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Charles Laffiteau's Bigger Picture

Last update - Friday, April 12, 2013, 10:41 By Charles Laffiteau

The World at Home

 

I could be wrong, but I believe the consequences of a failure to negotiate a peaceful end to the Middle East crisis will become increasingly dire on both sides of the dispute. The plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank will only continue to worsen because their rapidly growing populations are in desperate need of the jobs and economic growth that would attend a peace deal. Without such a deal, I believe the Israelis will not only suffer from the economic costs of providing security for Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, they will eventually pay too high a price in terms of their own political freedoms.

President Obama and the vast majority of US foreign policy experts are in agreement that Israel is not only becoming more isolated within the wider international community, but also that political instability is a growing threat in the countries that share its borders. Over the past 40 years Israel has been able to thrive economically thanks largely to peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan that the US brokered following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

But the political instability that led to several skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon over the last 30 years now threatens to engulf Israel’s other neighbouring states. In Egypt, the Arab Spring uprising – led by liberal and secular young people agitating for democracy – succeeded in overthrowing the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship. But the democratic elections they wanted led to a narrow victory by Islamist political parties that were much more sympathetic to Palestinians and hostile to Israel. While President Morsi’s Islamist regime has thus far abided by Egypt’s peace agreements with Israel, Morsi is under pressure from many Islamists in his government to provide more support to the anti-Israeli Hamas regime in Gaza.

In Jordan, which is also home to an estimated two million Palestinian refugees, King Abdullah is coming under increasing pressure to hold democratic elections that could eventually lead to an Islamist regime taking power there as well. Further complicating matters in Jordan is the more recent influx of over half a million Syrian refugees, which Unicef estimates will double to almost 1.2 million by the end of this year.

In Lebanon, an uneasy truce between Israel and Hezbollah has prevailed since the end of the 2006 invasion of the south by the Israeli Defence Forces. But the absence of armed conflict with Lebanon in recent years has also been due to internal political and armed conflicts between Lebanon’s pro-western Christian forces and Shia Muslims aligned with Hezbollah. Today the greatest threat to Lebanon’s political stability is in the spill-over effects it is seeing from the civil war currently raging in Syria. The influx of refugees from that conflict has led to an increase in tensions and sectarian violence in Lebanon.

Last but not least: while the uneasy truce between Israel and Syria in place for the past four decades is not currently threatened, if the Islamist factions fighting to topple the Assad regime do succeed in taking power, then all bets are off.

However, the biggest long-term threat to Israel’s political freedoms and future as a democracy doesn’t come from increasing political instability outside its borders. Rather, it is an internal threat that stems from population statistics. Experts estimate that Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel will comprise half the population of the region by 2015. Furthermore, by 2020 these same demographers estimate that Palestinians will outnumber Jewish Israelis by more than half a million.

Time and again, history has shown that the only way an ethnic or religious minority can maintain political power and control over a majority is by using totalitarian methods to restrict the political freedom of its citizens. But the numerical advantage of the majority also eventually leads to a violent exchange of power. Truly democratic regimes do not use restrictions on the rights of its citizens to remain in power; instead they give the ethnic majority some power by integrating members into their political regime.

So as George Mitchell recently noted in an interview with Charlie Rose, when Israeli Jews are no longer a majority of the population in the geographic region they control, they will then have to choose between being a Jewish state or a democratic state, because they won’t be able to continue being both Jewish and democratic while also maintaining control of the region.

 

Charles Laffiteau is a US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is pursuing a PhD in Public Policy and Political Economy. He previously lectured on Contemporary US Business & Society at DCU from 2009-2011.

 


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