The Revenge of Geography (46 page)

To the entire Muslim world, at once united and enraged by mass media, the plight of the Palestinians represents a totemic injustice in the affairs of humankind. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank may not have been a visible factor in the first stages of the Arab Spring but we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The facts have, to a certain extent, become meaningless; perceptions are everything. Undergirding it all is geography. While Zionism shows the power of ideas, the battle over land between Israelis and Palestinians—between Jews and Muslims, as both the Turks and the Iranians would have it—is a case of utter geographical determinism.

“Jews will very soon become a minority in the lands they occupy or rule from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean (by some calculations this has already happened), and some demographers forecast that in fifteen years they will make up as little as 42 percent of the population in this area.” So wrote Benjamin Schwarz, the national editor of
The Atlantic
, in that magazine in 2005, in an article entitled “Will Israel Live to 100?” Since then little has changed to affect those calculations, or his dispassionate analysis. The birth rate in the occupied Arab territories is ludicrously higher than in Israel: in Gaza, population growth is double that of Israel, with the average woman having more than five children over her adult lifetime. Consequently, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a consensus emerged within the Israeli political, military, and intelligence communities that Israel must withdraw from virtually all of the occupied territories or become an essentially Apartheid-like state—if not immediately, then over time. The result was “the fence”: an Israeli-built barrier that effectively seals off Israel from the demographically expanding and impoverished Palestinian population in the West Bank. Arnon Soffer, an
Israeli geographer, calls the fence “a last desperate attempt to save the state of Israel.” But Jewish settlements close to the Green Line in the occupied territories may, as Schwarz writes, “have roots too deep and may well be too integral to the daily life of too many Israelis to be forsaken.”
²³
And then there is the basic principle and premise of Palestinian ideology, the “right of return”: which applies to the 700,000 Palestinians displaced from Israel upon its birth and their descendants, a population that may now number five million. In 2001, 98.7 percent of Palestinian refugees dismissed compensation in place of the right of return. Finally, there are the Israeli Arabs to consider: those living within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. While the population growth among Israeli Jews is 1.4 percent, among Israeli Arabs it is 3.4 percent: the median age of Jews is thirty-five; that of Arabs is fourteen.

In a rational world, one might hope for a peace treaty between Israelis and Palestinians in which the Israelis would cede back the occupied territories and disband most settlements, and the Palestinians would give up the right of return. In such a circumstance, a Greater Israel, at least as an economic concept, would constitute a regional magnet on the Mediterranean toward which not only the West Bank and Gaza, but Jordan, southern Lebanon, and southern Syria including Damascus would orient themselves. But few peoples seem psychologically further apart as of this writing, and so divided amongst themselves—and, therefore, politically immobilized—as Israelis and Palestinians. One can only hope that the political earthquake in the Arab world in 2011 and early 2012 will prod Israel into making pivotal territorial concessions.

The Middle East hangs on a thread of fateful human interactions, the more so because of a closed and densely packed geography. Geography has not disappeared in the course of the revolutions in communications and weaponry; it has simply gotten more valuable, more precious, to more people.

In such a world, universal values must be contingent on circumstances. We pray for the survival of a Hashemite Jordan and a united post-Assad Syria, even as we pray for the end of the mullahs’ dictatorship
in Iran. In Iran, democracy is potentially our friend, making Greater Iran from Gaza to Afghanistan a force for good rather than for evil. Thus might the calculus in the entire Middle East be shifted; thus might Hezbollah and Hamas be tamed, and Israeli-Palestinian peace prospects improved. But in Jordan, it is hard to imagine a more moderate and pro-Western regime than the current undemocratic monarchy. Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy. In Syria, democracy should come incrementally; lest the political organization of Greater Syria be undone by Sunni jihadists, as happened in Mesopotamia between 2006 and 2007.

European leaders in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth were engrossed by the so-called Eastern Question: that is, the eruptions of instability and nationalist yearnings caused by the seemingly interminable rotting-away of the Ottoman Empire. The Eastern Question was settled by the cataclysm of World War I, from which the modern Arab state system emerged, helped forged as it was by age-old geographical features and population clusters that Marshall Hodgson writes about so eloquently. But a hundred years on, the durability of that post-Ottoman state system in the heart of the Oikoumene should not be taken for granted.

The late Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in 1972 that no group of scholars had a more “fertilizing effect” on the study of history than the so-called
Annales
group, founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and named for the Paris periodical in which they frequently published:
Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale
. Foremost among these Frenchmen was Fernand Braudel. In 1949, Braudel published
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
, a work that broke new ground in historical writing by its emphasis on geography, demography, materialism, and the environment.
¹
Braudel brought nature itself into a work of history, thereby immeasurably enriching the discipline, as well as helping to restore geography to its proper place in academia. His massive two-volume effort is particularly impressive because he wrote much of it while a prisoner of the Germans during World War II. In Braudel’s vast tapestry of a narrative, permanent and unchanging environmental
forces lead to enduring historical trends that go on for many decades and centuries, so that the kinds of political events and regional wars with which we concern ourselves seem almost preordained, if not mere minutiae. It was Braudel who helps us understand how the rich forest soils of northern Europe, which required little to make an individual peasant productive, led ultimately to freer and more dynamic societies compared to those along the Mediterranean, where poorer, more precarious soils meant there was a requirement for irrigation that led, in turn, to oligarchies. Such poverty-stricken soils, combined with an uncertain, drought-afflicted climate, spurred the Greeks and Romans in search of conquest.
²
In short, we delude ourselves in believing that we are completely in control of our destinies; rather, Braudel leads us to the attendant realization that the more we are aware of our limits, the more power we have to affect outcomes within them.

Braudel’s geographical compass identifies the Mediterranean as a complex of seas near a great desert, the Sahara. Thus, he restored North Africa to prominence in Mediterranean studies, and so provided context for the mass migration of workers in our own era from the Mediterranean’s southern Islamic shores (upon whose stony massifs Latin sank few roots) to its northern Christian ones. Braudel’s story, despite its emphasis on the Spanish ruler Philip II, is not really one of individual men overcoming obstacles, but rather of men and their societies subtly molded by impersonal and deeply structural forces. In an era of climate change, of warming Arctic seas opening up to commercial traffic, of potential sea-level rises that spell disaster for crowded, littoral countries in the tropical Third World, and of world politics being fundamentally shaped by the availability of oil and other commodities, Braudel’s epic of geographical determinism is ripe for reading. In fact, Braudel with his writings about the Mediterranean establishes the literary mood-context for an era of scarcity and environmentally driven events in an increasingly water-starved, congested planet.

The achievement of Braudel and the others of the
Annales
school, Trevor-Roper writes, “is to have drawn geography, sociology, law,
ideas into the broad stream of history, and thereby to have refreshed, nourished, and strengthened that stream.” After all, Trevor-Roper goes on: “Geography, climate, population determine communications, economy, political organization.”
³
Braudel, who unlike Mackinder, Spykman, or Mahan lacks a specific theory of geopolitics for us to investigate, nevertheless achieves something greater. For he is more than a geographer or strategist. He is a historian whose narrative has a godlike quality in which every detail of human existence is painted against the canvas of natural forces. If geography ever approaches literature, it does so with Braudel. In a sense, he is a summation of all the strategic thinkers we have encountered thus far.

Oxford archaeologist Barry Cunliffe notes that perhaps Braudel’s signal contribution to the way in which history is perceived is his concept of “varying wavelengths of time.” At the base is the
longue durée:
slow, imperceptibly changing geographical time, “of landscapes that enable and constrain.” Above this, at a faster wavelength, come the “medium-term cycles,” what Braudel himself refers to as
conjonctures
, that is, systemic changes in demographics, economics, agriculture, society, and politics. Cunliffe explains that these are essentially “collective forces, impersonal and usually restricted in time to no more than a century.” Together the
longue durée
and
conjonctures
provide the largely hidden “basic structures” against which human life is played out. My very highlighting of geography has been designed to put emphasis on these basic structures. Braudel calls the shortest-term cycle
l’histoire événmentielle
—the daily vicissitudes of politics and diplomacy that are the staple of media coverage. Braudel’s analogy is the sea: in the deepest depths is the sluggish movement of water masses that bear everything; above that the tides and swells; and finally at the surface, in Cunliffe’s words, “the transient flecks of surf, whipped up and gone in a minute.”
⁴

It is impossible to speculate on how geopolitics will play out over the inhuman timeframe of much of Braudel’s analysis, especially given the controversy over climate change and its effects on specific regions. To talk about relations between, say, America and Europe a hundred or two hundred years hence is ridiculous, because of so
many factors that have yet to even appear. Rather, think of Braudel as simply encouraging us to take a more distant and dispassionate view of our own foibles. For example, reading Braudel, with the events of the first decade of the twenty-first century uppermost in one’s mind, it is impossible to avoid the question: Are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan transient flecks of surf only; or are they part of something deeper, more profound, and structural in America’s destiny? For that matter, might World War I and World War II even, which saw violence on a scale never before experienced in history, belong merely to
l’histoire événmentielle
? Braudel, precisely because he places the events of humankind against the pressure of natural forces, facilitates thinking in terms of the
longue durée
.