Island Israel

by John Thompson

January, 2001

With the current round of Arab-Israeli tensions, Israel may be in worse trouble than it realizes.

The security of Israel has long rested on four sturdy cornerstones: The excellence and daring of its citizen-soldiers, friendly support from the United States, fairly reliable support from Western Europe (often prompted by memories of the Shoah), and the influx of money and hope from Jewish communities in friendly nations.

However, as the founders of the Zionist movement learned when the Dreyfus Affair ignited a wave of anti-Jewish bigotry in France during the 1890s, sometimes you just can’t trust anybody. Israel might be about to relearn this lesson.

Israel traditionally used a qualitative edge to blunt its opponents’ quantitative advantages. Part of the price for the American-directed peace-process in the Middle East consisted of reassurances to friendly (or vital) nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- by allowing sales of such advanced weapons systems as Abrams tanks and F-16C fighters to Egypt and Apache attack helicopters and F-15C interceptors to the Saudis.

Israel’s edge has also dulled with the long demand for troops on internal security duties in Palestinian communities — which means they have learned a different type of soldiering from that which saved Israel earlier.

The recent imbroglio in the US Presidential election presents other problems — the USS America is losing its current captain, and his replacement had to fight all the way to the helm. With the turnover of power, Israel may not get strong support and swift decision out of Washington for a while.

Worse, even Yasser Arafat can’t always strike out. For 35 years he has miscued his strategy of combining violence and the appearance of conciliation — causing no end of mischief throughout the region. But this time, the World is different and short of leaders who can recognize a thug on the make.

There are other problems. The 2000 elections in the US and Canada may mark the last time that Jewish opinion and voters counted for more than those of the Islamic citizenry. As opposed to the Orthodox Community, Liberal Jews are marrying non-Jews at a record rate — a fact that has rung alarm bells with Commentary and other Jewish magazines. The community, if it is not shrinking, may be static in terms of growth.

In contrast to the Jewish community, Muslim immigration is rapidly building up in North America and Western Europe. In the 1996 Canadian census, about 351,000 people identified themselves as being all or partly Jewish in origin. The same census indicated that about 245,000 Canadians identified themselves as being Arab or "West Asian" in appearance and 262,000 identified Arabic, Persian, Somali and Turkish as their mother tongue. Our Muslim population is doubling every decade and the 2001 Census might reveal that parity has occurred.

The growing Islamic population in the United States has led the US Army to create specialized field rations for Muslim troops. In terms of their proportion to the overall population, Muslim immigrants have yet to rival those in Canada — but it is a large community and growing quickly. The numbers in Western Europe are even more interesting.

In Germany, 2.4% of the population is of Turkish origin, and the overall size of the Muslim population is nearing 4% of the total. They have no memory of the Holocaust and feel no need to be burdened with shame about it. In Great Britain, practicing Muslims outnumber practicing Jews by fifteen to one. The massive influx of North African workers and citizens in France has created a very large Muslim community. Many Arab and Muslim citizens can be found in most other Western European nations.

If push came to shove, Israel might not get much weight behind it. Worse still, Middle Eastern oil is probably more necessary for Western European nations than it is for North America. The Europeans may embrace Arafat’s recent offer to help "solve" the problem he unleashed.

Moreover, if any people should know about the power that can be mustered by overseas communities, it is the Israelis. Overseas sponsors sustained the early Zionist settlers in Palestine. Massive support for Israel from the Jewish citizens of America and Canada kept the embryonic state alive and nurtured its early growth.

No Israeli should be surprised if support for Palestinian Arabs starts to flood in from the wealthy Palestinians and Muslim communities abroad. Their widespread distrust (even vitriolic hatred) of Israel is translating into dollars and power from Europe and North America — and can only grow in size.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca