[BRIGADE] PJB: The Lost Tribes of Israel
Published: Fri, 05/16/08
Patrick J. Buchanan
Friday, May 16, 2008
As Israel enters its 61st year, Israelis may look back with pride.
Yet, the realists among them must also look forward with foreboding.
Israel is a modern democracy with the highest standard of living in
the Middle East. In the high-tech industries of the future, she is
in the first rank. From a nation of fewer than a million in 1948,
Israel's population has grown to 7 million. In seven wars -- the
1948 War of Independence, the Sinai invasion of 1956, the Six-Day
War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and the Lebanon wars of
1982 and 2006 -- Israel has prevailed, though some of these wars
were, as Wellington said of Waterloo, "a damn near-run thing."
Israel has revived Hebrew, created a new currency, immersed her
children in the history, ancient and modern, of her people, and
established a homeland for Jews from all over the world, millions
of whom have migrated there to settle. Israel is now home to the
largest concentration of Jews anywhere on earth.
Here, however, we come to the heart of the existential crisis.
Israel became home to the largest Jewish population on earth in
part because American Jews in the 1990s fell in number from 5.5
million to 5.2 million, a loss of 300,000, or 6 percent of the U.S.
Jewish population.
According to Charles Krauthammer, by 2050, the U.S. Jewish
population will have shrunk another 50 percent to 2.5 million.
American Jews are slowly vanishing. How and why is this happening?
It is the collective decision of American Jews themselves, who have
led the battles for birth control and a woman's right to choose.
As Jews were roughly 2 percent of the U.S. population from Roe v.
Wade to today, perhaps 2 percent of the 50 million legal abortions
since Roe were likely performed on Jewish girls or women, resulting
in 1 million lost members of the Jewish community in 35 years.
And if demography is destiny, Israel's future, too, appears grim.
As former Ambassador Zalman Shoval writes, Israel's population of 7
million is 80 percent Jewish. But the Palestinian population of
Israel has risen to 20 percent and is growing much faster.
One Israel blogger, using Shoval's totals, writes that among the
Israeli population between 1 and 4 years old, roughly 30 percent is
Arab. The future of Israel is thus increasingly Arab and less Jewish.
According to the United Nations, by 2050, Israel will have 10
million people.
By then, the Arab population, at present birth rates, is likely to
be close to 30 percent of the Israeli population. On the West Bank
and Gaza, today's 4 million Arabs are to explode to 10 million, far
outstripping the growth in Israel. Jordan's population of 5
million, 60 percent Palestinian, will also double to 10 million.
Thus, not even counting Palestinians in Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Syria and the Gulf states, Israel's 7 million to 8 million
Jews in 2050 will be living with 13 million Palestinians in Israel,
Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. If Israel is to survive as a
Jewish state, a separate and independent Palestinian state would
seem an imperative.
Yet, as Israelis continue to build outposts and expand and add
settlements, the possibility of a Palestinian state recedes.
Indeed, many Israelis, seeing what an end to the occupation
produced in Gaza, refuse to consider any pullout at all from the
West Bank.
Such a policy of holding on and digging in is sometimes the best
one -- but only if time is on one's side. Is time on Israel's side?
According to the world population statistics from the National
Policy Institute, the worldwide Arabic population in 1950 was only
94 million, less than 4 percent of the world population. But by
2050, it will be 700 million, 7 percent of a world population of
almost 10 billion.
According to U.N. population experts, Lebanon's population will
grow to 5 million in 2050, but Syria's will almost double from
today's 20 million to 34 million. The population of Saudi Arabia
will rise from 24 million to 45 million. Egypt will grow by more
than 50 million to 121 million Egyptians by 2050. The Islamic
Republic of Iran, 71 million today, is expected to reach 100
million at mid-century.
And, demography aside, the Islamic faith of Israel's neighbors is
becoming militant. Hamas now controls Gaza. Hezbollah now controls
Southern Lebanon and is becoming the power in Beirut. While Egypt
is headed by a pro-American autocrat, the principal rival for power
is the widely popular Muslim Brotherhood.
Those who do not like the Saudi monarchy should consider what is
likely to rise in its place, should the House of Saud fall. The
same is true of the Jordanian and Moroccan monarchies, and the
sheikdoms, emirates and sultanates of the Persian Gulf.
In any struggle of generations, the critical question is often:
Whose side is time on? As President Bush celebrates Israel's 60th
birthday, and is celebrated in turn as Israel's best friend ever,
it is a fair question to ask.
SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=991