Friday 11 January 2008

Bush Has Given Up, So Why Don't You?

George Bush never really was very pro-Israeli. No American administration ever has been. The real American ally in the Middle East, indeed far and away the closest American ally in the world, is Saudi Arabia. But Bush has now given up even what little pro-Israeli sentiment he ever expressed.

And who can blame him? He is simply facing reality, because he is simply doing what the Israelis themselves have done. Within Israel's pre-1967 borders, the most popular name for new baby boys is now Muhammad. There is now a Russian-language television station for the ever-growing number of devourers of pork products, many of whom insist on taking their Israeli soldiers’ oaths on the New Testament alone, and some of whom have been found to be distributing anti-Semitic literature in Russian, up to and including the members of the Israeli neo-Nazi gang discovered a few months ago.

These Russians are the beneficiaries of the Law of Return, not least because Israeli Jews, other than ultra-Orthodox who are either fully anti-Zionist or at least deeply unhappy about the State of Israel that exists, exhibit that unmistakable societal death wish which is a birth rate well below replacement level (and still falling).

Israel should seize this opportunity, not only to present her non-Jewish Arabs (more than half of Israeli Jews being Arabs) as the best-off in the Middle East, but to make them enjoy, and make the world know that they enjoy, the same standard of living as the rest of her citizenry.

But put together the little Muhammads, the sausage-munching Russian Christians, the non-Jewish Arab birth rate, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish birth rate, the contrastingly low and declining birth rate among other Israeli Jews, and the fact that Israel’s international credibility now requires that she deliver on her much-vaunted claim that her Gentile citizens are equal.

All in all, in 50 or even 30 years time, we will all marvel that there was ever an attempt to re-create some romanticised version of Wilhelmine or Weimar Germany in the Levant, and the magazines that come with the Saturday or Sunday newspapers will occasionally feature articles about the tiny outposts of those aged souls still trying to live the dream.

But, my Zionist interlocutors, the dream is over. Give it up. After all, which would you rather have? Full re-integration into the linguistically and culturally Arab Levant of Christians, Muslims, Jews and Druze, with its de facto capital at Damascus? Or a statelet dominated demographically and politically by Russian Nazis, the statelet busily being created by the continuing application of the Law of Return? Those are the only two options available. In which would Jews be safer?

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