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If Israel had conquered
all of Palestine and expelled all the Palestinians
in 1948, Morris wrote, "today's Middle East would be
a healthier, less violent place, with a Jewish state
between Jordan and the Mediterranean and a
Palestinian Arab state in Transjordan.
Alternatively, Arab success in the 1948 war, with
the Jews driven into the sea, would have obtained
the same, historically calming result. Perhaps it
was the very indecisiveness of the geographical and
demographic outcome of 1948 that underlies the
persisting tragedy of Palestine.''
Well, of course, but most outcomes are indecisive.
Like many knowledgeable people in the Middle East,
Morris's mood was strikingly pessimistic even before
the US invasion of Iraq, but five years later the
mood is darker still. Beyond forecasts of civil war
in Iraq, however, there has been little effort to
discern what the Middle East will actually look like
after the US troops go home.
There is already a civil war in Iraq, and it might
even get worse for a time after American troops
leave, but these things always sputter out in the
end. There will still be an Iraqi state, plus or
minus Kurdistan and regardless of whether or not the
central government in Baghdad exercises real control
over the Sunni-majority areas between Baghdad, Mosul
and the Syrian border.
The Sunni Arab parts of Iraq have been turned into a
training ground for Islamist extremists from all
parts of the Arab world by the American invasion.
Once the American troops are gone, however, the
action will soon move elsewhere, for the US defeat
in Iraq has dramatically raised the prestige of
Islamist revolutionaries throughout the Arab world
and beyond.
It's not possible to predict which Arab states will
fall under Islamist control, and they certainly
aren't all going to: the pipe-dream of a
world-spanning Islamic empire remains precisely
that. But it will be astonishing if one or more of
the existing Arab regimes does not fall to an
Islamist revolution in the next few years.
For the citizens of the country or countries in
question, that could be quite a big problem, since
it would probably mean not democracy and prosperity
but just more decades of poverty and a different
kind of tyranny. For people living outside the
Middle East, however, it would probably make little
difference.
Islamist-ruled states are not the same as bands of
freelance fanatics. If they have oil to export, then
they will go on exporting it, because no major oil
producer can now do without the income that those
exports provide; they need it to feed their people.
And they would have little incentive to sponsor
terrorist attacks outside the region, for they would
have fixed addresses, and interests to protect.
For Israel, however, the situation has changed
fundamentally. For the first 20 years of its
existence, Israel was a state under siege.
For the past 40 years, since the conquests of 1967,
it has had the luxury of debating with itself how
much of those conquered lands it should return to
the Arabs in return for a permanent peace
settlement. (The answer was always "all of them,''
but that was not an answer many Israelis would
hear.)
Now the window is closing. Before long, some of the
Arab states that Israel needs to make peace with are
likely to fall to Islamist regimes that have an
ideological commitment to its destruction. (Hamas's
capture of the Gaza Strip is a foretaste of what is
to come.) Israelis trying to evade hard choices have
long complained that they had "nobody to negotiate
with.''
It is about to become true.
Israel faces another generation of confrontation and
quite possibly of war, and the Palestinians face
another generation of military occupation.
Significant chunks of the Arab world face Islamist
revolutions that would bring more poverty and a new
kind of oppression. It is a mess, and it's too late
to fix it.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent
journalist whose articles are published in 45
countries.
Source: trinidad
express com
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