those of Bull Connor’s Birmingham, Alabama.
The Arab population in Israel-Palestine grows along the rates of third-world populations which have not experienced full
demographic transition, something demographers have identified as an historic event in all advanced countries, a
one-time population adjustment from the ancient human pattern of high birth and death rates to a modern one of low rates
for both. High birth rates yield a young and growing population in any land where high death rates once claimed the
lives of many children and kept population growth suppressed, but vaccines and improvements in diet and hygiene have
lowered traditional infant mortality in many parts of the world. In advanced countries, the pattern has been for birth
rates to fall once lower death rates are seen as the new reality, yielding slow to non-existent or even declining
population growth. This last part of demographic transition requires a degree of prosperity to be achieved, something
which Israel’s occupation makes impossible for Palestinians.
Countries with modern, non-replacement levels of fertility must rely on in-migration to grow and, in many cases, just to
keep their populations where they are. All of advanced Europe and the United States and Canada are in this situation. A
declining population has many implications, from shortages of key skills and talents to a decreased pool for soldiers
and an outright decline in a country’s economic output. All advanced nations today maintain their populations through
immigration.
Israel has been built almost wholly through immigration. Because Israel defines itself in such limiting terms as a state
for only one group of people, with that group being a tiny fraction of world population (about 15 million out of 7
billion), Israel faces likely an insurmountable problem obtaining required future migrants. Its last source of
substantial population growth was from Russia, and there are no more large pools of Jewish population left in the world
willing to trade their situation for that of Israel. Jews now living comfortably in Europe and North America are
certainly willing to visit Israel and perhaps donate and perhaps even do a business deal, but most are not willing to
pack up and move there.
And why should they? Life is good in Europe and much of North America. In modern Israel there are endless tensions and
arguments and difficulties, and immigrants face everything from national service requirements (for men and women) to
punishing taxes and high costs of living and, in more than a few cases, intense prejudices. It is not surprising that
recent World Bank data show significant net out-migration for Israel over the last 5 years, something new in the
country’s brief history.
Why does Israel hang on to the occupied territories, the source of great stress and conflict, with their Arab population
approaching 5 million? The answer, to a great extent, is found in a concept called Greater Israel. Greater Israel is
supposed to reflect information from the Old Testament about the extent of biblical Israel. It includes the West Bank
and Gaza, a slice of Syria, much of Lebanon, and other bits, all depending on which of several definitions you accept,
there being no maps in biblical literature and words having been used with far less precision than we accept today. And
there is something almost silly and chimerical about taking so literally ancient writings which include people being
swallowed by a whale or turned into a pillar of salt. Whether chimerical or not, It is easy to see how dangerous the
concept is today.
Many astute observers believe Israel’s 1967 War was deliberately engineered to seize much of the territory required for
Greater Israel. At the time, France and the United States, while promising security for Israel, warned it not to use the
war to increase its territory, but Israel did use the war that way. One of the explanations for Israel’s intense attack
on the USS Liberty, a well-marked spy ship about which Israel had been informed in advance, was to silence America’s
minute-to-minute information as Israel hurriedly turned its armored forces from Egypt towards the north and murdered
hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war to expedite the operation. Israel’s own behavior since 1967 certainly supports the
idea of conquest as the war’s goal.
One suspects many Israeli leaders secretly believe in Greater Israel, with a number of them having spoken about it. It
is important to know that the ultra-orthodox – whose parties are required for either major party’s forming a government
- are the fiercest and most unapologetic believers in Greater Israel. For them “the promised land” must be as promised
thirty centuries or so ago. Of course, believers in Greater Israel are not typically heard to explain what would happen
to millions of Palestinian residents, other than such flip notions of their all moving to Jordan where they supposedly
belong. What we see in Israel’s regular building of new settlements in the occupied territories does, for all the world,
resemble a policy of slow-motion ethnic-cleansing towards creating Greater Israel. It certainly is a policy extremely
hostile to any hopes of peace and stability.
How can you be so hostile and yet say that you search for peace? You cannot, at least in the real world. So how does any
realistic person interpret Israel’s continued stealing of other people’s homes and farms? Israel calls these periodic
thefts “facts on the ground” towards negotiation, but that ambiguous expression much resembles Israel’s public pledge
never to be the first in the region to employ nuclear weapons, yet we all know that Israel does indeed have nuclear
weapons while no one else does (most recent estimate is 80 nuclear warheads and a stockpile of fissile material adequate
to better than double the number). While many Israelis rail against liberals who criticize such things, the simple fact
is that the very definition of liberal-minded makes it impossible to accept them.
No place can sustain a sense of crisis indefinitely, something Israel has done since its founding, and the continued
occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights only add greatly to that sense of crisis. The
costs in material terms and in psychological ones are high. Indeed, it is an unnatural thing for any state to sustain
itself as a garrison state, a garrison state being a fortified place where service in the armed forces, various secret
services, and a large bureaucracy concerned with such matters, provides an unhealthily large part of the national
economy. Such institutions consume great amounts of wealth and produce little beyond basic security, and any nation with
an inordinately large set of such institutions is at a comparative disadvantage to other nations not so burdened.
Apart from the immense cost of occupation, Israel’s army is showing increasing signs of unhappiness and demoralization
with its role in the occupied territories. Adding to the general malaise expressed by hundreds of soldiers and veterans,
the recent government commitment to subject the ultra-orthodox to military service for the first time is sure not to
prove a happy experience. It is the ultra-orthodox parties who have most driven the ferocity of Israel’s position with
its neighbors. These are the people who every once in a while run out and seize Palestinian land, building shacks on it
and calling it a settlement, or who chop down ancient olive groves so that the Palestinians who own them cannot make a
living. And these are the people who absolutely will not live with others who are different, including even many other
Jews. Their men will not ride with women on a bus, and there is a long history of attacks on people living near or
passing through their neighborhoods, as the defacing of non-orthodox temples, the physical assaults on outsiders in the
streets, and such extreme acts as burning down the homes of women regarded as loose, sometimes with the occupants
inside. When their young men and women have to wear uniforms and do duties in the occupied territories and at borders –
and note women as well as men are drafted into the army - they are going to be very unhappy, but if the government fails
in its intentions, there will be continuing unrest in the larger part of Israel, many of whom regard the ultra-orthodox
as an embarrassment and a national problem.
Israel hopes with such measures as drafting the young ultra-orthodox to better integrate them into society, but this
seems a hopeless idea. Can you integrate old-order Mennonites into society at large? To even attempt to do so is to
destroy the foundation of their beliefs, much like America’s futile attempts to alter behaviors of fundamentalist
Muslims in Afghanistan.
Since the beginning there have been internal conflicts in Israel between the ultra-orthodox and others. Many outsiders
are not aware of the extent of the secular, indeed worldly, nature of a great part of Israel’s population. A very large
part of Israel’s population is secular, estimated at well more than 40% while the orthodox and ultra-orthodox are about
20%. Yet many social rules legislated in Israel are to please the ultra-orthodox – after all, they do hold the balance
of power in Israeli elections - and since a great part of Israel’s population is not observant in religion, regarding
its Jewish identity as cultural, most Israelis live under legislation with which they are uncomfortable, but it is
difficult to imagine how these differences and irritations can ever be rectified. Indeed, within Israel’s Jewish
population, the only people with larger-than-average birth rates are the ultra-orthodox. Much as with Mennonites or
old-fashioned Mormons, the ultra-orthodox eschew many of the benefits of modern society and live to some extent as
though it were still the 19th century, including 19th century rates of fertility.
It is also demoralizing for a good part of the population to realize that their country is in much the same business as
past discredited societies such as apartheid South Africa. How else can it be, given the occupied territories and
Israel’s notion of itself as the Jewish state? It is also demoralizing to read overwhelming expressions of disapproval
in the world’s press and to see the reactions of others when travelling on an Israeli passport. Indeed, the Israeli
government has gone to the desperate extreme of paying thousands of students to counter criticisms of Israel on internet
commentary and social sites around the world.
The elite class of Israel consists largely of Ashkenazi Jews from Europe and North America. Recent historical research
and DNA testing do tend to support an old but unproven idea, once subject to the accusation of anti-Semitism, that their
origin is not the ancient Hebrew people but a 7th to 9th century people from the Caucasus called the Khazars, converts
to Judaism. And, to add more irony to the situation, historical research (and some DNA testing) supports the idea that
today’s Palestinians are in part descendants of the Hebrews. There is no record from Rome of its having expelled the
population when it conquered the region, nor would such an act be characteristic of Rome in its many conquests. Whatever
the final truth of the matter, these ideas, now taken seriously by some world-class scientists and scholars, can only
add to the unease and discomfort of modern Israelis.
Israel, since its founding, has been the most subsidized state in the world, maybe even in the history of the world.
Israel’s economy for that reason cannot be sensibly compared to anything. It receives about $500 per year per Jewish
citizen from the United States, and it has done so for decades. But that is only the beginning. There are periodic loan
guarantees of tens of billions. There is constant access at the highest level for this nation with the population of
Ecuador, something no other country, even a far more important one, has.
It has a plum free-trade agreement – indeed, without exporting its subsidized crops Israel’s agriculture would disappear
- a costly gift to Israel because it has no tangible benefits for Americans. The opportunity cost of the water Israel
squanders on tomatoes and clementines to export is unbelievably high because it is the cost of desalination-plant water.
It thus sends subsidized produce to the United States under free trade, produce the United States doesn’t even need.
Israel receives billions worth of intelligence and defense cooperation every year from the United States, something few
other countries receive. The billion and a half dollars a year going to Egypt is a bribe paid on Israel’s behalf by
Americans since the Camp David Agreements. Israel receives heavily below-cost natural gas from Egypt, the result of U.S.
pressure. Everyone knows this is scandalous, and the U.S. offered to pay a subsidy if Egypt raised the price. Israel
also receives billions from the Jewish communities of America and Europe, and it receives important business
intelligence and connections.
The great privilege granted to American Israelis to be recognized as dual citizens, a status of which the United States
in general disapproves, means they move back and forth regularly, all the while sharing business and other intelligence.
Israel’s farms and cities and water supply were all taken with absolutely no payment or reparations from other people,
that being the biggest subsidy ever received, the very substance of the nation. Israel has received tens of billions in
reparations from Germany – wholly appropriate in view of the past – but still a subsidy, and today Germany still
subsidizes things like submarine construction. The list is even longer than this, but I think the point is clear: Israel
is, in no meaningful sense, an independent national economy. It is in truth a gigantic international welfare case.
Israel, despite the subsidies, does not offer a good living for a great many of its citizens. Huge demonstrations – much
hidden in the Western press – revealed great discontent in a country where the costs of basics like home ownership are
intimidating. And it is hard to see how it can be otherwise in a very small, economically-inefficient country with
military and security costs like no other.
Subsidies do not continue forever, and many of the sources of Israel’s subsidies must eventually tire of its never
honestly trying to create meaningful peace. Many Jews in America, while continuing to support Israel, increasingly are
irritated and embarrassed by its counter-productive policies and often outrageous acts. How long can they be depended
upon?
Israelis like to complain of Western liberals and their views of the country, but they fail to remember who their
historic allies and enemies were. Today’s “friends of Israel” represented by the likes of Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich
or America’s religious right were the very types who exuded anti-Semitism and admired Nazis a bit more than half a
century ago. How secure are such attachments?
The Holocaust generation will completely disappear soon, taking with it a great deal of the intense fear and guilt which
powered Israel’s creation. The efforts of ideologue Zionists for decades would never have made Israel a reality. It took
the immensity of the Holocaust, influencing both Jews and nations like the United States - which could have accepted
refugees before the Final Solution, but flatly refused, sending boatloads back to Germany - to create modern Israel. The
United States position on Israel has always been riddled with hypocrisy, imposing a terrible burden on Palestinians for
something which was neither their fault nor anything they could have prevented and giving huge aid to Israel instead of
helping with compensation for Palestinians rendered refugees in their own land.
The virtual industry we have seen in building museums and publishing books dedicated to the Holocaust largely goes
against normal human nature: people have a built-in capacity to forget great pain and turn to the stuff of living.
Saying that does not mean that the Holocaust will be forgotten, only that it will assume its place in history with so
many other terrible events and great upheavals, events and upheavals which are hard historical facts, not ever-present
sources of pain and fear. But the Holocaust as a continued rationalization for the injustice and abuse we see in
Israel-Palestine is losing its force both inside and outside Israel.
No democratic state can thrive under the long continued presence of a large military and intelligence establishment, the
United States being the world’s premier example of this truth. For its size, Israel’s military-intelligence
establishment is quite huge. Such institutions simply do not operate under democratic rules, and they do not promote
democratic values within society. Quite the opposite, through their training of cohorts of young people, their secret
demands on politicians, and secretive operations, they erode democratic values and respect for human rights. That fact
combined with Israel’s continued occupation and abuse of millions and the fundamental fact that Israel’s idea of
democracy begins with one group making all decisions do mean that Israel’s democracy is a rather poor one.
Moreover, it is an historical fact that democracies, not protected by a Bill or Charter of Rights, will everywhere and
always abuse minorities. Power, however granted, is power, and there is nothing magical about democratically-granted
power which protects any group or party differing in its views. Yet, by its very nature, Israel can never have a Charter
of Rights, and therefore Israel can never be a proper democracy.
Last, Israel plays a decisive role in keeping in place the very dictatorships and monarchs around it that its
politicians regularly decry in speeches aimed at American audiences. Why was the Egyptian Revolution, for example,
completely turned around so that eighty million people are back to living under a junta? Why was a clean democratic
election with Hamas, a party which represented genuine reform from Fatah, treated as a terrorist event, leading to
elected officials being arrested wholesale and their leader openly threatened with assassination, a bloody invasion of
what is essentially a giant refugee camp, piracy on the high seas, and a years-long punishing blockade? Israel does not
want, and will not allow, democracy in any meaningful sense to emerge amongst its neighbors. And the fundamental reason
for this is that Israel knows the popular will of virtually all of its neighbors is not friendly to Israel’s most
selfish interests. So does that mean that all of Israel’s neighbors are doomed to tyrannies or monarchs in perpetuity? I
think it does, so long as Israel is the kind of state that it is.
In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, one extremely wealthy American supporter of Israel supplied Newt
Gingrich with the best part of $20 million towards Gingrich’s ambition of becoming the Republican candidate. Even in
America’s money-drenched political system, such generous support does not come free. The price in this case was
Gingrich’s periodically announcing in speeches that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian,” an echo of Golda Meir’s
years-ago, dismally dishonest claim. Do Jews in Israel or America really enjoy hearing such paid-for nonsense from
American politicians? More than anything, Gingrich resembled a pet monkey on a chain dancing for his supper. Such
performances only demonstrate desperation by Israel’s apologists, a kind of frenzied wish-fulfillment to make a
tremendous real problem disappear, and I’m sure many are embarrassed or disturbed by them.
Many of Israel’s Ashkenazi people hold dual citizenships, America and other countries having made an exemption to their
traditional opposition to dual citizenships. While it might have been an adventure or a special opportunity to live in
Israel or an expression of religious or cultural attachment, it is very likely many of them increasingly will take
advantage of their situation to return to the lands of their birth. There is a better life for almost any class of
people to be had in Europe or North America than in Israel. Better economies, greater opportunities, higher standards of
living, no military draft for children, no daily scenes of abuse, no need to rationalize or apologize about your
citizenship, no intense, unresolvable internal conflicts, and no sense of being surrounded with hostility.
No matter how many ultimately leave, large numbers of Jews will continue to live in the Middle East, but a purely Jewish
state is no more sustainable in the long run than was the Soviet Union with its built-in anti-economic assumptions
generating perpetual economic weakness. So, too, a state based on fear, which is in part what Israel is today. Fear does
not sustain and ultimately cannot be sustained in any population. Stalin’s Soviet Union operated on fear for a
considerable amount of time, but in the end even the dedicated communists desperately wanted to end fear. The many Jews
who do remain will have to accommodate the realities of the region. They will come to accept Albert Einstein’s idea of
Zionism: Jews living in the Middle East without the apparatus of a special state and a large army and living with
respect for their neighbors. Perhaps, what will ultimately emerge is a single nation living in genuine peace. At least
we can hope.
ENDS