— Amidst the hostility toward President Bush for either being too hard on the Israelis for their incursion into the occupied territories (or too easy, depending on who you believe), the debate over Arafat’s exceptionalism among Palestinian leaders, and the general horror incited by suicide bombers, it’s easy to lose focus on Israel’s long-term prospects, which aren’t good. Israel is, after all, a small country, with only six million people living shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of millions of hostile neighbors. While Israel is technically advanced, the suicide bomb is a weapon of mass destruction against which it’s completely powerless. If present trends continue, suicide bombing alone will lead to the end of the state of Israel in a few short years.
It’s the recognition of this that lead Sharon to make such a disproportionate response, trashing houses, killing innocent civilians, cutting Palestinians off from hospital visits, surrounding Arafat, and the rest of it. He’s desperate because he knows it’s only a matter of time until the suicide bombing makes life in Israel so unbearable that Israelis emigrate en masse to more peaceful climes. And it’s all happened before, in the first diaspora that left Palestine without a Jewish population in 1948 when the modern state of Israel was created:
The Jewish Diaspora and Israel: After the Jewish revolts against the Roman occupation (66-135 CE), Jews are banned from living in Jerusalem and Judea. Under Byzantine rule (324-640 CE), Christianity is introduced in Israel and many anti-Jewish laws are enacted. By the 6th century, Jews have become a minority in their own land. After the Arab conquest, the Jewish population declines further. At the time of the first crusades (11th century), only a few thousand Jews remain in Israel.
This is the scenario that those of us who support Israel don’t want to acknowledge. It makes us uncomfortable for the same reasons that suicide cults like the People’s Temple and Heaven’s Gate and military suicides like the Kamikaze make us uncomfortable. We’re individualists, and we mistakenly assume that everybody else in the world is too, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Not that we’re all that sincere in our individualism, which generally manifests in our young people in forms of rebellion narrowly selected from MTV and the Ralph Lauren catalog; our deepest desire is to belong to a group, and while we act on that impulse while speaking the rhetoric of the self, the rest of the world isn’t at all conflicted about sacrificing the self for the sake of the community. The supply of potential suicide bombers in the Arab world alone is practically boundless; it certainly wouldn’t take more than a few thousand to bring about the end of Israel as we know it.
Perhaps the situation in the Middle East isn’t completely hopeless (I certainly hope it’s not, for America’s sake if for no other reason,) but unless there’s a major shift in attitudes on both sides of the River Jordan, Israel has no future. Do the math.
“And it’s all happened before, in the first diaspora that left Palestine without a Jewish population in 1948 when the modern state of Israel was created:” [followed by a citation to a history that refers to the Jewish population of Palestine in the 11th century]
This seems a bit odd. My impression is that Jews moved around a bit in the 900 intervening years, and particularly between l’affaire Dreyfus and the Holocaust. Surely they wouldn’t have bothered to create a modern state of Israel if there weren’t at least two Jews in residence, one to be president, and one for prime minister. They could have taken turns being the army.
On the larger point: My impression of the numbers is something like 6 million Israelis vs. 300 million hostile Arabs-and-others. The numbers have always been that lopsided, and Israel has always won. Logistics, competence, technology, and luck have always been on its side. None of that has changed — not even the luck: Between its intelligence service and its readiness to preempt, Israel’s luck is mostly home-made.
Drawing bombers, instead of soldiers, from the pool of 300 million does not make the military situation worse for Israel. There are fewer potential bombers than soldiers. Almost all potential bombers could be soldiers. As a bomber, the recruit will do less damage to Israel’s ability to defend itself, and will deprive the Arab world of a soldier, worker, and parent. A bomber, once dead, leaves Arafat’s headquarters naked to Israeli raids like the ones that (so far) have ended the bombings. A soldier on the attack can (try to) prevent Israel from defeating Arafat and his allies.
Suicide bombing is a powerful tool for destroying civil life, and it might be used to deliver a weapon of mass destruction. Certainly any movement that practices or encourages it must be eradicated. But that does not make the technique itself a weapon of mass destruction. It is less efficient than boot infantry, and the “martyrs in millions” just aren’t there.
“but unless there’s a major shift in attitudes”
That shift is to be expected. After all, whenever somebody invents a new attack, somebody else finds a new defence. It is called adaptation. I expect that devising an effective defence against suicide bombers will entail a major shift in attitudes…but when the issue is survival, people are willing to do things they wouldn’t otherwise consider.
I agree with Richard Bennett: suicide bombings present a strategic threat. They’re demoralizing not just because of the sheer randomness of attack and the unsettling of everyday life, but precisely because there’s no defense. I don’t know if Sharon’s “disproportionate” response means he’s desperate. Instead, he’s just doing what he’s always done. Besides, in a war — as this surely is — the idea is to smash the other side. That said, I’m not quite sure what his ultimate strategy is. I can only hope that he plans on building a very large wall between Israel and Palestine.
There hasn’t been a suicide bombing in a few days, and there are two theories going around to explain this: 1) the incursion has wrecked the suicide bomber infrastructure, and nobody can supply the necessary hardware; and 2) the whole point of the suicide bombing campaign was to provoke Sharon into a military action that would create sympathy for the Palestinian side by it’s disproportionate nature. He’s gone nuts, so the Palestinians can step back and go: “see what he’s doing to us, poor, innocent little Arabs without a tank to our name!”
I don’t know which is right, but it doesn’t appear to me that it’s all that hard to make a suicide-bomber backpack, which lends support to theory number two.
Where’s the “Can Do” attitude? How long can suicide bombing thrive if we crack down on Iraq, Iran, and Syria? Of course, there are other supporters like the Saudis and the EU but my guess is that the open embrace of this tactic is not as enthusiastic nor as sustainable as it’s boosters would have us believe. The Kamikaze, effective as they were, signaled the last act of a desperate cause. The switch to young girls, seems like a terrifying new development but it may mean the opposite.
I don’t know that support from other countries is all that vital to suicide bombers; there’s enough money in the Arab world to pay off their families, even if we were to crack down on Iraq and the others. How much does a little C4 or a fertilizer bomb cost, anyway?
It seems to me that this is a tactic that’s very hard to thwart, as long as you have people willing to die for their cause. “Give me liberty or give me death” isn’t uniquely American after all.
I don’t know about “Give me liberty or give me death,” but I think that “Give me liberty or let me strap on a Semtex waistcoat and blow my intestines all over a wedding filled with little girls” seems kinda exceptional to me.