The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010

40 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 1 0 tional Christian heartland, Israel’s ac- tions and policies have become the primary significant stimulus to anti- Jewish animus there and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the replacement of Zionist idealism, humanism and sec- ularism with the cynicism, racism and religiosity of contemporary Is- raeli politics has precipitated a mounting moral crisis and loss of confidence among many committed to the Jewish state. Although some settlers continue to arrive, one-fifth of Israelis now re- side abroad. Jewish emigration is ac- celerating. Meanwhile, the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories continues to grow, as does the size of the Palestinian diaspora. By 2015, barring mass deporta- tion, half the people in Israel and the occupied territories will be Arabs. Thereafter, Jews will be a declining minority. The international community — including, I daresay, most of the Jewish diaspora—does not accept the settler propo- sitions that Jews can and should by divine right entrench their rule over the Arabs of the Holy Land, or define them as morally inconvenient and deport them. An antiapartheid- style campaign of ostracism, boycott and disinvestment against this version of a Jewish state has already begun. In combination, current trends portend the perpetua- tion of violent struggle by the Palestinians against their Is- raeli overlords, even as the Jewish state is isolated from without and corrodes fromwithin. These trends lead to es- calating antagonism between the United States and the Arab and Muslim worlds. Given the self-identification of many Jews with the state of Israel, these trends also risk a rebirth of anti-Semitism and a spillover of violence to the Jewish diaspora. Peace — Or the Alternative So where does this leave the Obama administration’s peace project? In Israel’s own estimation and that of the re- gion, the Jewish state is at a turning point. Time is running out on the prospects for peaceful engagement between it, the Palestinians, other Arabs and non-Arab Muslims. No peace is conceivable without the full use of Americanmoral and economic leverage to bring Israel to the negotiating table. A decision by Washington to compel Israel to make the choices necessary to achieve mutually respectful coex- istence with the Palestinians and other Arabs would, however, lead to immediate political crises in both Is- rael and the United States. The ad- ministration speaks with determina- tion, but is it really prepared to risk this? Peace with the Palestinians would enable Israel for the first time to be accepted by 340 million Arabs and 1.2 billion non-ArabMuslims as a legitimate part of theMiddle East. It would thereby end the conflict in the Holy Land. The key to deradi- calization of the Arab and Muslim worlds, and to ending their violent backlash against the West, it is also the prerequisite for the restoration of peace within the realm of Islam. The alternative is the current Israeli government’s effort to impose a Jewish-dominated state dotted with little Arab ghettos. This is a “success” that Israelis would almost cer- tainly come to regret bitterly. Would a state seen by the world as embodying racism and religious bigotry retain the support of the Jewish diaspora? Would the United States continue indefinitely to guarantee its security? The safety of such an Israel and its citizens would depend on the so- far undemonstrated ability of intimidation, ruthlessly sus- tained, to grind Arab resistance into acquiescence. Cairo and Amman would have to be kept within a Camp David framework that Egyptians and Jordanians, if allowed to vote, would even now overwhelmingly repudiate. Israel’s right to exist as a state in the Middle East would almost certainly be reviewed in intermittent tests of arms, conducted — as in the case of the Crusader kingdoms in Palestine — over decades, if not centuries. Israel would have to sustainmilitary hegemony in perpetuity over larger, ever more populous and ever more modernized Arab and Muslim neighbors. If these conditions were not met, as they almost certainly could not be, this unilaterally imposed outcome would be an invitation to protracted Arab and Muslim struggle against Israel and its supporters abroad. It is hard to see this as a formula that leads to anything but eventual disaster for Israel and its foreign backers, now essentially limited to the United States. Israel’s nuclear doc- trine — based as it is on an amalgam of Armageddon with the heroic suicide at Masada—seems to recognize this. On the whole, for sensible people in Israel and for Americans, F O C U S Peace with the Palestinians would enable Israel for the first time to be accepted by 340 million Arabs and 1.2 billion non-Arab Muslims as a legitimate part of the Middle East.