Stabbed in the Back?

Obama vs. Israel

Barack Obama and Bibi Netanyahu (photo: Getty)

What’s Super Autocue-reading Boy up to this time? A couple of weeks after unleashing his “Seals of Death” against the Bearded-but-almost-forgotten One, which was one week after “unleashing” his recently re-remembered Hawaiian birth chit, he now comes out 1960s-Batman-style with a new, shiny, Middle-Eastern peace plan that looks set to upset the Jewish lobby—Biff! Zap! Bam! Kapow!

Is this more evidence of the “chaos theory” that Igor Shishkin says lies at the heart of American foreign policy? The simple, low maintenance theory for all this is that Obama is simply making pointless “feel good” sound bites, with those pulling his strings knowing full well that a reversion to Israel’s pre-1967 borders has as much chance as a snowball in the Negev (85 percent of which is used by the Israeli military for training purpose). May as well send a train down a track without any sleepers.

A slightly more abstruse theory is that the Whitehouse’s “Big Idea” at the moment is to place itself at the forefront of the Arab Spring, even though this might deprive the Democrats of some of the more naïve shekels.

Such a policy obviously requires a well-timed backtrackable gesture towards “fair play” for the Palestinians. Exactly the kind of thing Obama has just done. With the Arab Spring threatening to push on into Summer, Syria, and possibly un-Arabian Iran, the possible thinking here is that encouraging “democratic” uprisings in a region that has never had a democratic culture offers the Whitehouse and its Zionist backers the political panacea of keeping the Middle East forever divided, destabilized, off-balance, and harmless.

Taking the pre-‘67 borders proposal at face value, it is clearly unworkable. Israel with the West Bank is a tiny overpopulated country that would be vulnerable to attack by a resolute and well-organized enemy. Israel without the West Bank creates a misshapen piece of land that would be constantly open to infiltration from the local DIY Arab militias as well as prone to murderous friendly fire from its own big boy munitions.

In total, Israel with the West Bank is about 25,000 square km (roughly equal to Vermont), 13,000 of which is the sparsely populated Negev desert. Over 90 percent of Israel’s population, including a growing portion of it on the West Bank, is concentrated in the remaining 12,000 square km. Take away the West Bank and that shrinks to about 7,000 square km (roughly equal to Delaware), which, assuming all the Jews living in the West Bank relocated, would have about 1,000 people per square km (roughly similar to Bahrain and double the present Palestinian territories).

Densely packed civilian populations in tiny areas are not the most defensible of areas, especially against ruthless enemies or enemies who feel they have a deep grievance. Any threat that rose against a post-Obama-plan Israel would inevitably tick these two boxes. No matter how well armed they were, seven million Israelis packed into a Delaware-sized sliver of land would be an inviting target.

“But, surely, trading land like this would buy peace,” goes the unthinking formula. Perhaps fleetingly. But tensions would quickly resurface and old wounds hastily reopen, especially regarding the insurmountable problem of Jerusalem.

There is also the demographic threat. Heavily compressed populations with high standards of living show a strong tendency towards decreased fertility. To maintain its existence as a Jewish state, Israel would have to maintain rigid population controls, not least against its approximately 1.5 million non-Jewish citizens, who already have higher fertility. Such a “eugenic” policy would, of course, run counter to the entire principle of peaceful coexistence and letting bygones be bygones. It would also raise the ghost of Nazism, but not in the way the Jewish state likes it to be raised.

As reprehensible as the policies of Zionists like Netanyahu are, they are actually closer to the fundamental facts of the case than the feel-good policies of the peaceniks in that they follow the brutal logic of what must be done in order for a Jewish state to exist. In a nutshell, a land-for-peace deal would be the beginning of the end for the Jewish state.

Whether overtly or covertly, it is this reality, not the Arab-street-friendly peace rhetoric, that will ultimately swing this at the level of action (or inaction). The best guess is that the Obama administration will run with this policy for a few months in the hope of ingratiating itself with the Arab masses, before losing it behind the back of the Whitehouse sofa sometime towards the fundraising season.