The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

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

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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.”
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 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

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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.

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