If there were no Israel
Edward Glick tries to envision what the Middle East - and the World - would look like without Israel. Not for Jews - that's a separate issue and any Jew who doesn't understand why we would all be in danger if Israel did not exist, doesn't understand what it was like to be a Jew in Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Glick tries to envision what the Middle East and the World would look like for the non-Jews if there were no Israel. Here's some of it (Hat Tip: Backspin). What would an Israel-free Middle East be like?And the World would no longer be interested in throwing billions of dollars at the 'Palestinians' if there were no Israel to be opposed.
For starters, the only democracy in the region will have vanished.
And since there would still be Arab hostility, dictatorship, cronyism, corruption, overpopulation and socioeconomic dislocation, Hamas, Hezbollah and the other Arab leaders would have to find a new scapegoat toward which to deflect the anger and despair of their people.
Palestine would still be as underdeveloped as are most of the Arab states, whose combined gross domestic product is less than that of Spain.
Their people saddled with one of the highest birthrates in the world, most Palestinians would still be unemployed and unemployable, partly because of the inability or unwillingness of their rulers to create viable institutions and infrastructures, and partly because there would no longer be an Israel for the Palestinians to work in.
East Jerusalem and the West Bank would be still ruled from Amman, the Gaza Strip would still be ruled from Cairo and the Golan Heights would still be ruled from Damascus. Syria would still be the de facto ruler of Lebanon and its Christian minority, and it would still be a threat to both Palestine and Jordan, which it considers to be part of southern Syria.Read the whole thing.
The Arab states without oil would still resent the Arab states that have oil -- and the wealth and power that flow from it. And water, always in short supply in the Middle East, would eventually become the most precious liquid in the region.
The animosity between the 85 percent of Muslims who are Sunnis and the 15 percent who are Shiites would not abate.
...
Iran would still be run by the ayatollahs. And the United States, even under President Barack Obama, would still be facing the specter of an atomic, biological or chemical version of 9/11.
Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, funded in no small amount by Saudi money, would still be trying to punish us for, among other transgressions, stationing our infidel soldiers -- especially our women soldiers -- in the land which contains Islam's sacred cities of Mecca and Medina.
Finally, even without a Jewish polity and without either a one-state or a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, there would still be at least 1.3 billion Muslims living on this planet. If only 1 percent of them are Islamists and jihadists, that means 13 million people who are hellbent on terrorizing infidels back to earlier centuries of real and imagined Islamic glory.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:20 PM
1 Comments:
Exactly, Carl. Israel is completely peripheral to and doesn't figure in most of the Middle East conflicts, which have nothing to do with it. In their more lucid moments, the rulers of the region's regimes understand it as well. That's a point often lost in the West, which assumes that if Israel removed what is perceived as the main bone in the throat of Arab irritation - namely a Palestinian reichlet, all the trouble in the Middle East would vanish. Trouble, is there is not much the Jews can do about the ones in which they never have had a hand.
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