Posted by
InchDeep on Monday, May 05, 2008 11:38:12 AM
Are We Witnessing the Death of Israel by a Thousand Cuts?
Jonathan Power, Arab News.
Even Jimmy Carter, who single handedly (without much Jewish
appreciation) has done more to make Israel secure than any other living
person, can’t change the march of demographics. Within the boundaries
of the State of Israel and the occupied territories there are 5.4
million Jews and 4.6 million Palestinians. The Palestinian birth rate
is almost three times that of the Israeli Jews. If anything the Jewish
population is starting to fall as an increasing number of Jews decide
that Israel has no future for them and in significant numbers emigrate.
The far seeing Richard Nixon, when asked by Patrick Buchanan and his
wife, how he saw the future of Israel, turned down his thumb “like a
Roman emperor at the gladiators’ arena”.
Perhaps we are
witnessing the death of Israel by a thousand cuts, the attrition of
conflict and the attrition of population. Maybe after all the rabbis of
Vienna who were sent in 1897 on a fact-finding mission to Palestine to
investigate whether it was a suitable place for Jewish settlement were
right.
They reported back that the “bride was beautiful but
married to another man.” The rabbis had been moved to visit Palestine
by Theodore Herzl, an Austrian journalist, who had just published his
highly influential book, “The Jewish State”, which launched the
movement called “political Zionism”.
Herzl, a broad minded man,
was happy to think of the new Israel in Argentina which had a
considerable Jewish migration in the 19th century and was well away
from the clutches of anti-Semitic Europe.
He was also inclined
to accept the offer of Joseph Chamberlain, then the British colonial
secretary, for a site on the Uasin Gishu plateau near Nairobi in what
was then British East Africa. The Zionist Conference overruled him.
But
when the British government finally gave in to Zionist lobbying and, in
the words, of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, favored “the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”
the only Jewish member of the Cabinet, Edwin Samuel Montague, denounced
the whole project as a reconstruction of the tower of Babel.
“Palestine”,
he said, “would become the world’s ghetto”. Lord Curzon, the former
viceroy of India, observed that Britain had “a stronger claim to parts
of France” than the Jews did to Palestine after two millennia of
absence. He denounced it as an act of “sentimental idealism”.
There
are few rewards in this life for being farsighted on political
questions. The Zionists still have the bit between their teeth on the
creation of a permanent Jewish state, even as they face
self-destruction.
A few perhaps can see it coming and among the few is the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
In
an interview last November he said, “If the day comes when the
two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style
struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the
territories) then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is
finished.”
For the Zionist this would be a terrible end. But need
it be for rank and file Jews who just want to bring up their families
and live in an atmosphere emptied of violence? (Read Israeli novelist
Shifra Horn’s book, “Ode to Joy” if you want to smell the cordite and
sense deep in the soul their everyday fear of being blown up.)
But
unmistakably this is the direction events and demographics are moving
and arguably the best thing that outsiders can now do for Israel is to
stop trying to help organize the creation of a two-state solution and
let the Israelis themselves look the Palestinians in the eye as the
demographics bite. If the white South Africans can do it so can the
Israelis. If this were the solution the Israelis would find that the
only thing that most Palestinians would now want is a prosperous,
capitalist economy that lives in peace with its neighbors.
The
Jews would not be driven into the sea. But those who wanted to return
to Europe, America or even Russia would be more than welcome. Both
Germany and Russia, the great centers of anti-Semitism in the past,
have seemed to have flushed that horror away.
Life does move on. Some problems, like apartheid, do get solved, even if not very long ago they seemed intractable.
The Jews should never have tried to turn back the historical clock by returning to Palestine after fleeing in AD 70.
But
now they are there in such significant numbers their only solution is
to honor the rest of the text of the Balfour Declaration.
“Nothing
should be done that may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, it said. This was the
British condition. The Israelis overlook it today at their peril.