Those Who Forget the Past (53 page)

HOW HAVE THE ISRAELIS SURVIVED FOR SO LONG?

The Arab war on Israel is now in its fifty-third year and the fact that the Israelis have hung on for so long is primarily a testament to spectacular Arab incompetence. Relying on an opponent's military incompetence is not a viable long-term strategy. The U.S. military exhibited spectacular incompetence at the beginning of World War II, losing battles where we outnumbered the Germans ten to one. Our enemies were not able to enter North America and prevent us from regrouping. Consequently we ultimately learned how to fight and prevailed. The Arabs are gradually moving into the modern age and learning how to use Western technology. Every year the Arabs sell a bit more oil and grow a bit wealthier. Additionally there are one billion non-Arab Muslims worldwide happy to devote a portion of their wealth and energy to the challenge of killing or otherwise removing the Jews in Israel. Every time an Arab army is defeated it can simply retreat back across the border and regroup to fight another year or another decade. At first glance, it is difficult to see how the Arabs have failed thus far and how they can continue to fail in the long run.

The last real fight between Arabs and Jews was the 1973 Ramadan War. In this war, called the “Yom Kippur War” by Westerners, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, backed up with money, troops, tanks, and airplanes from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Morocco, Lebanon, and Jordan, and came very close to winning. All of these countries have much larger economies and militaries than they did in 1973. All, except for Egypt and Jordan, remain in a state of declared war with Israel. In light of the example of the Ramadan War, the willingness of Anwar Sadat to sign a peace treaty with Israel back in 1978 seems either insane or an enormous triumph for the diplomacy of American President Jimmy Carter.

Perhaps there is a military and rational explanation for the 1978 peace treaty, however. The Israeli nuclear weapons program was in its infancy in 1973 when the Arabs launched their big war. The best estimates are that Israel had enough material to make three bombs. By 1978, however, Israel was estimated to have built between 100 and 200 atomic bombs, enough nuclear power to wipe out every town in Egypt, whose population is densely concentrated along the banks of the Nile River. Anwar Sadat, in command of a military without nuclear weapons, could no longer realistically hope to prevail in a conflict with Israel.

The nuclear balance of power has been shifting since 1978. Pakistan has the Bomb and long-range ballistic missiles. Wealthy Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia have been buying missiles from the Chinese and anyone else who will sell them. Ironically the Palestinians may save the physical lives of the Jews. If an Arab dictator were to succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons, dropping the Bomb on Israel would seem to be a quick and easy path to everlasting glory. The fact that the Palestinians are living in and among the Jews and would be killed alongside them might be the only thing that gives a nuclear-capable Arab pause. In 2002 there were 1.26 million Arabs who held Israeli citizenship and who lived within the 1948 boundaries of Israel, nearly 20 percent of the population. Most of the remainder of those officially classified as Palestinian refugees live in the West Bank, in Gaza, or in nearby Jordan.

Are the Palestinians adequate protection for the State of Israel? Islamic terrorists have demonstrated a willingness to kill co-religionists in the service of larger goals, e.g., when they brought down the World Trade Center and the Muslims working inside. Secular Arab leaders going as far back as Anwar Sadat have pronounced themselves willing to lose millions of their own soldiers in exchange for a victory over Israel. Given the lack of interest in Palestinian welfare by fellow Arabs over the decades it seems reasonable to conclude that the deaths of even several million Palestinians might come to be considered acceptable as the price of liberating the land.

Israel's nuclear arsenal is small and weak. The Israelis might be capable of wiping out neighboring capitals such as Cairo and Amman but not of surviving a first strike, deterring an Osama-bin-Laden–style foe, or of reaching a faraway enemy such as Saudi Arabia. On balance it would seem that the presence of the Palestinians amidst the Jews is currently the main deterrent against an Arab nuclear or biological attack.

Currently it seems as though Israel and its enemies have arrived at a standoff. However, taking the long view and keeping in mind that the Muslims can afford to lose a thousand battles while the Israelis cannot afford to lose even one, it seems worth considering what would transpire if the Muslims were to win. The published post-victory plans of the Arabs call for deporting all the Jews who weren't in Israel prior to 1947 back to where they came from. The most problematic subgroup therefore are the 600,000 Israeli Jews, and their descendants, who were expelled from Arab countries. Would the Arabs want them back in their homelands? Would a population that has grown up on a steady diet of Jew-hatred in their schools, mosques, and media accept Jews back in their midst?

CONCLUSION

Day-by-day newspaper accounts of violence in Israel are constructed to provide entertainment between advertising, not to illuminate. Fundamentally the facts are the following:

Jews are not wanted in Europe or in Islamic countries.

Although initially settled by some idealistic Zionists, Israel has become primarily a dumping ground for the world's unwanted Jews and this is its principal significance to non-Muslim countries.

For dictators in Muslim nations, inculcating mass hatred of Jews has substantial political value; Israel's principal significance to Muslim countries is as a focus of popular hatred.

For the dictators and subjects of Arab nations, the State of Israel takes on an additional significance as a place whose successful conquest would signify a resurgence of Arab power as exciting as the Arab conquests circa A.D. 700.

Palestinian violence continues because it is yielding substantial material support from Arab and European nations, support that should lead to a gradual victory over the Jews and the liberation of all of Palestine.

Taking the long view, the State of Israel is most simply explained as a concentration camp for Jews. Starting in the 1930s the Europeans expropriated the property of their Jews and collected the physical bodies of those Jews in camps where they could be worked to death—the Nazis did not put healthy Jews into gas chambers but only those who had become exhausted by slave labor. In the 1940s and 1950s the remaining Jews of Central Europe were by and large sent to Israel while at the same time Arab nations expropriated the wealth of their 1,000-and 2,000-year-old Jewish communities and sent the physical bodies of the Jews to Israel (except for some thousands who were killed by mobs). In the last decades of the twentieth century the former Soviet Union began to export its Jewish population, though without the violence and confiscation that had accompanied Jewish migrations from Europe and Arab nations.

Historically most concentration camps for Jews have eventually turned into death camps and certainly there is no shortage of people worldwide trying to effect this transformation.

IS THERE REALLY A CRISIS? (PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS)

This article's primary practical value is intended to be in freeing you from the tyranny of the daily news. If there is a big news story from Israel, feel free to watch
The Simpsons
. Elected governments will come and go in Israel. Dictators will rise and fall among the Arab nations. Terrorists will kill civilians. The Israeli army will kill terrorists. American and European university professors will vent their Jew-hatred on Israelis and the Israeli government. Politicians and diplomats will negotiate. Peace agreements will be signed when a military stalemate is reached. War will resume when the Arabs believe that they have a new and useful military tactic. All of these events are insignificant against the larger background of history painted above and compared to the major events that will transpire when the Arabs score a major military breakthrough.

Referring to an Israeli-Palestinian “crisis” in a headline is a good way to sell newspapers but not an accurate description of a conflict that will enter its second century soon. The last significant event was the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty on March 26, 1979. You could have missed every news report for more than two decades and yet be fully up to date on this crisis.

Events that would qualitatively change the situation in Israel include the following:

Palestinian takeover of Jordan or establishment of a Palestinian state elsewhere.

Islamic revolution in Egypt.

Acquisition of nuclear weapons by a country ruled by Islamic fundamentalists (or a powerful independent group such as Al-Qaeda).

To build a strong military force for the ultimate liberation of all Palestine, the Palestinians must have their own sovereign state in which heavy weapons can be accumulated and large armies trained. This fact has not been lost on the neighboring governments. Between 1948 and 1967 the state of Jordan occupied the West Bank and prevented the Palestinians from forming their own state. Between 1967 and the present day the State of Israel has occupied the West Bank and prevented the Palestinians from forming their own state. Lacking sovereignty the Palestinians have been unable to stop the Jordanian and Israeli armies from periodically rolling through their neighborhoods confiscating weapons and arresting terrorists, thus capping the number of effective fighters.

Start following the news if you hear that a sovereign Palestinian state has been established on the West Bank, because that is a required first step in any larger effort by Palestinians.

What would be the logical second step? Jew-haters worldwide like to cheerlead for a Palestinian takeover of the present State of Israel, but the reality is that a takeover of Jordan would be much easier and in fact this is where most Palestinian efforts to achieve sovereignty have been focused. Jordan offers five times the land area of Israel defended by a military that is considerably weaker. The majority of Jordan's citizens are Palestinian yet the country is ruled by foreigners, the Hashemite family of Mecca, who were defeated in their native land by the Bedouins under Ibn-Saud and were granted ownership of most of Palestine by Britain. Relations between Palestinians and the family have been strained ever since. A group of Palestinians organized King Abdullah's assassination in 1951 at the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount. King Hussein, who was wounded in the attack that killed his father, fought a civil war with Yasser Arafat's PLO in 1970 resulting in the deaths of many thousands of Palestinians and the expulsion of all armed Palestinians to southern Lebanon (these fighters sparked off a fifteen-year civil war between Muslims and Christians in their new host country; more than 100,000 people were killed by their neighbors [plus a few thousand more when Israel invaded from 1982 to 1985]).

After Palestinian sovereignty the next important event to watch for is an Islamic revolution in Egypt, a country with a population of 70 million and an economy twice the size of Israel's. Currently the population is kept under control by a 500,000-man military that has modernized its capabilities with $38 billion in U.S. military aid between 1978 and 2000. The army spends much of its time finding, torturing, and killing Islamic fundamentalists but still has plenty of energy left over to train for a big battle with Israel. If the Muslim Brotherhood manages to seize power in Egypt, the Israel Defense Forces could face their toughest challenges since the 1973 Ramadan War.

WHAT CAN WE, AS AVERAGE AMERICAN CITIZENS, DO?

Terrorism is funded by wealth. There are plenty of poor people in this world who hate the United States but we never hear from them because they can't afford airplane tickets, weapons, training, etc. When people get richer they buy more of all the things that they enjoy. If you give extra money to a group of French people you'll see that some is spent on fancy wine and cheese. Flip on the TV and watch Muslims worldwide celebrating the collapse of the World Trade Center or the destruction of the space shuttle
Columbia
. These are folks who will spend a portion of any new wealth on the killing of Americans. The principal source of Muslim wealth is oil. As a society the most effective way that we can protect ourselves from Muslim violence is by reducing our consumption of oil. They may still hate us but they will have less money to put their hatred into action.

Oil is an especially bad thing to buy and burn. Any country that earns most of its income from natural resource extraction is a place where it is easy for a ruling elite to transfer that income into its pockets. You don't need the consent or assistance of your subjects to strike a deal with a foreign oil company and watch them extract the product. Burning oil contributes to air pollution and atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus leading to global warming. “Roughly half the oil consumed in the U.S. goes for cars and trucks,” noted
The Wall Street Journal
on March 18, 2003. The same article quotes Saudi Arabia's oil minister, Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, in 1981: “If we force Western countries to invest heavily in finding alternative sources of energy, they will. This will take them no more than seven to ten years and will result in their reduced dependence on oil as a source of energy to a point which will jeopardize Saudi Arabia's interests.”

If we were to tax oil to reflect its true military and environmental cost, it would encourage investment in more fuelefficient technology. Half of our oil is burned up in cars and trucks whose powerplants are scarcely different from the engine in a Model T Ford. One can build an engine with precise computer-controlled solenoid-lifted valves rather than a sloppy camshaft, but when gas is cheap it isn't worth the extra capital cost (see “Why Not a 40-mpg SUV? Technology exists to double gas guzzlers' fuel efficiency. So what's the holdup?” in the November 2002
Technology Review
). Toyota and Honda show-rooms offer hybrid cars that get fifty miles per gallon but at current gas prices it takes years to recover the higher initial investment. High-tech windmills are good enough that Denmark is able to generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind power; in the United States it is slightly cheaper to take a fossilized dinosaur from Venezuela and light it on fire so that's what we do. Would you invest in genetic engineering of bacteria that could separate hydrogen fuel from water if you knew that a Sheik in Riyadh could wipe out your company with the stroke of a pen?

If you want to know who is funding terrorists, look in the vanity mirror as you turn the key of your SUV. If you want to stop funding terrorists, work for a $20-per-barrel tax on imported oil and a $10-per-barrel tax on domestic oil, which doesn't require an expensive military to defend but we still want to discourage its use to curb pollution. The tax should be phased in over five years, thus giving businesses and consumers time to replace inefficient older machines.

Terrorism is theater. Terrorism will taper off if people lose interest in news coverage of acts of terror. It is tough to ignore a spectacular event such as the destruction of the World Trade Center, but we can do our share by ignoring newspaper and television stories about run-of-the-mill terrorism. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like a traffic accident on Interstate 95: a tragedy for the handful of people involved that wouldn't have affected the rest of us if we hadn't slowed down to gawk. The last couple of years have been the most violent and even so the number of people killed on both sides has been about 1,000 per year. Shouldn't this many deaths provoke our sympathy and interest? If we're motivated by humanitarian concerns, there are richer opportunities for saving lives right here at home. For example, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 Americans are killed every year by medical malpractice (
To
Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health
System,
Kohn et al., 2000). The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration reports that 41,821 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2000, at a cost to the economy of $230.6 billion, not including intangibles such as physical pain or reduced quality of life. Many of these deaths could be prevented with simple engineering, information system, and procedural improvements. If we want to be unselfish and help foreigners we might look at malaria, a preventable disease that kills between one and three million people each year.