Israel in the Meat Grinder

In the over half a century since the 1967 Arab-Israel War, Israel has carefully and steadfastly refused to answer two defining questions about itself.  Where is it and what is it?

With October 7th, this refusal is having the most terrifying consequences.

We all know that Israel occupies the space between Syria and Jordan in the east and the Mediterranean and Egypt in the west and between Lebanon in the north and the Gulf of Aqaba in the south.  But where, exactly, is the state of Israel in this space?

Failure to answer the first question raises the second question:  what is Israel?  The population of the Israeli space is about 14.6 million, of which 6.6 million are Palestinians, or 45%.  But, only 1.6 million of these Palestinians live in neighborhoods in the Israeli space that have the right to citizenship and to vote for the government that rules them.  So, roughly a third of the population is in a patchwork of disenfranchised zones.  And has been for over half a century.

This means that whatever the Israeli space is, a democracy it isn’t.  The lack of democracy makes the space highly unstable and embeds bitterness and hatred between the peoples on either side of the citizenship lines.  It destabilizes Israel’s unclear borders, an endless military and political nightmare.  And makes it increasingly difficult for democracies like the U.S. to support Israel, risking a complete upending of Israel’s place in the world.

When we lay this confused mess onto the Middle East, a complex overlay of ethnicities and religions warring in a meat grinder for the last seven thousand years, we get violence at scale. 

No news, Israel has long been stuck in the meat grinder, an endless war within its space and with its neighbors.  A war that now risks dragging in the United States.  Which raises a huge question for us.  If Israel won’t answer the two questions, with whom and what are we allied?  And to what end?  How do we support something no one can define?

What makes our question even more critical is that it has been many years since the U.S. has had any strategic interest in the Middle East.  In the Cold War an enemy of the USSR was a friend of ours, regardless of democratic standing.  As the 1967 war showed, the Soviet Union supported Arab states and we and our allies supported Israel.  The problem is that the USSR left the stage thirty-five years ago.

Added to this, we have all the oil and gas that we need.  Plus, technologies like Ubiquitous Energy’s ability to solarize windows on high rises and supertalls will put the Saudis out of business.  We have no interest in the Middle East today.  Anyone who can read a map knows that our problems lie elsewhere. 

In this stew of confusion, Israel’s biggest mistake was the Camp David Accords of 1978.  Brokered by President Carter, the Accords were designed to return to Egypt lands Israel conquered in the 1967 war in return for enduring peace and stability between the two countries.  Except for one small thing.  Egypt refused to take back Gaza and sealed its border with the place, locking Gaza firmly inside Israel. 

As we all understood at the time, Egypt had just embedded a gigantic bomb in Israel.  Once it went off, Israel would be destabilized in ways from which it might never recover.  The longer it took for the bomb to go off, the better because the damage would be the greater.  Egypt would get everything it wanted at no cost.  Very, very cynical.  Very, very smart.

For reasons that were never made clear at the time, or since, Israel jumped into the Gaza trap.  Then, when it had to withdraw from Gaza decades ago, it did not place a deep and defendable exclusion zone along its Gaza borders to minimize casualties among its people when the inevitable bomb went off. 

Forty-three years after Camp David, Israel got the October 7 explosion and the horrifying casualties that we long expected, wars in its space, along the borders of its space and now with Iran.  The number of killed and wounded is already in the many tens of thousands, embedding hatreds that will take centuries to erase, if ever. 

Israel’s refusal to answer its two questions will, therefore, destabilize the country for many hundreds of years.  Once in a meat grinder, there is only one way out.  Through the bottom.  

How can democracies align themselves with this?  Already, we are seeing the loss of support for Israel in democracies worldwide.  And especially in the U.S. which is meant to be its closest ally. 

The country’s desperation move now will be to drag the U.S. into its war with Iran before the November presidential election in the hope that doing this will get Dumb Don back in office.

But, as Publius has shown, it was Dumb Don’s staggering Iran miscalculation that gave the Mullahs the power they have today.  Don’s inability to think, chronicled here in detail for the last eight years and just days ago by The New York Times, means that the risk to Israel of another Dumb Don presidency is existential.

Looks like a fun time…