The Israeli-Arab Time Bomb
There is a part of Alpher's article that discusses a facet of Israeli political discourse that I haven't really seen discussed before:
Some settlers point to internal Israeli demographic projections that purport to show that the Israeli Arab population (Palestinian Arabs with Israeli citizenship who live within the State of Israel) will on its own become a majority within the country in some 50-70 years, in order to argue that even a two-state solution cannot preserve Israel as a democratic Jewish country (a position reinforced recently by Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who stated that it is the Israeli Arabs who constitute the "real" demographic problem), and that the only answer is therefore transfer or disenfranchisement of all Palestinians west of the Jordan River.
Alpher, of course, has no sympathy for this argument - if maintaining a Jewish demographic majority is impossible even by granting Palestinians a state, then not only does transfer emerge as the only solution, but giving up even an inch of land will weaken Israel for the war that would inevitably follow such a transfer. Very few people want to believe that this description is true.
Unfortunately, Alpher's rebuttal is absolutely incoherent. But it's incoherent for a very particular reason - he can't accept that Arab hostility toward Israel is intractable rather than the result of political dynamics. Rather than admit this possibility, he panics and makes all kinds of unfortunate arguments:
This position appears to be fundamentally inaccurate, for several reasons. Firstly, in the Israeli case, long-term demographic projections have frequently proven unreliable - witness the fact that Israel's minority population has for decades, due to Jewish immigration, remained at around 18 percent of the total (and its Muslim population less than 16 percent, despite predictions that it would grow radically.
If that's the case, then his entire argument for why a two-state solution is impractical yet necessary collapses:
The growing demographic-geographic threat to Israel's future as a Jewish and democratic state is of strategic proportions. There is something cruelly paradoxical in its emergence at a time when most of the strategic threats Israel has faced over the years have been somewhat mitigated.
In fact, it's very, very strange to see Alpher undermining demographic projections, and it's indicative of how lost and panicked he is confronting this argument. Undermining demographic projections is usually something you see the right doing in order to argue that the demographic threat is overstated and that the occupation does not present any urgent demographic problems. It's suprising to see and Israeli of Alpher's Leftist credentials trying to mobilize this strategy for his cause, but it's indicative of his inability to integrate the reality of Arab-Israeli hostility. His other two answers are actually worse:
Secondly, an agreed two-state solution should allow and persuade Israel to give greater equality and even autonomy to its Arab minority, thereby hopefully generating stability and prosperity and slowing the Arab birth rate. Indeed, Arab-Israeli agreement on a two-state solution, including the concept of a Jewish state, might include the redrawing of borders so as to include several large Israeli Arab towns within the Palestinian state, and could conceivably persuade some radical Israeli Arabs to emigrate there in order to fully realize their Palestinian national identity.
Thirdly, even in the current difficult times, only a minority of Israel's Arabs indicate in polls that they would feel greater loyalty to a Palestinian state (if and when it exists) than to Israel.
These two arguments, which I have taken entirely from the original article as is (that is, one really does follow the other) are in blatant contradiction. If Israeli Arabs don't feel any loyalty to a Palestinian state, then they won't accept being placed on the eastern side of a new border and they won't emigrate there to realize their (ostensibly nonexistent) Palestinian identity. The more probable outcome is that they'll demand to stay on Israel's side of the border, and then continue trying to destroy the state from within (more on that later today - Israeli-Arab electoral patterns are infuriating, but that's a different rant). When I talk about the Israeli Left's doublethink (the ability to hold two absolutely contradictory opinions and believe them both), this is what I mean. They'll throw up even incoherent arguments if those arguments seem on some level to respond to the Right.
But ultimately, Israeli Arabs can be assimilated and integrated into Israeli society, but this task will require political will and focus. Politicians who go overseas and advocate terrorism must be disqualified from office. Alpher's solution accomplishes the opposite - it drains political will by devastating Israeli morale in the form of an unbalanced peace deal with the Palestinians and it hurts political focus by attempting to convince Israelis that the Arab-Israeli problem is a function of the Palestinian-Israeli problem and so can be solved by dealing with the latter problem.
In fact, Alpher's advocacy of autonomy smacks vaguely of racism - are the Arabs in Tel Aviv Israelis or not? If they're Israelis, then they should be integrated and assimilated. If they're not, then there should be no problem deporting them when they openly preach terrorism against Israel (no nation-state is precluded from declaring anyone within its borders persona non grata). For the record, I advocate the former and not the latter. Alpher's solution - to pretend that an impossible peace deal with the Palestinians would achieve the counter-intuitive result of convincing Israeli Arabs that Israel is here to stay - is a dangerous distraction from either solution.
Some settlers point to internal Israeli demographic projections that purport to show that the Israeli Arab population (Palestinian Arabs with Israeli citizenship who live within the State of Israel) will on its own become a majority within the country in some 50-70 years, in order to argue that even a two-state solution cannot preserve Israel as a democratic Jewish country (a position reinforced recently by Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who stated that it is the Israeli Arabs who constitute the "real" demographic problem), and that the only answer is therefore transfer or disenfranchisement of all Palestinians west of the Jordan River.
Alpher, of course, has no sympathy for this argument - if maintaining a Jewish demographic majority is impossible even by granting Palestinians a state, then not only does transfer emerge as the only solution, but giving up even an inch of land will weaken Israel for the war that would inevitably follow such a transfer. Very few people want to believe that this description is true.
Unfortunately, Alpher's rebuttal is absolutely incoherent. But it's incoherent for a very particular reason - he can't accept that Arab hostility toward Israel is intractable rather than the result of political dynamics. Rather than admit this possibility, he panics and makes all kinds of unfortunate arguments:
This position appears to be fundamentally inaccurate, for several reasons. Firstly, in the Israeli case, long-term demographic projections have frequently proven unreliable - witness the fact that Israel's minority population has for decades, due to Jewish immigration, remained at around 18 percent of the total (and its Muslim population less than 16 percent, despite predictions that it would grow radically.
If that's the case, then his entire argument for why a two-state solution is impractical yet necessary collapses:
The growing demographic-geographic threat to Israel's future as a Jewish and democratic state is of strategic proportions. There is something cruelly paradoxical in its emergence at a time when most of the strategic threats Israel has faced over the years have been somewhat mitigated.
In fact, it's very, very strange to see Alpher undermining demographic projections, and it's indicative of how lost and panicked he is confronting this argument. Undermining demographic projections is usually something you see the right doing in order to argue that the demographic threat is overstated and that the occupation does not present any urgent demographic problems. It's suprising to see and Israeli of Alpher's Leftist credentials trying to mobilize this strategy for his cause, but it's indicative of his inability to integrate the reality of Arab-Israeli hostility. His other two answers are actually worse:
Secondly, an agreed two-state solution should allow and persuade Israel to give greater equality and even autonomy to its Arab minority, thereby hopefully generating stability and prosperity and slowing the Arab birth rate. Indeed, Arab-Israeli agreement on a two-state solution, including the concept of a Jewish state, might include the redrawing of borders so as to include several large Israeli Arab towns within the Palestinian state, and could conceivably persuade some radical Israeli Arabs to emigrate there in order to fully realize their Palestinian national identity.
Thirdly, even in the current difficult times, only a minority of Israel's Arabs indicate in polls that they would feel greater loyalty to a Palestinian state (if and when it exists) than to Israel.
These two arguments, which I have taken entirely from the original article as is (that is, one really does follow the other) are in blatant contradiction. If Israeli Arabs don't feel any loyalty to a Palestinian state, then they won't accept being placed on the eastern side of a new border and they won't emigrate there to realize their (ostensibly nonexistent) Palestinian identity. The more probable outcome is that they'll demand to stay on Israel's side of the border, and then continue trying to destroy the state from within (more on that later today - Israeli-Arab electoral patterns are infuriating, but that's a different rant). When I talk about the Israeli Left's doublethink (the ability to hold two absolutely contradictory opinions and believe them both), this is what I mean. They'll throw up even incoherent arguments if those arguments seem on some level to respond to the Right.
But ultimately, Israeli Arabs can be assimilated and integrated into Israeli society, but this task will require political will and focus. Politicians who go overseas and advocate terrorism must be disqualified from office. Alpher's solution accomplishes the opposite - it drains political will by devastating Israeli morale in the form of an unbalanced peace deal with the Palestinians and it hurts political focus by attempting to convince Israelis that the Arab-Israeli problem is a function of the Palestinian-Israeli problem and so can be solved by dealing with the latter problem.
In fact, Alpher's advocacy of autonomy smacks vaguely of racism - are the Arabs in Tel Aviv Israelis or not? If they're Israelis, then they should be integrated and assimilated. If they're not, then there should be no problem deporting them when they openly preach terrorism against Israel (no nation-state is precluded from declaring anyone within its borders persona non grata). For the record, I advocate the former and not the latter. Alpher's solution - to pretend that an impossible peace deal with the Palestinians would achieve the counter-intuitive result of convincing Israeli Arabs that Israel is here to stay - is a dangerous distraction from either solution.
