The MIddle East is undergoing the same nation-forming process that was completed in Europe after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Ethnic minorities are being cleansed out and strong ethnically homogeneous states are emerging. Now we are witnessing that process in Syria. It is a 90% Sunni country, with a 10% Alawi minority. Nowadays the Army has split along ethnic lines, and the Alawi group is fighting the deserters and shooting at the population. The 90% Sunni are boiling in anger, and there are only two possible outcomes:
(1) The Army massacres the rebels and Alawi domination emerges stronger than before, or
(2) The Army loses control, a popular rebellion institutes street terror and the Alawi have to run for their lives.
There are only two possible neighbor countries where Alawis may seek refuge: Turkey and Israel. Turkey is preparing large refugee camps near the Syrian border. We are mining the border so no one will pass. We are an ethnic nation and do not want two million more Arabs here.
Once completed the formation of ethnic states in the Middle East, the area will be ready for peace. Like Europe.
22 comments:
And then you can form a "Middle Eastern Union" and open all the borders.
Yes.
And a common currency. The GOAT.
Gaza, Oman, Akrotiri, Turkey.
The Saudi GOAT will be carry the image of a camel. The Akrotiri (a country acording to the CIA site) GOAT will have a profile of the Prince of Wales. No offense! The Israeli GOAT will show Sara Netaniyahu.
"Once completed the formation of ethnic states in the Middle East, the area will be ready for peace. Like Europe."
Does this mean the Arab citizens of Israel get moved out of Israel into the grand alliance of Middle Eastern states?
If the Arab citizens of Israel have any sense they will stay put where they can be citizens of a Western outpost instead of an Arab hellhole. The so-called Palestinians were always part of the greater Arab world and never had a separate national identity. This never translated to their own state or a greater Arab state as they were ruled by the Ottomans.
K
One more ingredient is needed I think.
Stable population.
For the time being it is not the case in the area. And today's numbers are anyway pretty unsustainable.
I saw a lot of arguments that fertility is around replacement level in ME. And so the future is bright. Know nothing about distant future, but near one is anything but bright.
Whoever says that has no idea how a demographic projection looks like. Growth stops in 2 generations after fertility goes under replacement level. It stops when large generations start dieing, and replacement ones are smaller. Of course older people are less rebellious but still society will not be able to accomodate all of them. The big wave has not arrived in ME. Yet. Except Iran which will probably stabilise very soon.
In future maybe what J says will happen. But it involves an enormous amount of blood spilled. The young people already borned, which live 5 brothers in a room right now.... how are they going to be accomodated? It seems probable they will not be.
What appers as large numbers like the 80 million egyptians. The horror is yet to come. Now they are very young. Adult population is relatively small. There won't be room enough for all the kids to live as adults. What will happen I personally do not want to imagine. Is so horrible I don\t want to even think about it.
The prospect for peace is very far away.
Probably not in time - everything is faster now, no need for 200 years like in Europe - but in the amount of horrendous events which will have to happen.
If I may be allowed a prediction/vision. The haredi community will continue to grow. Will change the profile of the state. Not as in suddenly taking over, but in gradually changing society. With each generation their values and way of understanding the world will creep forward tiny little step after tiny little step.
The zealots are coming back.
With all which accompany that particular social/political approach approach - sicarii and other stuff.
In the long term Israel is going to morph into the bad boy of the neighbourhood. The one whom everybody really fears and avoids having arguments with.
There is a saying that you should be carefull what you wish, for you might get it. And descover you were superficial when identifying your wish.
The people will be fruitfull and will multiply. The land will be conquered and colonised one way or another. Enemies / neighbours will fear and avoid God's chosen. But all will happen in a completly different form then the one envisoned by the founders. One that Hertzl would not recognize. But one that Y'hudhah HamMakabi would understand and agree with.
Teo,
You are ridiculously optimistic. The ultimate outcome of the rise of zealots and sicarii in ancient times was that the ancient Judeans eventually took on Rome, a power for which they were no match, and lost after much bloody struggle. The rest is painful history. It is not as if the technological advantage that Israel possesses will survive among a bunch of superstitious bearded men who spend all of their free time learning Talmud, even if they absorb "talmudic math."
J is also over-optimistic. If all of the Arab states become homogeneous, they may experience peace among themselves, but they will be stronger adversaries for Israel. They will never accept Israel because it is a non-Arab and non-Muslim state. That won't change.
When one travels in the ME, outside of Israel, the hatred is palpable.
In the end, hatred will be the only glue holding them together.
Anon
Hate will not hold them together. Arab countries are powereles to gang up against Israel or any other "foreigner" in the region. There is nowhere more hate against Israel than in Gaza, an overpopulation strip of beach living off foreign alms. In their situation they can hate but cannot organize themselves in an effective modern force. In the end, they are irrelevant.
I remember the Bandung movement that so frightened the West in my youth. Much hate rethorics and no substance.
Apropos the banknote pictured above:
Anon's Second Rule - "The lower the IQ, the funnier the hat".
Anon.
J: Big difference between desire and ability it seems. Probably the nazis were not the worst , but they were the most competent of the hatefull.
I saw a film with the coup d'état when Samuel Doe took power - whatever - from the American-afro commuity and killed Tolbert. Like in zombi films.
And another when someone - don't remember the name - did the same to Doe. And the winner was sipping bear when his followers were cutting Doe's ears, bitting him etc. Zombi Apocalypse.
What they lack - can't mention who - is ability. Arabs are not too far away. We are going to see them in all their splendor in following years. Can chop very well with a machete, even at industrial scale.
Of course the mentioned machete is not enough to change the power gradient of an industrial state.
A completion of the above.
The ability identified with israeli is a secular askenazi feature. Which are a dominant minority for the time being.
In the future we will see that jewish israelis have similar abilities in using machetes.
Haredi are already in training to do precisely this. Today they don't have the demographic mass. Yet.
Attacking 8 year old girls because they have a different idea about the dress code is today quite rare and extreme. But is the harbinger of the times to come.
Images of Tel Aviv are no prediction for the future. Like it happened before, Cesareea will lose. Jerusalem wins every time.
What makes this time be more interesting is the fact that we will see a Jerusalem on steroids. A nuclear one, thanks to our present days Cesareea'e technical performance.
teo, Jerusalem wins all the time, yes, of course. You know, that thing above helping them, God.
You are making too much of HaAretz reporting of an "attack" on an eight years old girl. I can imagine the situation: a passing woman said the girl to dress more modestly. The anglosaxon mother went into hystery and called the horror stories collecting patrol.
Religious Jews want only one thing, to be left alone. They dont want to see gay parades in the neighborhood, they dont want seminude models looking them in the autobus, they dont want their children to receive sex classes in elementary school, they dont want TV nor tridimensional Avatar films. They are fighting a defensive war against a very attractive, very potent Western way of life. They dont want their young boys and girls defecting to Tel Aviv to study French literature nor joining Arab-Jewish theater troups.
In other worlds they dont want to invade or conquer Tel Aviv, and they dont care if in Baalbek they sacrifice goats to their idols. They are not Christians looking to bring light and salvation to Jews or Pagans.
I feel you are imposing your way of thinking on ultra pious Jews. Most of them dont want to do nothing with "the world", in fact, they didnt ask for a Jewish State and would be happier living under non-Jewish rule.
The Haredi are not all the same - they range from the Nuterai Karta that want nothing to do with Israel to the militant settlers who see it as a religious duty to hold Judea and Samaria. Teo I think was speaking more of the latter. This group was strongly influenced by currents in American life - their spirtual mentor Kahane arose as a sort of reaction to the Black Power movement of the '60s.
K
Absolutely agree they are not conspiring to change society - religious ones I mean. But they will non-the-less. Due to numbers. They will change it to accomodate them.
"They are fighting a defensive war against a very attractive, very potent Western way of life. "
And they are extremly succesfull. An absolute intelectual peak , the chief rabbi of britain wrote about this talking about europe. there it goes much slower but in the same direction.
he said what we see now is the agony of secular society.The religious camp is OK and will make a comeback. Secular values and communities are the ones in agony and dieing. Of course seculars attacked him enraged but are getting wiped out anyway. For the curios ones he is - chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks. An absolute pleasure to read something written by him. So clear and logical, true masterpieces.
Jerusalem wins because well here are 2 distinct reasons. It's like the theory of unified force in physics, they are in the end the same.
It wins because God is on their side, but also because they are fruitfull and numbers will be on their side. It's the same. They respect God's commandments and multiply and well afterwards God favours the larger battalions.
We'll see how "fruitful" the ultra-Orthdox are when there is no money for welfare benefits. The vast bulk of the haredim and hasidim have no higher skills, and manual labor jobs will disappear over the next 50 years due to automation. Will they pump out children at the expense of living in grinding poverty and despair, or will they reduce their family sizes?
Most of the Jews of E. Europe were as poor as church mice and yet they kept grinding out the children. The amount of $ you need to survive and the amount needed to live a yuppie lifestyle are two different things. Give up the Mercedes and the condo and the vacations in France and you can afford as many children as G-d provides.
As I have noted before, most of the secular Jews of today don't have to go back very far to get to the bearded Haredi grandfather. Likewise, I'm betting that today's Haredim will experience an attrition in ranks (in NY there are associations for ex-Hasidim - I know a few personally). Keep in mind that most Hasidim are Ashkenazi and are therefore of above average IQ.
K
"ikewise, I'm betting that today's Haredim will experience an attrition in ranks (in NY there are associations for ex-Hasidim - I know a few personally). Keep in mind that most Hasidim are Ashkenazi and are therefore of above average IQ."
Definitly they will. Interesting to see if it happens on large scale - attrition -before they change Israel or after. I'd bet it will happen after but we will not know for sure until one of the possibilities happens. I am willing to risk 2 beers on this bet.
Ashkenazi poverty? I dont believe in it.
Even in the worst of Tzarist oppression, the economic position of the Jews was better than the average Russian. They were accused of exploiting the poor Russian mujiks and so on.
Jews were poor in Western terms, and were poor when they arrived in masses at New York and Londosn and Berlin. They were middle class aftr ten years and rich after a generation.
I cant imagine a more absurd accusation than Haredi Jews dying of hunger if Social Security stops.
I wonder what you are talking about. Ashkenazi Jews are literate, every one of us knows how ro read and write. We are good with numbers. In a society like the USA, where 50% of the people are functional analphabets, no Ashkenazi can be poor.
Keep in mind that the Haredim receive only the most rudimentary secular education (Rebbes don't want them getting any ideas of their own) and so even though they are very bright they do lack a lot of marketable skills. Still I agree that brains will take you far, education or no.
K
Putin and his government would pay anything to have a haredi community of their own - a russian one. Germans now got smart and would do the same.
Children are an invaluable commodity for many ethnical groups. Now that they are few.
Without them Israel would not be sustainable in the ME. I f they will assimilate into the secular society or they will change it and make it more religious - the probable outcome - it's pretty irrelevant. Survival is what counts, the rest are details.
As a south african guy told me once : " you need warm bodies!" They failed to understand this simple fact when they had chances.
Haredi are producing jewish warm bodies. Fertility will definitily decline but until it does they will ensure the survival of Israel and of the jewish community.
Not a small feat I believe.
PS. A joke.
If Putin smiles then it means you have a child. And if he smiles widely it means you got twins.
Talking about small amounts of welfare is ridiculous when survival is at stake. Haredi are cheap. And what they produce is invaluable for the jewish community.
Post a Comment