More birthdays

Back in the day when I thought I was interested in international politics, one region I avoided was the Middle East, particularly Israel/Palestine. It just seemed to be in quagmire with no resolution, no coherence and little rationality that a deep understanding would require too much time and too little enrichment. Or maybe I was just being lazy (this was my undergrad days).

With Israel turning 60, the state of the nation has been a hot topic, including the cover story in the May Atlantic. The author wandered a bit (or maybe he didn't--it might have been the cover monkeys providing a misrepresentation of the article [the cover asks "Is Israel Finished?]), but there is this passage which wouldn't be a revelation to anyone who follows the Israel/Palestinian issue with a modicum of attention (that person isn't me), but succinctly illustrates the difficulty of Israel's position.

On one crucial issue, Olmert is credited by many of the most doubting Israelis with sincerity and thoughtfulness: his newfound belief that the dream of a Greater Israel—one that incorporates the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights—is dead, replaced with the recognition that the land must be split between a Jewish democratic state and an Arab state.

I asked Olmert whether there was a moral dimension to his desire to exit the West Bank... He won’t call the dream of both banks immoral or destructively utopian, because it is a dream that many Israelis believe is just. “If there had been a 10 percent or 15 percent minority which is not Jewish there, then it would have been legitimate. But you don’t come to a majority and say to them, ‘Listen, we deprive you of your right to self-determination and at the same time we won’t provide you with the natural right of equality and equal votes.’ At the end of the day, it was about demography,” he said. “We couldn’t do it.”

Max Nordau wrote that Zionism is meant to create for the Jewish people a homeland in the land of Israel, assured by international legitimacy. One sentence, the whole story. It’s about Jewish people, about defining the community of Jews as a nation, one in the family of nations. Second, it’s not a state for all citizens, but for the Jewish people. Third, it’s in the land of Israel, but not necessarily all the land of Israel. And it has to be secured by international legitimacy.”

Israel’s flagging international legitimacy is one of Olmert’s preoccupations. In an interview with Ha’aretz in November, he said, “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African–style struggle for equal voting rights [among Palestinians of the occupied territories], then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.” He went on to say, “The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us, because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”"

Maybe this isn't as revelational as I thought, but it does give me a perspective I had thought about before--how does a country defined on one identity adapt/change/respond to a demographic change that, if left unaddressed, will irrevocably change the ability to maintain that identity?

Given the demographic change in the US, albeit in a more peaceful fashion, does it/will it serve as a lesson at all?