In the 21st Century, the Promised Land is bound to look even more unpromising than it does today.
Israel has survived against incredible odds ever since it declared independence in 1948, despite being a tiny state of just 20,000 square miles and a couple of million people, immersed in a vast sea of hostile Arab and Muslim neighbors stretching from Morocco to Pakistan. At its birth, the nation succeeded in fighting for its survival against a vast coalition of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Arab population of Palestine and volunteers from across the Arab world. Its most spectacular victory came in 1967, when it embarrassed the combined armies of Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan in a preemptive strike that took just six days. The Six-Day War allowed Israel to occupy the West Bank of Jordan, the Golan Heights of Syria and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, thereby giving it strategic depth and insulating the Jewish areas of Palestine from direct foreign invasion. Most of all, it gave Israel an air of invincibility that has continued to deter its neighbors from military attack until this day. Now, however, the legend of Israeli invulnerability remains but the substance does not; the gap between myth and reality continues to widen, which may lead to some sudden, nasty surprises in regional politics in years to come. The Six-Day War marked the high water mark of Israeli power, which has steadily declined ever since, to the point where the odds of its survival through the 21st Century no longer look incredible, but impossible. Many of the factors that contributed to Israel’s remarkable survival have unfortunately been eroding ever since, at an a pace that is almost imperceptible but with consequences that have already proven deadly.
Israel and the Retreat of the West
In The Retreat of the West, a mammoth sleeping pill of a book that I once intended to use as my dissertation, I attempted to explain in great detail why the group of nations typically referred to as “the West” rose in tandem compared to the rest of the planet until roughly the early 20th Century, as well as outline several processes that have been undermining its strength ever since. The definition of the West I used included the whole of Europe as far as Russia, as well as several nations outside of the region that were settled many by Europeans, such as the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It also included Israel, whose power has waxed and waned in tandem with this same group of nations – which is not surprising, given that Jewish settlers from Europe (a.k.a the Ashkenazi Jews) quickly came to outnumber the Mizrahi Jewish population that had inhabited the region since ancient times. The establishment of the state of Israel by Westernized Jewish immigrants from Europe was itself one of the last symptoms of the rise of Western power, as was the Six-Day War. Likewise, the winds of change have been increasingly running against Israel ever since, thanks to the same numerous factors that have been steadily reducing the power of the U.S. and Europe relative to their former colonies in the Third World for the last century. This prism explains not only why Israel was able to survive against incredible odds, but why it has suffered so many small but steadily accumulating reversals of fortune in foreign policy ever since.
The Retreat of the West expands on political scientist Hans Morgenthau’s concept that there are nine basic forms of power a nation can make use of, then traces how changes in the international balance of each form of power contributed to all of the planet’s major political events since the 15th Century. Geography, natural resouces, industrial capacity (together with other economic measures, like technological proficiency and financial capital), military preparedness, population, quality of diplomacy, quality and structure of institutions, quality of leadership and national morale all play a role in determining the amount of power a nation can bring to bear in international politics. Out of these, Israel’s national morale appears to be the one strength that is most likely to endure, for one simple fact that has helped it win each of its large-scale wars since 1948: unlike its Arab neighbors, it must always fight to win, because failure means the permanent extinguishment of the whole nation. Nevertheless, this morale may also be reduced in the future, since it has been artificially augmented by two factors that are subject to change for the worse, the zealousness of devout Jews and the aura of invincibility that has lingered since 1967. Some of the founders of the Israeli state had high morale because they were motivated by a belief in Judaism as a religion, not in attachment to Jewry as an ethnic group, which carried with it the idea that the Jews were bound to win because they were entitled to the Promised Land. The popularity of that belief, however, has badly faded in the past half-century for the same reasons that orthodox Christianity has fallen out of fashion throughout the Western world. The Westernized settlers brought with them distinct ideas about secularism, which eventually emasculated Judaism of any real power; since then, Israel has gradually adopted the real religion of the West, the love of money, which is conducive to cowardice because it is focused on this life, not the next. Whether or not this gradual substitution of the Western culture of consumption for Judaism is a morally positive or negative thing, it certainly does reduce this particular component of Israel’s national morale. The most important part, the aura of invulnerability, is likely to dissipate as well, but in a much more dramatic fashion once the nation’s other weakness begin to show visible signs.
Two of the most subjective and arguable forms of power are the quality of leadership and quality of diplomacy. In both, however, the trends at least superificially appear to be running against Israel, just as it is in the rest of the West. The intimidating outcome of the Six-Day War combined with skillful negotiation brought Israel a truly remarkable diplomatic coup in the 1979 Camp David Accords, in which Egyptian President Anwar Sadat basically capitulated in order to get the Sinai Peninsula back. Since then, however, Israel has had no tangible diplomatic success at all; if anything, it has committed many strategic blunders. Some of them have violated the most cogent principles of diplomacy, such as unnecessarily multiplying its enemies with bellicose behavior towards enemies that could have been pacified, like Lebanon , or by alienating previously neutral regional powers like Turkey. It is also hard to argue that the current crop of Israeli leaders has any of the military skill of a Moshe Dayan or the qualities of a statesmen like David Ben-Gurion. None of them are even the equal of Yitzhak Rabin, who was perceived as mediocre at best until his assassination in 1995, after which the international media anointed him as some kind of visionary. Like their counterparts in U.S. and Europe, the current leadership of Israel lacks any vision of the future at all, which is why the same faces keep popping up proposing the same old policies, such as retread Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The best that can be said about him is that he is not a convicted rapist, unlike former President Moshe Katsav, who is facing seven years behind bars after Israel’s Supreme Court rejected his appeal yesterday.The Israelis had some success in the area of institutional power in the ‘80s when they reformed an unworkable economic system that routinely bred unnecessary inflation and their fractious parliamentary form of government, which had likewise been unworkable and unstable. It does Israel no good, however, to have stable institutions if those institutions are routinely staffed by incompetent leaders.
If Israel’s present leadership truly had the capacity to lead, they would speak frankly about the factors that truly threaten to erode the nation’s power in the 21st Century. Instead, like almost all of their counterparts in other Western nations from America to Britain to France to Russia and back again, they are sweeping them under the rug rather than dealing with them up front. Among these is the erosion of the technological lead this group of nations once had over the rest of the world, which makes a higher industrial capacity possible and in turn generates financial capital. One of the salient dynamics behind the whole rise of Western civilization between the 15th and early 20th Centuries was the rapid growth of its lead in technological capability over that of the rest of the world, from the Orient to India to the Aztecs to the Muslim world to sub-Saharan Africa. In those centuries, Christendom was politically decentralized enough that the inventions and innovations in each nation could easily flow to neighboring states, but not to other civilizations, thanks to barriers like culture and distance. The rivalry of the European states was at just the right level that it stimulated competition and further innovation. This “cosmopolitan competition” broke down when that rivalry reached a ruinous fever pitch in the World Wars and the Cold War, which allowed the West’s former colonies to catch up with them. Moreover, the West’s own inventions steadily shrank the distances that prevented commerce and communication between the West and the rest of the world, thereby erasing many of the barriers that previously prevented the flow of inventions from exceeding the rate of innovation. Other factors likewise combined to erode the cultural barriers between the West and the rest of the world, including colonization by European powers and new philosophies like secularism. There is still an undeniable gap between the West and the rest of the planet in terms of technology, but this breakdown in cosmopolitan competition has steadily shrunk the gap and the lag-time in diffusion of knowledge since roughly the beginning of the 20th Century. The Internet has served to accelerate this process tremendously since I wrote my first crude observations on this thesis back in the mid-‘90s. Humanity has certainly benefitted greatly from this diffusion of knowledge, but it poses tremendous long-term challenges for international stability. A century ago, the U.S. and the Europeans could fight over who had the right to export their goods to China and the rest of the Orient, for the simple reason that too few East Asians had the level of education and technical proficiency needed to establish their own factories. Now that they have narrowed the gap somewhat, they can offer stiff competition. Israel is caught up in this long-term global process as well, for it too cannot compete with East Asia any better than its fellow Western nations. Unlike the U.S. and Europe, however, it must have a strong industrial capacity in order to survive, because it is poorly endowed with another form of power, natural resources. If Israel can’t export industrial goods on competitive terms, it can’t fall back on agricultural goods or some highly valued commodity like oil. And without these sources of income, eventually it will lose its financial capital, meaning that it won’t be able to pay its bills, just like the U.S. and Europe no longer can today. The many trends that have been corroding the West’s economic supremacy for generations are so deep and have been paid so little attention that it is likely they will continue for at least another generation or two at best. If so, then the U.S. will no longer have the financial capital to subsidize Israel’s economy with billions of dollars in aid each year. In the long run, Israel is going to have to depend on itself more, but is going to be less capable of doing so.
Too Few Israelis
Since the early days of the Israeli state, there has been an elephant in the room every time the subject of national security comes up: its demographic Achilles Heel. Some willfully blind observers will discuss the subject but are in a state of denial, while the majority fidget uncomfortably whenever the topic comes up and sweep it under the rug, but it is clear that the danger to the nation’s very survival is growing precisely because its tiny population is not. Because Israel was able to survive several wars against its far more populous neighbors, a deceptive notion has spread that population size doesn’t matter in the international balance of power, but it counts. In an age when deep long-term trends are equalizing the balance between the West and the Third World in terms of military and economic competition, other forms of power like population are going to matter even more. To put it simply, if everyone has the same guns, then victory is more likely to go to those who also have the numbers. On this score, Israel has no hope of competing with its Arab neighbors or the wider Muslim world beyond it, which is equally hostile. To put it simply, there are now a billion Muslims worldwide, or roughly the equivalent of China, but only a paltry 14 million Jews, or roughly the population of Pennsylvania. About half of those 14 million are already living in Israel. At the time when Israel was winning victory after victory against its Arab neighbors, it was enjoying a large influx of Jewish immigrants from across the world, then had another spurt from Russia at the end of the Cold War, but now there are no more reservoirs of Jews elsewhere in the world that Israel can augment its population with. Large portions of the other half of the world’s Jewish population outside of Israel, particularly those in the U.S. and Europe, are Jewish in name only, clinging only to a few ceremonial aspects of the religion while living out the religion of avarice that dominates the rest of Western civilization. Such people are unlikely to take a life-changing step like emigration merely to help the Jewish state. If Israel is going to redress the population imbalance with its rivals, it is going to have to do it the old-fashioned way, through the nursery. Sadly, they are being trounced here as well, thanks to the Ashkenazis importing Western ideas about child-rearing. Like their Western counterparts, many Israeli women value money and prestige more than their children, which is why they are aborting and contracepting them out of existence. Regardless of the fact that this is pure evil, and flies in the fact of everything Judaism teaches, for the purposes of this discussion it is also the #1 threat to Israeli national security that Israelis themselves could do something about. Since 1979, between 11 and 16 percent of the fetuses conceived in Israel have been killed through abortion.[1] Widespread acceptance of contraception has also contributed to a steep decline in the birth rate in Israel since its independence, particularly among the Ashkenazi Jews who follow the culture of their Western ancetors most closely. In the period 1950-1955 Israel had a total fertility rate of 4.2 percent, but today among Israeli Jews it stands 2.9 percent, compared to 3.75 percent for Israel’s Muslim minority.[2]
This is a microcosm of a demographic imbalance that is occurring across the planet, as the followers of Mohammed have grown to one-sixth of the world’s population, because their birth rates have remained static while those of the West have plummeted because of their rejection of their Judeo-Christian heritage and the orthodox family values that came with it. As a result the West is the grips of a man-made demographic disaster equally severe as that of the Black Death. As I have discussed elsewhere, some of the hidden fruits of this have been the insolvency of pension funds, as the populations of the West age, while another is the increasingly important issue of immigration. A hundred years ago, North America and Europe used to export settlers to the rest of the world, but thanks to this slow suicide, the rest of the world now exports settlers to them. That is why the U.S. is being invaded by illegal immigrants, particularly from Latin America, while Europe is basically handing itself over to Muslim immigrants, in one generation undoing all of the heroics of men like Charles Martel and John Sobieski to keep them out. Because nations like France and Italy still have a substantial lead in most other forms of power over neighbors like Algeria and Libya, they can afford to engage in this sort of foolishness for a few more generations before suffering any serious consequences. The same is not true of Israel, which was fortunate to survive even at the peak of its strength against neighbors which are still implacably hostile. Not only are Israel’s mere 7.7 million people more badly outnumbered by the Arab and Muslim populations of the world with each passing day, but the Arab and Muslim minorities within Israel itself have been growing inexorably since independence. The numbers are even more imbalanced than when I first wrote about the topic in The Retreat of the West back in the mid-‘90s. The Muslim minority grew from 8.8 percent of Israel’s population to 11.6 percent in 1972 to 15.2 percent in 1995 to 16.7 percent in 2000.[3] Twenty percent of Israelis are now Arab, with about 86 percent of those being Muslim, with the rest being Christians and Druze who have stronger loyalty to the Jewish state.[4] Everywhere else in the Middle East, the Christians and Druze are oppressed tiny minorities, but they have more support for the Jewish state because it grants them liberties they don’t have elsewhere. The majority of Arabs, however, have no incentive to live in a state that is officially Jewish in an ethnic sense, nor does the overlapping majority of Muslims, have any incentive to live in a state that is officially Jewish in a religious sense. There is no need for paranoia about a fifth column here, because there is no question that if the mainly Muslim Arabs became sufficiently populous, they would exercise their power to end the exclusive Jewish identity of the state. The threshold at which the Jewish population would no longer be able to enforce this identity is widely believed to be around 70 percent; if it declines much further from its current 75 percent, then the end of Israel may be around the corner. The Arab population is large enough that the Jews would have a hard time stripping them of their voting rights through some sort of apartheid system, but if they continue to grant them this political power, sooner or later they will have a large enough minority in the Knesset to throw monkey wrenches in any Jewish legislation they disagree with.
The existence of an explicitly anti-Israeli lobby within Israel of courses raises the parallel issue of a military threat from within. If the threat weren’t tangible, then we wouldn’t already be seeing suicide bombers taking out Israeli civlians and soldiers within the nation’s own borders. There really isn’t much question that in the event of a foreign invasion of Israel that a large section of the oppressed Arab and Muslim minority would side with the invaders. Since many of their forebears were unjustly expelled from Israel back in the war of independence, the Palestinians within their borders would see themselves as redressing an act of genocide. With each passing generation there are many more such people with Israeli citizenship who think this way and who are capable of resisting the Israeli state with both their votes and their guns. For all intents and purposes, this has opened yet another military front that Israel will sooner or later have to fight on some day, but this is just one symptom of a broad, steady decline in the one form of power Israel is most renowned for: its armed forces. Every trend in international politics is running against them, sapping their strength little by little from one generation to the next. Some aspects of this decline aren’t immediately apparent, such as the eventual effects of the changing balance of education and technical proficiency. In the past, for example, Israeli military commanders were able to easily outmaneuver their Arab counterparts thanks to better training. Similarly, the pilots serving in Arab air forces often didn’t have the technical proficiency to operate their planes effectively for reasons ranging from poorer secondary school education to less money for pilot training programs. Those things are still true, but less true with each passing decade. The Arab and Muslim armies can’t operate their equipment as well as the Israelis and probably never will, but they only need to operate it well enough for their advantages in manpower to cancel this out. Thanks to the oil price shocks of the ‘70s, the Middle Eastern governments which despise Israel now have cash to buy expensive weapons and training they could never afford since the last time they fought a large-scale war with Israel. On the other hand, Israel doesn’t have any appreciable natural resources of its own, nor can it compete on an industrial level the way it once could, thanks to the rise of East Asia as the world’s manufacturing center. Without this source of income it will be progressively more difficult for Israel to make or buy its own weapons and training, nor will foreign patrons like the U.S. be able to afford to bail them out. Given enough time, the Retreat of the West may reach the point where the U.S. might not be financially capable of even mounting its own operations to prevent Israel’s Arab neighbors from overrunning it. Like the U.S. and the rest of the West, Israel is staking its whole defense strategy on high technology, but it is doomed from the beginning to fail, precisely because the gap between the West and the rest of the world has been shrinking for a century and will shrink at a torrid pace in the next thanks to such inventions as the Internet. To make a long story short, they’ve got the guns, they’ve got the butter and they’ve got the numbers. We may have better guns and are bound to make even better ones in the future, but theirs will sooner or later be good enough.
The Creeping Decline of Israeli National Power
If you trace the balance of power in the Middle East since the Six-Day War, it has gone in one direction: against Israel. Every piece of anecdotal evidence we have pointing towards a steadily, quickening decline in Israeli power. I wrote about a laundry list of such incidents in a newspaper column back in 1995 and today the evidence is even stronger. Israel came perilously close to losing the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Egypt and Syria, who employed brilliant tactics and new weaponry to mount a sneak attack. The first real defeat for Israel came after it invaded Lebanon in 1982 to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from its bases there. Tel Aviv succeeded in forcing its evacuation from Lebanon, but the PLO was fairly tame compared to the far deadlier and more effective Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups that have profilerated since then. One of these, the Shiite militia Hezbollah, mounted a guerrilla war to liberate southern Lebanon from Israel and its local allies; when the dust cleared after the last Israeli soldier fled ignominiously back across the border, Israel had a much more radical enemy than the PLO entrenched on its northern doorstep. Ever since then, the northernmost towns of Israel have had to live with the omnipresent threat of attack by Hezbollah’s rockets. After this, Israel lost control of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a five-year uprising known as the Intifada. Thanks to Israel’s declining birth rate, its dreams of populating the West Bank with its own colonists were now dust; it was now cleaer that either the Jewish state would have to police this permanently hostile foreign population forever, or surrender and leave. When that dust settled, Israeli was forced to sign the Oslo Accords of 1993 with the PLO, which now seemed like the lesser of two evils when compared with Hamas, the small but rapidly growing political party of Islamic radicals leading the Intifada. After Israel ceded some of its power to the Palestinian Authority established by the accords, its old enemy, the PLO, took over the West Bank and Gaza through elections. As has occurred in virtually every Islamic country in the world in the last half-century, however, fundamentalists graduated to become the main political opposition, as the inexorable trend toward radical Islam continued unabated. Soon Hamas won free and fair elections in 2006, got into a scuffle with the increasingly irrelevant PLO over the shape of the government, then seized control of the Gaza Strip in retaliation in 2007. The decline of Israel over the Occupied Territories reached the next level in the Gaza War of 2008-2009, in which it failed to dislodge Hamas from Gaza. Now it has a second Lebanon on its southern border, where it faces rocket attacks on key cities like Beersheba and Ashdod from a guerrilla army that expensive foreign incursions can’t seem to uproot. Hamas has even established its own native arms industry, making its own cheap rockets, despite the terrible poverty of the Gaza Strip. Israel also failed in another bid to oust Hezbollah from its bases during the Second Lebanon War of 2006. The latest step in the unraveling of Israeli control of the Occupied Territories came just a few weeks ago, when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas made a dramatic diplomatic bid for U.N. membership as an independent state. The amount of territory Israel once controlled was expanding a couple of generations ago; now it is clearly receding. In fact, the Arab suicide bombings that began in 1990s demonstrate that Israel can’t even protect the Jewish areas of its own territory the way it once could. It has relinquished this control of the region unwillingly, under pressure from enemies it once could have squashed quite easily. Israel was once capable of trouncing the combined armies of regional powers on the level of Egypt and Syria; now it cannot even prevent rocket and mortar fire on its own cities from guerrilla armies in poor neighbors like Gaza and Lebanon. At one time those borders were quiet; now they are erupting with gunfire from increasingly radical enemies who are proliferating and opening new fronts.
Among the most ominous changes, however, have occurred in the past year in capitals far from Jerusalem. At first glance, the Arab Spring might appear to work in favor of Israel, since it rid the region of a few corrupt dictators and led to at least a veneer of democracy in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. On the other hand, Hosni Mubarak, like the leader of Tunisia, was a stooge of the West whose adoption of capitalist economic policies had foolishly run his country into the ground; likewise, Khadafy had mellowed in his old age to the point where he now had much warmer relations with the U.S. and Europe than the Islamic militants who served as the main opposition, until earlier this year. To put it simply, the removal of all three of these dictators paved the way for the people of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to elect people we don’t like. Now Islamic fundamentalists have graduated to become leading political parties in all three nations. This situation is especially critical with respect to Egypt, one of the wealthiest and most populous of Arab states, one that shares a border with Israel. Sadat’s treaty with Israel was universally unpopular, even among the secular opposition, so the overthrow of his successor is bound to weaken ties between Egypt and Israel greatly. The leading candidates for president in Egypt are openly derisive of the Camp David Accords and at best, Israel will have to deal with one of them for years to come; at worst, they will face a government run by Egypt’s most popular political party, the Muslim Brotherhood. The security situation in the Sinai Peninsula has already worsened thanks to the power vacuum opened by the collapse of the Mubarak regime, to the point that smugglers now constitute the only effective government there. For thirty years Israel has been able to count on at least one stable border to the south, but once the fluid political situation in Egypt stabilizes, it is bound to be less secure than at any time since the Yom Kippur War. In the long term, there is a real possibility of reignition of military conflict between Egypt and Israel – except that this time, the balance of power will be a little less in Israel’s favor. A war could easily erupt, for example, if Egypt’s democractically elected government does the popular thing and comes to the aid of the besieged Hamas government in Gaza. It was a similar scenario which brought Israel to the brink of war with Turkey last year, after Israeli commandos killed nine Turkish citizens participating in an aid flotilla attempting to run the Egyptian-Israeli blockade of Gaza. There is much dispute over whether some of the activists on board were looking for a fight, or whether the aid mission was entirely humanitarian, all of which matters for reasons of justice. Either way, however, better leadership would have kept the Israelis from putting themselves in that position to begin with. The cost of preventing this small-time smuggling to the Gaza Strip was a complete souring of relations with Turkey, which was once a populous but relatively poor secular nations that tolerated Israel, but a generation later has a booming economy and a popular president who espouses a mild brand of Islamic fundamentalism. The worst Hamas can ever do is lob rockets and mortars over the border, but Turkey’s navy is capable of taking down Israel’s in any fight on the high seas, far from Israel’s coastal defenses. The two once cooperated routinely to keep Syria in check, but now that cooperation is in question. The raid violated one of the cardinal principles of international strategy, the Conservation of Enemies, but gained nothing. Israel can’t do anything to improve the political mood among its old enemies in Cairo, but it could have avoided provoking a rivalry with a new enemies in Ankara.
Iran Ascendant: The Unforseen Consequences of the Coming War
It is against this background that Israel is seriously contemplating yet another foreign military strike, this time against Iran. For many years now, both the U.S. and Israel have openly debated whether or not to launch a missile or air attack on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, but this chatter has increased to such a degree in the past year that concrete action may actually be imminent. One of the dead giveaways may be the recent allegations of Iranian involvement in a convoluted plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. I am not renowned for my love of Iran’s theocratic government, but this incident smacks of a rather sloppy Cold War-era attempt to manufacture an incident, in order to whip up war fervor. Nothing about the incident makes sense, especially the motivations; even if Iran were to launch some stupid surprise attack on Saudi Arabia, with which it has chilly but stable relations, why would it begin with the assassination of some unimportant official who can easily be replaced? Such an assassination would accomplish nothing except to isolate Iran further without gaining it anything at all; it would be of no use except to someone with an axe to grind against Tehran. Iran’s leadership is much more intelligent than that, which is what makes them so dangerous in the long run. In fact, the country has become the leading power in the Islamic world by making the best use of all of the trends feeding the Retreat of the West, and the concomitant rise of theThird World. It has a population of about 75 million, more than either France or Britain; it has high national morale, thanks to the motivation given by the reigning ideology of Islamic fundamentalism. It can feed itself and produce its own industrial goods, because its leaders were smart enough not to fall for the Western capitalist fallacy that prosperity comes through total integration into international markets. If it was too heavily dependent on foreign trade then the various international embargoes placed on it since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 would have crippled the theocracy, but they haven’t even fazed it. One outgrowth of Iran’s native industrial capacity is its own homegrown arms industry, which means the Revolutionary Guards can produce their own aircraft, tank and missiles regardless of any international arms embargo imposed on them. Such restrictions may keep them from getting military technology as freely as they otherwise might, but trading of technology and know-how with rogue states like North Korea, rogue elements in the Pakistani military and purchases from Russia and China more than make up for any gap in their capabilities. Now that this native industrial capacity and technological capability have progressed to the point where Iran is on the verge of making its own nuclear weapons, there is understandably considerable alarm in Tel Aviv and Washington, since this makes their own nuclear deterrents less valuable.
This may be a deadly problem without a solution. Israel’s armed forces are probably not a match for the Revolutionary Guard anymore, but even if they were, the Israelis would have to cut through the Occupied Territories, Jordan and Iraq first to get there, which would open up some ridiculously vulnerable supply lines even if they were able to reach the Iranian border. Iraq would never allow the U.S. to use its bases there for a massive land war against Iran, given that the Shiite majority feels much kinship with their brethren in Iran – including many of the current political leaders who spent years in exile in Iran during Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror. Our relations with Pakistan are terrible now thanks to the relevation that its equivalent of the CIA was harboring Osama Bin Laden, and a Normandy-style naval landing on Iran’s southern coast would be ludicrous and impractical, so Iraq is our only way in. Yet any attempt to force Iraq into line might destabilize the entire country and put it in league with Iran; likewise, even if the U.S. did manage to mount a massive land war, it might likewise destabilize the entire Eastern Hemisphere by drawing in many of the powerful allies Tehran has skillfully cultivated over the years, including China, Pakistan, North Korea, Syria and others. Even without such dire implications, it is unlikely that the U.S. could win without the commitment beyond the scale of the Vietnam or Korean Wars, involving perhaps a million or more soldiers.What seems to be universally missing from discussions of the issue in the media is any understanding that we would be going up against a major regional power, not some backwater like Afghanistan; this would be like fighting Britain or France, not Serbia or Libya. There is only one avenue open to either the U.S. or Israel against this rising, formidable foe that wouldn’t require a full-scale national mobilization and great risks to the stability of the whole Eastern Hemisphere: the usual precision strike with bombers or guided missiles. The problem is that even the most accurate bunker-busters and Predator drones are pinpricks that won’t actually do anything to solve the problem. Such weapons are great for use against individual dictators in hiding or terrorists on the run, but we’re up against an enemy that has diffused its nuclear weapons research across the country. Certainly we can set it back a few years by hitting the right bunkers, but we can’t hit them all, and once the bombing stops the Iranians will simply pick up where they left off. This isn’t going to go like Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq's reactor at Osirak. There isn’t going to be any tangible long-term military benefit from such a strike, but there are plenty of risks. Win or lose, Iran can always play the martyr and gain the sympathy of much of the Islamic world, so we have to factor in that cost ahead of time. The best we can hope for is a superficial victory that allows American and Israeli officials to claim victory in front of the media, but accomplishes nothing, leaving intact an angry Iran basking in the sympathy of much of the world. There could be worse consequences though, if Iran has any military success at all. If Iran does heavy damage to Israeli cities with its long-range missiles, takes out American ships in the Persian Gulf or shoots down the bombers sent against it, then they will emerge as the champions of the Muslim world. Furthermore, Israel’s Teflon coating will finally be scratched for the whole world to see. Like the U.S. after Desert Storm, Israel’s is still living off the captial provided by the Six-Day War, which still intimidates their neighbors to this day, although the circumstances that made it possible have vanished. The greatest danger to Israel’s security is that its rapidly multiplying adversaries might realize how greatly the power equation has shifted, so any high-risk military mission that isn’t really going to accomplish anything ought to be avoided. Once the world understands that they can be beaten, their enemies will be encouraged to combine against them again.
On the other hand, inaction against Iran’s nuclear program or any of the other threats swirling around Israel today merely postpones the consequences of the Retreat of the West. It is because Israel has so little room for maneuver that I fear that before the century is out, it will share the fate of Outremer, the tiny kingdom established in Palestine by the Crusaders. It too held out against the Muslim potentates surrounding it, but finally succumbed after a century. Like Outremer, Israel was established as a beachhead in the Orient by settlers from the Occident, but for entirely different reasons. Outremer was founded on the religion of Christianity, but Israel was founded on the ethnicity, not the religion, of Judaism. Although I support Israel and hope that the dire trends I have outlined here are reversed, I am not optimistic, in part because Israel’s citizens have chosen not to do anything about the things they really can change. If Israel still followed the respectable religion of Judaism rather than merely clinging to its ceremonial trappings, they might have a possibility of surviving a few more generations with their backs to the wall. Instead, the country has enthusiastically embraced everything that is wrong with the West today, including its real religion, the love of money. Israel’s main wound, its population deficit, is a self-inflicted, suicidal one: by rejecting Judaic commandments against abortion and contraception, the country has bought itself a higher standard of living, but only at the cost of the long-term survival of the nation. And it is questionable whether any nation that openly embraces such evils can either survive or deserves to. If the Jewish state fails, I will weep for those orthodox Jews who fought valiantly against such horrors and just as valiantly for everything heroic in the religion of Judaism – because if it falls, it will not fall because it was Jewish, but because it wasn’t Jewish enough. I will find it harder to weep for many of their countrymen, who complain loudly about Jews being killed in the Holocaust of Hitler or threatened with a future Holocaust by men like Bin Laden, but tolerate the killing of unborn baby Jews in their neighborhood abortion clinics. There are teeming millions of followers of Mohammed who would like to murder the state of Israel, but they could not succeed if Israel were not already killing itself. If the Jewish state dies, the verdict will be suicide.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.
[2] See http://www.springerimages.com/Images/HumanitiesArts/1-10.1007_s12397-009-9011-1-0 cites Total fertility rates, selected countries, 1950–2005. Source: United Nations (2007), Israel CBS, annual. Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel.
[4] IBID.
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