Israel: The Next 60 Years

As Israel turns 60, a new obstacle is emerging to join all the other obstacles to the much-vaunted two-state solution. Namely, the fact that increasing numbers of Palestinians now dismiss a two-state solution in favor of a one-state solution in which the West Bank, Gaza and Israel become a unified country under majority rule.

If such a nation were created today, it's majority would be Jewish. But not for long. Thanks to a far higher Arab birthrate, demographers estimate that by 2025 Jews would constitute only 46% of the population of a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

This is one reason why Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Olmert, are so eager to shed the territories and their huge Arab populations and push forward with a two-state solution now, while there's still a chance.

"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights," Olmert recently told the LA Times, "the state of Israel is finished."

The idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might evolve from a struggle over land to a battle over equal political rights within one land strikes many as just one more strategy by the Arabs to destroy the Jewish state. And in a sense it is.

So on Israel's 60th anniversary, it's sobering to realize that after six decades as a fact-on-the-ground, the security and even existence of Israel remain far from assured.

This is often attributed to the mere intransigence or the radicalism of the Arabs. But is it really? Would history have unfolded in a different way if Israel had been founded in a different place, among different neighbors? Or put a different way, does history hold example of states like Israel that were accepted by their neighbors, instead of ceaselessly rejected?

The answers, sadly, are probably no. It is true that Israel is the result of a process -- settlement migration -- that led to the foundation of many stable and successful countries, including the US, Canada and Australia. But in the case of Israel, settlement migration never achieved the most crucial thing required for success: the power of numbers. And that has made all the difference.

To see what I mean, it helps to look at how settlement migration has succeeded -- and failed -- in creating states in the past.

Throughout history, the most common type of settlement migration was settlement migration followed by assimilation. France is a typical example. Throughout French history, Gauls, Roman settlers, Frankish invaders, Normans and other tribes all battled over the same land. New settlers fought at first with older inhabitants, but eventually intermarried, adopted a common religion and ultimately morphed into the French. Assimilation was the key that led to peace and stability.

This was by far the most common type of settlement migration in history, and it led to most of the stable modern national identities in the world today.

The last few hundred years saw a different category come to the fore: Settlement migration without assimilation, but by settlers who achieved overwhelming demographic superiority. That model prevailed in much of the New World, Australia and New Zealand.

In most of these cases, native populations were perfectly prepared to keep resisting the settlers endlessly. The factor that finally convinced them to give up was not the settlers' superior technology, military might or organization. It was numbers.

The resisting natives fought continuously until the day they looked out across the horizon, saw the endless wagon trains, the charging locomotives, the massive cities rising on the plains, and realized they had been completely outnumbered. Only then, did they reluctantly give up.

But if overwhelming demographic superiority was the key factor that led to the success of states like the US, Canada and Australia, what happens when history produces settlement migration without overwhelming numbers?

There, the historic record has not been kind to the settlers. They may start off victorious due to superior arms, technology or organization. But the defeated locals have no real motivation to admit defeat. They look around and see that they themselves have the overwhelming numbers, and assume that sooner or later they must prevail. So they fight on endlessly, leading to two general outcomes.

One is endless conflict, often punctuated by periods of truce, but always followed by more conflict. The other is that the newcomers themselves are eventually defeated and either driven off the land altogether, or at least driven out of power.

Consider a few examples:

In the 1500s and 1600s large parts of Ireland were settled by Protestants from England and Scotland. But the newcomers never came close to swamping the native Irish numerically, and neither side ever dreamed of assimilating. So the struggle between the Catholic natives and the Protestant settlers has raged off and on in Ireland for four centuries. Even periods of peace lasting many decades always gave way to more conflict.

Or consider the French settlement of Algeria. Hundreds of thousands of French "colons" were convinced they had created a stable new world in Algeria. The colons, however, were surrounded by several million Algerians well aware of their own numerical superiority. Today, the world of the French colons has vanished.

Even in the Americas, in places like Guatemala, Ecuador and Peru where native populations remain in the majority without substantial assimilation, wars and uprisings have flared for five hundred years.

Similar problems confronted Moslem settlers in places like Spain, the Balkans and India, where they, too, never swamped the natives numerically. In Spain the Moslems were eventually driven out after eight hundred years. The Balkan region has been a scene of ceaseless conflict. In India, the minority Moslem settlement ultimately led to a chaotic division at Independence into a 'two-state solution' (Indian and Pakistan) and a brutal population transfer, followed by tension, terrorism and wars ever since.

Tellingly, one of the most notable failures of this kind of migration happened on the very ground where Israel sits today. In the Middle Ages the Europeans carved out a dynamic and powerful settlement in much of what is now Israel and Lebanon that thrived for about a century. But the Arabs knew they had the numbers and never gave up. In the end, the Crusader state disappeared.

Looking out over the historic record, it is difficult to find any example of settlement migration that lacks either assimilation or overwhelming demographic superiority (or both) that ever turned out well for the newcomers.

Israel today is a nation of 5.3 million Jews and 1.3 million Arabs within its pre-1967 borders, and over 3 million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. It is surrounded by an ocean of 300 million Arabs, expected to rise to over 400 million by 2020. There is no serious intention on either side to assimilate in terms of widespread intermarriage or conversion to the others' religion, language or culture.

To many Westerners and Israelis, it looks like the Arabs keep losing and just can't admit it. To many Arabs, it seems equally obvious that they are guaranteed to win in the long run.

This is not to say that history produces iron laws, for Israel or anyone else. The relatively benign fate of the white settlers in South Africa is an example of how vision and reconciliation can trump a historic record that would not necessarily have predicted such a peaceful outcome.

But the ultimate resolution of the conflict in South Africa was not separation and a two-state solution. It was, rather, its opposite: A single state with the white settlers relinquishing power to majority rule.

In the end, the historical record suggests that Israel faces several unpalatable scenarios: One is the Irish/Balkan scenario of endless conflict, which is essentially what we have witnessed so far. One is outright destruction, like the Moors of Spain and the colons of Algeria, the end-game advocated by rejectionists like Hamas and Ahmadinejad. One is difficult bi-national accommodation in a single state with majority rule, like South Africa. And of course one is the Zionist dream: a normal state where Jews can live securely in their own country.

It is this dream, based upon a unique Israeli claim on the conscience of the world, that makes Israel different from all other such states in the past, and that perhaps provides the a glimmer of hope that this beleaguered country can avoid the fate of similar experiments that came before.

But as Israel marks 60 years without genuine acceptance by its neighbors, the tragic failure of settlement migration without numerical superiority seems to be repeating itself. Based upon that sad record, this much can be said: If Israel ever convinces its neighbors to genuinely welcome it to the neighborhood as a normal country in a two-state solution, it will be a feat unprecedented in history. And Prime Minister Olmert is right: the longer it takes to bring that outcome about, the less likely it becomes.

Comments

[fairguy]

A fundamental fact about Israel is that unlike other settlement based societies, the majority of Israeli Jews have no allegiance to another country and therefore nowhere else to go. Pressed with their backs to the wall in 1948, 1967 and 1973, they emerged victorious. The balance of military power has since shifted even more in Israel's favor and is not likely to change soon, regardless of rising Arab numbers. In reality the biggest danger to Israel is the tendency of Western liberal-pr­ogressives to bunch it with other historic colonial movements. Convenient to the Ahmadenijads of the world but irrelevant to today's political reality.

Another example worth considering is the provincial arrangement in Canada. Although Anglophones have always been the majority, they considered that reaching a peaceful accommodation with the Quebec Francophone population was advantageous over the alternatives. When the majority of Palestinians confront reality, the two-state solution will work.