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THE SLOW SUICIDE OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL  
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John Walbridge
February 8, 2025
Informed Comment
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_ The two-state solution is now impossible, made so by the foolish
decisions of a series of Israeli governments to allow massive Jewish
settlement in the West Bank and enabling by the United States of
America. _

, Informed Comment

 

Bloomington, In. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – A dozen
years ago I visited Israel on a two-week trip as a guest of an
American pro-Israel group. I asked several of the speakers we heard,
“Where do you think Israel will be in a hundred years?” The
speakers invariably looked at me as though I had unaccountably
switched to speaking Swahili. I have yet to get an answer to that
question.

The two-state solution is now impossible, made so by the foolish
decisions of a series of Israeli governments to allow massive Jewish
settlement in the West Bank and enabling by the United States of
America. That leaves the alternatives of a democratic one-state
solution or the expulsion or extermination of either the Israeli Jews
or the Palestinian Arabs.

But perhaps the question is better considered by looking back nine
hundred years to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

In 1095 Pope Urban II, having received a plea for military help from
the Byzantine emperor, called for a “Crusade” to liberate
Jerusalem from the Muslim infidels. The emperor just wanted some of
those famous and brutal West European armored knights to help him
against the Turks. He had recently lost a disastrous battle that cost
his remnant of the Roman Empire much of what is now central Turkey.
The pope, hoping for a respite from the incessant wars among the
European nobility, thought their inclination to violence might be
better directed at the enemies of Christendom. Instead, four years
later, a Western European army, half mad with hunger and hardship,
stormed the holy city, slaughtered much of the population and
established the Kingdom of Jerusalem and three other semi-independent
Latin statelets along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. It was
an outcome every bit as improbable as the establishment of a Jewish
state in Palestine in 1948.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem and its subordinate states—the County of
Tripoli, approximately modern Lebanon; the Principality of Antioch,
approximately modern northwestern Syria; and the County of Edessa, a
chunk of south-central Turkey—had three strategic advantages. The
first was their body of professional armored knights mounted on their
burly European war horses. The light cavalry of the neighboring
Islamic statelets was no match for them, and the amateur militias that
usually constituted Islamic infantry could not stand against them.
Indeed, even in Europe, it was not until the English learned to use
longbowmen effectively and professional mercenary corps emerged in
Italy that the reign of armored knights on the battlefield ended.

Second, the feudal anarchy of Western Europe had nurtured a tradition
of superb military architecture, the famous medieval castles that
enabled a relative handful of defenders to withstand large armies.

Finally, the First Crusade happened at a time when the Islamic Levant
was divided into small squabbling states. Much of the political
history of the first century of the Kingdom of Jerusalem involved the
Christian states allying themselves with one or another of these
statelets.

Unfortunately for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, there were long-term
threats. Manpower was always a problem. Enthusiasm for crusading waxed
and waned. Idealistic knights trickled in, seeking blessing,
adventure, and perhaps wealth. Most them then returned home.
Occasionally, a large-scale Crusade might be organized, but that
usually didn’t help much. The Second Crusade in 1148 ended in fiasco
before the walls of Damascus. The Fourth was diverted to loot
Christian Constantinople. More seriously, the Kingdom of Jerusalem
could not afford to lose a decisive battle.

In 1189 the Kingdom’s luck ran out. First, the Islamic Levant had
been united under the famous Saladin. His uncle had already
established a sultanate in Iraq and northern Syria and then went on to
conquer Egypt, overthrowing a long-established Shi’ite empire that
had not been a particular threat to the Crusaders. This placed the
Kingdom of Jerusalem squarely on the lines of communication between
the two halves of what now was Saladin’s empire. The final straw
came when a Crusader lord in what is now southern Israel began
attacking pilgrimage caravans from Syria, one of which contained
Saladin’s sister. The Sultan’s patience exhausted, he gathered his
forces and besieged Tiberias, where the families of a number of
Crusader leaders happened to be staying. The king gathered his forces
and marched northeast to relieve to lift the siege. Saladin pounced.
Trapping the assembled knights of the kingdom on a waterless hill, he
set fire to the grass. A last desperate charge failed, and the knights
were all killed or captured. The king himself fell into Saladin’s
hands. Left defenseless, the Crusader cities, including Jerusalem
itself, surrendered to the Sultan. A desperate defense of the south
Lebanese town of Sidon provided a base for reestablishing a rump
kingdom along the coast, but over the next century or so, the
remaining coastal towns fell one by one to the Muslims. The Kingdom of
Jerusalem reestablished itself on Cyprus, before falling into the
hands of the Ottoman Turks. There still are three French noblemen who
claim the title, but their significance in Levantine affairs is, let
us say, negligible.

So what does this have to do with Israel? Well, to start with, the
strategic position of Israel is very like that of the Kingdom of
Jerusalem, and the fundamental laws of war have not changed. Israel
occupies a narrow strip of land on the eastern coast of the
Mediterranean surrounded by hostile but disunited states. Its chief
ally, the United States, is distant and increasingly reluctant to
intervene to support it. About half the population of areas controlled
by Israel is Arab. Moreover, something in excess of half a million
Israelis, about 7% of the Jewish population, are outside Israel on
more than a short-term basis. It is reasonably clear that some
significant portion of these people will not return to Israel. About
10% of Israeli citizens, probably overwhelmingly Jews, are dual
nationals and thus could easily emigrate. Immigration to Israel has
fluctuated wildly, mainly depending on factors outside Israel, notably
the Holocaust and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Given that the
bulk of Jews outside Israel live in Western democracies, mass Jewish
emigration to Israel in the foreseeable future is unlikely,
particularly if Israel’s security situation is not resolved.

Second, like the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Israel has depended on superior
military technology to compensate for inferior numbers. Heavily
armored horsemen and magnificent castles no longer dominate war, but
they have been replaced by tanks, warplanes, and anti-missile
defenses, aided by superior human and signals intelligence.
Unfortunately, another law of warfare is that advantage moves back and
forth between attack and defense. The machine gun and defensive
trenches neutralized the advantages once enjoyed by Napoleonic massed
infantry but were themselves neutralized by tanks and aircraft.
However, the last several years have seen the emergence of cheap new
technologies capable of neutralizing expensive weapons systems.
Ingenious Ukrainians demonstrated that mail-order hobbyist drones of
negligible cost could be adapted to destroy tanks. Remote-controlled
boats—floating drones—and guided missiles and drones succeeded in
sinking the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and confining the
surviving ships to port far from the Ukrainian battlefields. Tribal
militias armed with drones have more or less closed the Red Sea to
shipping. What remains, the Russians discovered, is once again massed
infantry attacks with troops gradually relearning the tactical lessons
of the last two years of the First World War. Countries like the
United States are hurrying to work out the implications of these
technical changes that would seem to neutralize the advantages of
superior technology, but Israel could not win a war dominated by
massed infantry.

Israel faces a further disadvantage. The knights of the Kingdom of
Jerusalem could go off to war, wars that at most lasted a few months,
while their serfs stayed home to tend the crops, but Israel is reliant
on a small professional army supported during a crisis by mass callups
of reserves. Given that the Arabs of the occupied territories are not
going to step in to replace teachers, factory workers, office
managers, and the like, the Israeli economy grinds to a halt for the
duration of a serious conflict. The current siege of Gaza entered its
second year with a mobilized Israeli army unable to secure a territory
about a third the size of a Midwestern American county and Hamas
re-emerging to resume governing the territory. The conflict with the
much better prepared Hezbollah in Lebanon was surprisingly successful
for Israel, but Hezbollah still exists. Continued conflict, especially
conflict like the current Gaza war, shows the inability of the State
of Israel to protect its citizens and provide peaceful life and is
likely to lead to more emigration. Finally, even Israel’s nuclear
weapons cannot ensure its security. As one Israeli general remarked,
there are only two times to use nuclear weapons: too soon and too
late.

Finally, the disunity of the Arab states will not necessarily
continue. The current crisis has forced the states of the Abraham
Accord to back away from Israel under public pressure. A major war in
the Middle East is not likely to favor Israel—hence the Israeli
government’s efforts to draw the United States into a conflict with
Iran.

In short, all the political, economic, and military factors indicate
that Israel faces the same threats that led to the destruction of the
Kingdom of Jerusalem eight centuries ago.

So what is the State of Israel to do, given that all the long-term
factors are unfavorable to it? The obvious answer is that it needs to
make a lasting peace with its enemies. Leaving aside the Palestinians
for the moment, there are no fundamental conflicts of interest between
Israel and its neighboring states. Having recovered the Sinai decades
ago, Egypt has no interest in a war with Israel. Jordan has long
reconciled itself to the loss of its Palestinian territories and has,
like Egypt, a peace treaty with Israel. Syria, in an ideal world,
would like the Golan Heights back, but it has more important fish to
fry, especially in the aftermath of the fall of the Asaad regime.
Israel would like access to the waters of the Litani River in southern
Lebanon, but Lebanon itself wants nothing from Israel except permanent
peace. Hezbollah does not like Israel, of course, but its fundamental
concerns are Lebanon and its Shi’ite population, not with the
destruction of Israel.

But despite the Abraham Accords, realistically can Israel make such a
peace? There the Palestinians and Israel’s own population are the
key. The answer to that is no; Israel’s own political lack of
foresight has made the vaunted two-state solution
impossible—especially with Trump’s proposal expel the population
of Gaza and to turn the territory into a chain of luxury resorts,
presumably Tump-branded. Israel has placed something like three
quarters of a million Jewish settlers in what was once Arab Jerusalem
and the West Bank. While some fraction of these have simply been drawn
to subsidized housing just across the old Green Line, the rest are
ideologically committed settlers determined to “redeem the land.”
There are hundreds of thousands of them, they are armed, in violent
conflict with the West Bank Palestinian population, and increasingly
present in the Israeli army and government, and they have no intention
of leaving. Jerusalem and the West Bank are the heartlands of the
ancient Hebrew kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Whereas the Zionists of
the Ben Gurion generation wanted a Jewish homeland, the West Bank
settlers want that specific land. Democracy and peace do not enter
into their calculations. What is left to the Palestinians are the
ruins of Gaza and isolated fragments of land divided by Israeli
settlements and Jewish-only roads.

In short, the emergence of a prosperous Palestinian state living in
peace along side Israel is an illusion. It would take a civil war to
remove the settlers from the West Bank, so they are unlikely to go,
given the political power and implacability of the settler movement.
Likewise, the Palestinian population for the most part has nowhere to
go, as the reaction to Trump’s to expel the Gazans to make room for
luxury hotels and condominiums shows

So that takes me back to my original question: “Where do you think
Israel will be in a hundred years?”

One possibility is that Israel loses a war decisively. Perhaps a new
Saladin will come along to unite the Arab nation and deal with the
irritant of Israel for good. Perhaps cheap weapons combining drone
technology, AI, and advanced electronics will neutralize Israel’s
technical advantages in tanks, missiles, aircraft, and intelligence.
This latter may already be upon us, as the example of the success of
the Ukrainians in holding out against the vastly larger Russian army
already shows. Such a defeat would almost certainly result in the
extinction of the State of Israel and the death or exile of most of
its Jewish population. After all, there is no Frankish remnant
surviving in Israel from before the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
It is impossible to know how likely this alternative is or whether
nuclear deterrence would prevent it.

The easiest alternative to predict and perhaps the most likely is that
things will continue as they are going now. In this case, Israel will
become a steadily more embattled apartheid state. Little wars will
erupt every few years to deal with Palestinian resistance—“mowing
the lawn” to use the vile Israeli euphemism. Jewish immigration to
Israel will continue to dwindle and be dominated by those inspired by
the ideology of “redemption of the land.” Secular Jews will
continue to leave. The populations of Arabs and economically
unproductive Ultra-Orthodox Jews will continue to grow. The state will
be dominated by parties committed to the annexation of Arab land and
the expulsion of the Arab population. Given increasing hostility to
immigrants across the world, the solution of a second Nakba in which
the Arab population is expelled en masse will not be available. The
result will be a situation in which a minority of Jews keeps a
majority of Arabs in poverty and subjugation. With the resulting loss
of much of the creative class of Israel and diminishing international
legitimacy, the vitality of the Israeli economy will decline. That is
the medium term. What about the long term?

I see two alternatives. One is that Israel turns into a combination of
Lebanon and apartheid South Africa—isolated, besieged, and
ideologically warped, a sort of modern Sparta living in terror of
those it has wronged. This is not the Israel of its founders’
dreams.

The final alternative is that Israel goes the way of post-apartheid
South Africa. Some combination of internal contradictions, exhaustion,
external pressure, and realistic leadership from both sides leads to a
democratic one-state solution. It would not be paradise, as the South
African example shows, but it could be workable with good will and
good leadership. It would no longer be a Jewish state, but perhaps a
Hebrew state in which two traumatized peoples might live warily
together.

_JOHN WALBRIDGE [[link removed]] is an expert
on Islamic philosophy and Islamic intellectual history with an
emphasis on the cultural role of philosophy and science. " He also
researches Graeco-Islamic medicine. His most recent books are "God and
Logic in Islam: the Caliphate of Reason" and "The Alexandrian Epitomes
of Galen," vol. 1._

_INFORMED COMMENT sheds light on how war, climate change and
globalization are shaping our world.
Drawing on the insights of expert journalists, activists, and
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