Kerry’s Reckless Middle East Stance

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is calling the status quo between Israelis and Palestinians “unsustainable,” but what is really unsustainable is the belief that the status quo between Israel and Palestine is not sustainable, because it has been and it will continue to be.

Another war in the Middle East between Israel and the surrounding Muslim states of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine is not only unthinkable: it is also impossible, for a variety of reasons. In fact, the only thing that might bring those nations to war is the belief that the current peace is unsustainable.

Here’s the situation in a nutshell: the so-called confrontation states have been so weakened by internal strife stemming from the side effects of the “Arab Spring” that the only objectives of the parties in power is to stay in power, and the only objective for the parties that are out of power is to take over and throw the parties in power out. In other words, their attention is aimed inward, not outward, and their adversaries are each other, not the Israelis.

The factionalism that affects all of these “Arab” states has undermined their collective animosity toward Israel. Palestine doesn’t have the men or the equipment to mount a credible offensive against Israel. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, far from being ready to go to war against Israel, is actually quite dependent upon Israel for its continued survival, because a belligerent Israel distracts the tribal leaders from their opposition to Jordan’s ruling family, and the Israeli pressure on the Palestinian state distracts them from a push to unseat the Jordanian royal family. That is a stalemate if there ever was one.

To the north, Lebanon is a nation in name only, riddled with warring factions and quite unable to launch an attack against Israel…or anyone else for that matter and, recently, has been inundated with Syrian refugees fleeing from violence associated with ISIS. Iraq has been shattered by 25 years of invasion (alas, by the United States) and civil war and continuing internal dissent, from militant groups like ISIS, to the point where the only thing that is keeping Iraq together is the continuing covert presence of American “defense” contractors, paid mercenaries under contract to the U.S. Government. In Syria, the ongoing civil war is bleeding both sides to the point where neither side has the time or the energy to think about attacking Israel, let alone the personnel or equipment to do so.

Egypt, in addition to having the largest army and the most cohesive social structure, has been going through it’s own revolutionary cycle, leaving the army without the leadership they would need to mount an offensive operation, with many of those leaders in jail and under death sentences. Saudi Arabia doesn’t even come into this equation because their troops would have to pass through Egypt, Jordan or Iraq in order to reach Israel and, right now, unlike 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, the Arab World is much more deeply divided than it was then; none of those countries is either willing to go to war against Israel, or to allow Saudi troops to pass through their territory. Saudi Arabia also has its own internal problems to consider.

All of the aforementioned confrontation states share bitter memories of past defeats by the Israelis but their leaders, unlike the U.S Secretary of State, are well aware of the fact that Israel is much stronger economically, scientifically, and militarily, than it was in 1967 or 1973, while they are much weaker…and those are the uncomfortable facts of life for those who would attempt to force further geographical concessions from Israel.

So, if this is a reasonable statement of the present situation, which it appears to be, precisely why does Mr. Kerry believe that the current status quo is unsustainable?

The unfortunate question for which there appears to be no easy answer is the population problem.  The birthrate in the Palestinian community is much greater than the birthrate among Jewish Israelis, creating a irrefutable population pressure against which military force is impotent….if the Palestinian population bomb were a fact rather than the myth it is.

In 2014, the population of Israel was 75 percent Jewish. In 2035, projections indicate that the Jewish population of Israel will be down to…73 percent. This means that Muslim population of Israel (ignoring the 10 to 15 other ethnic and religious groups in the country) would rise from 25 to 27 percent over the same time period. There is no Palestinian population bomb in Israel, except in the minds of some segments of the media and the United States State Department.

In the Palestinian Territories, however, it is a different story. There, the current population of 4.44 million, almost all of whom are Muslims, is expected to increase to 7.05 million by 2035. Thus, when you combine the Palestinian populations of the Territories with the projected Israeli Palestinian population of 4.22 million in 2035, you get a projected combined Palestinian population of 11.27 million, against a projected Israeli Jewish population of 11.4 million, which puts the ratio of Israeli Jews to Palestinians at 51 to 49 percent, not 46 to 52 percent as some pundits claim. (The missing two percent are presumably mostly Christians.)

The problem with these boring statistics is that the books have been cooked, because the Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority are not living in Israel, nor will they ever be. Israel is a very small country, with a very large agricultural sector, and a lot of absolutely useless desert lands where no one will ever live. The Palestinians who live in the Palestinian Authority territories are not going to be moving to Israel, because there is no place for them to move to, which means that the real ratio of Jews to Muslims in Israel itself will remain at around three to one for the rest of this century.

The population bomb is the excuse that American and European diplomats offer Israel as a rationale for why Israel has to negotiate a settlement, and an excuse for attempts to pressure Israel into withdrawing from what the Palestinians call the “occupied lands.” Threats of U.N. resolutions calling for Israel to give up those territories will fall on deaf ears, leaving the U.N. no choice but to impose sanctions upon the only country in the world that the United Nations itself ever created.

It is also worth noting that the land the Palestinians want back was never theirs to begin with, because there was no such place as Palestine in 1967.  The West Bank was part of Jordan from 1948 to 1967, when Israeli troops captured the region from Jordan which doesn’t really want it back any more.

Vaguely worded communiques suggesting that the current status quo is untenable are simply not in accordance with the facts. The facts are that, in the final analysis, the situation in the Middle East, with respect to Israel, is more tenable now than it has been during the past 50 years. Israel is stronger. Its enemies are weaker. The question that Americans should be asking today is why the U.S. government appears so determined to superintend the dismantling of its strongest alley in the region.

It seems that Mr. Kerry, in particular, has made a career out of attempting to destabilize what actually appears to be a very stable situation. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it in a 2014 interview, the people of Israel are quite a bit safer on a per capita basis than the people of New York City. As far as the population demographics are concerned, the Hebrew Torah has a solution for that problem, too: “Be fruitful and multiply.”