Bloomington, In. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – A dozen years ago I visited Israel on a two-week trip as a guest of an American pro-Israel group. I asked several of the speakers we heard, “Where do you think Israel will be in a hundred years?” The speakers invariably looked at me as though I had unaccountably switched to speaking Swahili. I have yet to get an answer to that question.
The two-state solution is now impossible, made so by the foolish decisions of a series of Israeli governments to allow massive Jewish settlement in the West Bank and enabling by the United States of America. That leaves the alternatives of a democratic one-state solution or the expulsion or extermination of either the Israeli Jews or the Palestinian Arabs.
But perhaps the question is better considered by looking back nine hundred years to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
In 1095 Pope Urban II, having received a plea for military help from the Byzantine emperor, called for a “Crusade” to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslim infidels. The emperor just wanted some of those famous and brutal West European armored knights to help him against the Turks. He had recently lost a disastrous battle that cost his remnant of the Roman Empire much of what is now central Turkey. The pope, hoping for a respite from the incessant wars among the European nobility, thought their inclination to violence might be better directed at the enemies of Christendom. Instead, four years later, a Western European army, half mad with hunger and hardship, stormed the holy city, slaughtered much of the population and established the Kingdom of Jerusalem and three other semi-independent Latin statelets along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. It was an outcome every bit as improbable as the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948.
The Kingdom of Jerusalem and its subordinate states—the County of Tripoli, approximately modern Lebanon; the Principality of Antioch, approximately modern northwestern Syria; and the County of Edessa, a chunk of south-central Turkey—had three strategic advantages. The first was their body of professional armored knights mounted on their burly European war horses. The light cavalry of the neighboring Islamic statelets was no match for them, and the amateur militias that usually constituted Islamic infantry could not stand against them. Indeed, even in Europe, it was not until the English learned to use longbowmen effectively and professional mercenary corps emerged in Italy that the reign of armored knights on the battlefield ended.
Second, the feudal anarchy of Western Europe had nurtured a tradition of superb military architecture, the famous medieval castles that enabled a relative handful of defenders to withstand large armies.
Finally, the First Crusade happened at a time when the Islamic Levant was divided into small squabbling states. Much of the political history of the first century of the Kingdom of Jerusalem involved the Christian states allying themselves with one or another of these statelets.
Unfortunately for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, there were long-term threats. Manpower was always a problem. Enthusiasm for crusading waxed and waned. Idealistic knights trickled in, seeking blessing, adventure, and perhaps wealth. Most them then returned home. Occasionally, a large-scale Crusade might be organized, but that usually didn’t help much. The Second Crusade in 1148 ended in fiasco before the walls of Damascus. The Fourth was diverted to loot Christian Constantinople. More seriously, the Kingdom of Jerusalem could not afford to lose a decisive battle.
In 1189 the Kingdom’s luck ran out. First, the Islamic Levant had been united under the famous Saladin. His uncle had already established a sultanate in Iraq and northern Syria and then went on to conquer Egypt, overthrowing a long-established Shi’ite empire that had not been a particular threat to the Crusaders. This placed the Kingdom of Jerusalem squarely on the lines of communication between the two halves of what now was Saladin’s empire. The final straw came when a Crusader lord in what is now southern Israel began attacking pilgrimage caravans from Syria, one of which contained Saladin’s sister. The Sultan’s patience exhausted, he gathered his forces and besieged Tiberias, where the families of a number of Crusader leaders happened to be staying. The king gathered his forces and marched northeast to relieve to lift the siege. Saladin pounced. Trapping the assembled knights of the kingdom on a waterless hill, he set fire to the grass. A last desperate charge failed, and the knights were all killed or captured. The king himself fell into Saladin’s hands. Left defenseless, the Crusader cities, including Jerusalem itself, surrendered to the Sultan. A desperate defense of the south Lebanese town of Sidon provided a base for reestablishing a rump kingdom along the coast, but over the next century or so, the remaining coastal towns fell one by one to the Muslims. The Kingdom of Jerusalem reestablished itself on Cyprus, before falling into the hands of the Ottoman Turks. There still are three French noblemen who claim the title, but their significance in Levantine affairs is, let us say, negligible.
So what does this have to do with Israel? Well, to start with, the strategic position of Israel is very like that of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the fundamental laws of war have not changed. Israel occupies a narrow strip of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean surrounded by hostile but disunited states. Its chief ally, the United States, is distant and increasingly reluctant to intervene to support it. About half the population of areas controlled by Israel is Arab. Moreover, something in excess of half a million Israelis, about 7% of the Jewish population, are outside Israel on more than a short-term basis. It is reasonably clear that some significant portion of these people will not return to Israel. About 10% of Israeli citizens, probably overwhelmingly Jews, are dual nationals and thus could easily emigrate. Immigration to Israel has fluctuated wildly, mainly depending on factors outside Israel, notably the Holocaust and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Given that the bulk of Jews outside Israel live in Western democracies, mass Jewish emigration to Israel in the foreseeable future is unlikely, particularly if Israel’s security situation is not resolved.
Second, like the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Israel has depended on superior military technology to compensate for inferior numbers. Heavily armored horsemen and magnificent castles no longer dominate war, but they have been replaced by tanks, warplanes, and anti-missile defenses, aided by superior human and signals intelligence. Unfortunately, another law of warfare is that advantage moves back and forth between attack and defense. The machine gun and defensive trenches neutralized the advantages once enjoyed by Napoleonic massed infantry but were themselves neutralized by tanks and aircraft. However, the last several years have seen the emergence of cheap new technologies capable of neutralizing expensive weapons systems. Ingenious Ukrainians demonstrated that mail-order hobbyist drones of negligible cost could be adapted to destroy tanks. Remote-controlled boats—floating drones—and guided missiles and drones succeeded in sinking the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and confining the surviving ships to port far from the Ukrainian battlefields. Tribal militias armed with drones have more or less closed the Red Sea to shipping. What remains, the Russians discovered, is once again massed infantry attacks with troops gradually relearning the tactical lessons of the last two years of the First World War. Countries like the United States are hurrying to work out the implications of these technical changes that would seem to neutralize the advantages of superior technology, but Israel could not win a war dominated by massed infantry.
Israel faces a further disadvantage. The knights of the Kingdom of Jerusalem could go off to war, wars that at most lasted a few months, while their serfs stayed home to tend the crops, but Israel is reliant on a small professional army supported during a crisis by mass callups of reserves. Given that the Arabs of the occupied territories are not going to step in to replace teachers, factory workers, office managers, and the like, the Israeli economy grinds to a halt for the duration of a serious conflict. The current siege of Gaza entered its second year with a mobilized Israeli army unable to secure a territory about a third the size of a Midwestern American county and Hamas re-emerging to resume governing the territory. The conflict with the much better prepared Hezbollah in Lebanon was surprisingly successful for Israel, but Hezbollah still exists. Continued conflict, especially conflict like the current Gaza war, shows the inability of the State of Israel to protect its citizens and provide peaceful life and is likely to lead to more emigration. Finally, even Israel’s nuclear weapons cannot ensure its security. As one Israeli general remarked, there are only two times to use nuclear weapons: too soon and too late.
Finally, the disunity of the Arab states will not necessarily continue. The current crisis has forced the states of the Abraham Accord to back away from Israel under public pressure. A major war in the Middle East is not likely to favor Israel—hence the Israeli government’s efforts to draw the United States into a conflict with Iran.
In short, all the political, economic, and military factors indicate that Israel faces the same threats that led to the destruction of the Kingdom of Jerusalem eight centuries ago.
So what is the State of Israel to do, given that all the long-term factors are unfavorable to it? The obvious answer is that it needs to make a lasting peace with its enemies. Leaving aside the Palestinians for the moment, there are no fundamental conflicts of interest between Israel and its neighboring states. Having recovered the Sinai decades ago, Egypt has no interest in a war with Israel. Jordan has long reconciled itself to the loss of its Palestinian territories and has, like Egypt, a peace treaty with Israel. Syria, in an ideal world, would like the Golan Heights back, but it has more important fish to fry, especially in the aftermath of the fall of the Asaad regime. Israel would like access to the waters of the Litani River in southern Lebanon, but Lebanon itself wants nothing from Israel except permanent peace. Hezbollah does not like Israel, of course, but its fundamental concerns are Lebanon and its Shi’ite population, not with the destruction of Israel.
But despite the Abraham Accords, realistically can Israel make such a peace? There the Palestinians and Israel’s own population are the key. The answer to that is no; Israel’s own political lack of foresight has made the vaunted two-state solution impossible—especially with Trump’s proposal expel the population of Gaza and to turn the territory into a chain of luxury resorts, presumably Tump-branded. Israel has placed something like three quarters of a million Jewish settlers in what was once Arab Jerusalem and the West Bank. While some fraction of these have simply been drawn to subsidized housing just across the old Green Line, the rest are ideologically committed settlers determined to “redeem the land.” There are hundreds of thousands of them, they are armed, in violent conflict with the West Bank Palestinian population, and increasingly present in the Israeli army and government, and they have no intention of leaving. Jerusalem and the West Bank are the heartlands of the ancient Hebrew kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Whereas the Zionists of the Ben Gurion generation wanted a Jewish homeland, the West Bank settlers want that specific land. Democracy and peace do not enter into their calculations. What is left to the Palestinians are the ruins of Gaza and isolated fragments of land divided by Israeli settlements and Jewish-only roads.
In short, the emergence of a prosperous Palestinian state living in peace along side Israel is an illusion. It would take a civil war to remove the settlers from the West Bank, so they are unlikely to go, given the political power and implacability of the settler movement. Likewise, the Palestinian population for the most part has nowhere to go, as the reaction to Trump’s to expel the Gazans to make room for luxury hotels and condominiums shows
So that takes me back to my original question: “Where do you think Israel will be in a hundred years?”
One possibility is that Israel loses a war decisively. Perhaps a new Saladin will come along to unite the Arab nation and deal with the irritant of Israel for good. Perhaps cheap weapons combining drone technology, AI, and advanced electronics will neutralize Israel’s technical advantages in tanks, missiles, aircraft, and intelligence. This latter may already be upon us, as the example of the success of the Ukrainians in holding out against the vastly larger Russian army already shows. Such a defeat would almost certainly result in the extinction of the State of Israel and the death or exile of most of its Jewish population. After all, there is no Frankish remnant surviving in Israel from before the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It is impossible to know how likely this alternative is or whether nuclear deterrence would prevent it.
The easiest alternative to predict and perhaps the most likely is that things will continue as they are going now. In this case, Israel will become a steadily more embattled apartheid state. Little wars will erupt every few years to deal with Palestinian resistance—“mowing the lawn” to use the vile Israeli euphemism. Jewish immigration to Israel will continue to dwindle and be dominated by those inspired by the ideology of “redemption of the land.” Secular Jews will continue to leave. The populations of Arabs and economically unproductive Ultra-Orthodox Jews will continue to grow. The state will be dominated by parties committed to the annexation of Arab land and the expulsion of the Arab population. Given increasing hostility to immigrants across the world, the solution of a second Nakba in which the Arab population is expelled en masse will not be available. The result will be a situation in which a minority of Jews keeps a majority of Arabs in poverty and subjugation. With the resulting loss of much of the creative class of Israel and diminishing international legitimacy, the vitality of the Israeli economy will decline. That is the medium term. What about the long term?
I see two alternatives. One is that Israel turns into a combination of Lebanon and apartheid South Africa—isolated, besieged, and ideologically warped, a sort of modern Sparta living in terror of those it has wronged. This is not the Israel of its founders’ dreams.
The final alternative is that Israel goes the way of post-apartheid South Africa. Some combination of internal contradictions, exhaustion, external pressure, and realistic leadership from both sides leads to a democratic one-state solution. It would not be paradise, as the South African example shows, but it could be workable with good will and good leadership. It would no longer be a Jewish state, but perhaps a Hebrew state in which two traumatized peoples might live warily together.
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