The demographic issue is a myth and it does not take any think-tank to debunk it:

- Arab Israeli fertility falling in direct relation to their rising standard of living and western assimilation (who needs kids, ‘I’ want my own life)
- Israeli non-religious Jewish fertility moderately falling in direct relation to their rising standard of living and western assimilation
- Palestinian Arab/Muslim fertility falling due to western assimilation and lack of hope in future and self-leadership
- Palestinian Arab/Muslim emmigration – A) upper class, B) educated – virtually zero is any immigration
- Palestinian Arab/Christian persecution leading to emmigration

- Israeli Jewish modern orthodox maintaining above average fertility
- Torani/Hardal/settler Israeli Jewish modern orthodox communities maintaining above average fertility
- Haredi Israeli Jewish modern orthodox maintaining way above average fertility

Soon Arab fertility will equal the Jewish fertility and continue downwards.

On top of that, the myth of a Palestinian nation is unravelling from day to day. Negotiating with the PLO is ridiculous since Hamas does not give them legitimacy. The PLO does not even have a ‘mandate’ to negotiate anything. ANyone still thinking that Abu Mazen is speaking for the residents of the Gaza Strip are merely deluding themselves.

No one cares about the conflict here. No one cared about Bush’s visit here either. The world is on the brink of a recession, at least a mild one, in which when people are more worried about economic issues, they have less time to think about some idiotic conflict somewhere overseas. And as long as we continue to carry the upper hand, the Palestinians will continue to lose hope of beating us. Anyone who fails to see the reason for Hamas overrunning Gaza is also deluding themselves.

I hope you’re right about a real war between Fatah and Hamas, Middle. It would mean lost and lots of dead terrorists (in the high thousands if we’re lucky) and the panicked flight of thousands more civilians who don’t want to get caught in the crossfire. If things go well, the Arab population of Yehuda and Shomron could be drastically reduced without Israel having to do anything. This is an outcome devoutly to be wished.

Unfortunately, when the fight comes it will just be Gaza redux; Hamas will smoke Fatah like a cheap cigar and Fatah will run like the cowardly rats they are. And it will come. And it won’t have anything to do with Israel does or doesn’t do either. You’re dreaming if you think the cowardly kleptocrats of Fatah have any chance whatsoever against the Hamas fanatics. Fatah will lose, and lose big. And all of the money and materiel the world is rushing to bolster Fatah with will fall into the hands of Hamas just like it did in Gaza. Once Hamas takes Yehuda and Shomron the missiles will start falling on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Then Israel will have to decide what to do. The most powerful army in the world is useless if the civilians who control it lack the courage to use it when it is necessary. We see that in Gaza already.

Ben David has it right. The Fatah population figures are all bogus. The same thing has happened in Iran, where the bottom has fallen out of the fertility rate. No one is having kids. This trend is deepening all across the Arab world. If Hamas takes over in Yehuda and Shomron as well, I expect mass emigration. No one wants to live in a shit hole.

Tom, I would like to think you’re right, but while I think people would piss and moan if Russia re-occupied Latvia, they would still buy gas and oil from Putin. Look at China: Tibet is slowly but surely being erased, and the Olympics are right on schedule.

Is it really true that anti-Israeli policy is “illogical”? Israel’s enemies have all manner of logical reasons for opposing it. Self-interest, for example– focusing opinion abroad and away from failed policies at home.

It’s all about logically-understood self-interest in the end. President Putin would love to get Georgia, Belarus and the Baltic states back– but the international community sets the price too high. The key for Israel is crafting a similar set of int’l. norms, rewards, and punishments.

I think Paul Johnson’s analysis of antisemitism (commentarymaga...) sums it up best when he describes antisemitism as a “mental disease” for societies, that is “damaging to reason, and sometimes fatal.”

No matter how you frame Israel’s existence, the illogical hatred of the Jewish state will keep leading to illogical acts by its neighbors. I do not think that this is a good reason not to strive for peace, but it is important when taking into account any “peace process,” in that Israel can never really expect a permanent solution, but only a brief break from military attacks.

Also, is anyone else tired of how the demographic argument for the peace process always seems to be whispered in the back sections of Jewish publications/web-sites as if it is a secret? Most commentators only invoke it in mostly-Jewish forums and only refer to it in passing in the major publications, as if the Arabs won’t notice that they are winning the war against Israel from the inside out. Yes—it is probably the biggest threat to the Jewishness of the Jewish state since the Yom Kippur War, but if this is the reason we pulling Jews out of their homes in Gaza and the West Bank, lets just come out and say it. As an American, it feels dirty to admit that Jewish people want to manipulate the actual composition of this “democratic state” in order to get the political results we want (i.e. a Jewish-political majority)—in fact, it feels downright undemocratic—-but if we are to stay true to the entire raison d’etre for Israel as a Jewish state, it needs to get done.

Or, we can always start paying attention to Benny Elon…

But, as per my observation above, Dr. Phil and his need to save the unsavable is an apt analogy to the mindset of both Clinton and Bush in their final months in office.

The number would be even higher if more visas were available. The US Embassy regularly hosts a long line of green-card hopefuls, most of whom are turned away.

And those are only the official emigres – no doubt many more are slipping (back) across the Jordanian border – undoing the illegal immigration into the “occupied territories” which topped out at over 25,000 Jordanians a year back when Israel was “oppressing” the West Bank.

And since the PA has come in, birth rates have plummetted.

Paradoxically, relatively stable, equable treatment during the Israeli “occupation” caused the birth rates to rise. Now that the Palis are living in a predatory, violent kleptocracy like the rest of the Arab world, their fertility rates are dropping, and their youth are seeking greener pastures. Sound familiar? If not – go visit any major European city.

The demographic argument has been a bugaboo, a shadow used to justify all kinds of left-wing Israeli nonsense – from the mass absorption of hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Russians, to the “piece” process.

And as Ephraim points out, laying back and fulfilling the Arabs’ notions that we are weak is hardly a solution.

Ephraim also writes that peace depends on the Arabs’ abandoning their wish to destroy Israel…. Here’s a small, seaside state , nearly surrounded by a vast people with a different language, culture, and religion, and access to limitless natural resources depended on by countries around the world. The small state contains a substantial minority of that alien people. History records repeated efforts to occupy, oppress, and destroy that small state, to deprive it of its identity and culture. A prominent leader of the larger people has termed the creation of the smaller neighbor a tragedy. Countries in which the larger people predominate are, in the main, dictatorships with capricious, sometimes bloody leadership.

The small state has only recently recovered its status as an independent country; its efforts to align itself with the US and the West arouse its neighbors’ opposition. Judged by such measures as comparative population and potential wealth, the smaller state is no match for its larger neighbors.

Judged by the foregoing, the future does indeed seem bleak for Latvia. Yet it has established itself in the community of nations; and no one believes that the events of 1940, in which the USSR absorbed it, will repeat themselves.

The response to Ephraim is that Arab hatred, and their revanchist dreams, aren’t dispositive. Israeli-Arab peace, if it manages to break out, will last if a durable international consensus exists that the Arabs don’t get to take Israel over and Israel has as much right to exist as Latvia, East Timor, Georgia, and other small states confronting hostile, volatile neighbors.

The Arabs aren’t likely to have a Dr. Phil moment in which they learn to love Israel. Surely many Palestinians will hate Israel for generations, peace or no peace. Does it matter? Not if the international system ratifies and enforces a settlement between bitter enemies who manifestly can’t reach one on their own.

I just remember Clinton realization that he came up short on his “all-in” gamble at Sharm, even before everyone convened at Taba.

Do you think there’s a parallel between the last months of Clinton and the last months of Bush vis a vis the same goal? Both made/are makingt the Israel/Palestinian solution a kind of Holy Grail. Clinton was pretty public about getting the deal done before he left office, to the point of begging Barak into offering a deal that the Knesset may not have approved – and that Arafat knew would be his death knell. Now Bush is doing the same thing, although he’s backing off and then backing off even more with every minute he spends in the region.

Hubris? Legacy? IMHO Clinton really went out on a limb – whereas Bush is simply trying to burnish his tarnished legacy and may bve under orders to keep the (perceived) Jewish defection to the Republican voting base intact. In the end I think they’re both going to be proven wrong.

At Taba, the Israelis had high hopes because they made extensive additional compromises that addressed many of the Palestinian and pro-Palestinian complaints from Camp David.