If Geopolitics Is Like Baseball, Israel Is Striking Out

By Andrew I. Killgore

In Europe during the 19th century something called "the Jewish problem" figured large. Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl advanced political Zionism as the solution. A Jewish state would be established in Palestine, the world's Jews would go there, and the "problem" would be solved.

With the sponsorship first of the British and later of the United States, and after the unspeakable horrors of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe, the state envisaged by Herzl was established in 1948. Now, 46 years later, how is Israel doing?

It has proved itself highly successful in wars against its Arab neighbors. No combination of them would have a chance of defeating Israel in the foreseeable future. Ironically, however, since 1967, when Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria simultaneously and overwhelmingly, Israel's wars have been increasingly costly, militarily and politically.

In the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, Israel easily conquered Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, the Jordanian-occupied West Bank and Syria's Golan Heights, achieving in territorial terms the Greater Israel dreamed of by Zionism's Revisionists, represented in the current Israeli political spectrum by the Likud Party. But the 196970 Egyptian-Israeli war of attrition, the October 1973 War (Ramadan War to Egyptians and Syrians, Yom Kippur War to Israelis), the 1982 Israeli war against Lebanon and the PLO and Syrian forces there, and the 1987 Palestinian intifada (uprising) against Israel in the occupied territories demonstrated that Israel had overreached in 1967.

Israeli military prowess notwithstanding, the Jewish state already had two strikes against it going into the 1990s. With only one more strike to go, Israel now seems to have swung and missed again. In baseball, it's "three strikes and you're out." Is the same true in the game of nations?

Strike one was demographics. That should have been an easy hit, if Israel was indeed a place where Western European Jews, for whom the state primarily was intended, wanted to live. But Israel missed it. Most European Holocaust survivors chose to go to North America instead.

In 1955 in the United States, every seventh Jew started down the one-way street of assimilation by marrying a non-Jew. On the American "Love Boat" today, more than half are marrying non-Jews. When viewers-with-alarm in the U.S. Jewish community warn metronomically of the dangers to Jewish survival posed by intermarriage, these days they induce more yawns than apprehension.

If things keep on this way, the day will come when genetically blended Americans won't be able to be anti-anyone. Very few Americans find this a daunting prospect. Most would call it "the American way."

Israel's emigration figures have been secret for at least a decade.

Back in Israel, however, father figure David Ben-Gurion, the first and greatest of Israeli prime ministers, used to say that the Jewish state would be safe when its population reached four million. He meant four million Jews. Palestinians didn't count except as people to be rid of. In Zionist dogma, Palestine had been "land without people for people without land." Prime Minister Golda Meir, although she was not legally blind, nevertheless maintained that "Palestinians don't exist."

Herzl, of course, had discovered otherwise, even before Ukraine-born and Milwaukee-raised Golda Meir ever saw Israel. In his diaries, written nearly a hundred years ago, he worried about the immutable fact that Palestinians did live in Palestine. But, he wrote, they would be induced to leave "discreetly and circumspectly."

Three-quarters of a million Palestinians were "induced" to flee the country of their birth in the 1948 fighting. At least another 200,000 departed, mostly at gunpoint, in 1967. But today, nearly a million Palestinians remain in Israel, and two million live in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, 46 years after its establishment, has Israel reached BenGurion's figure of four million Jews? Probably not, and it probably won't.

Israel claims five million people. At least 900,000 are Palestinians. That leaves 4.1 million Jewish Israelis. Or does it?

In March 1977, Wellington, New Zealand's Evening Post said 600,000 Israelis lived in the three North American citiesof New York, Montreal and Los Angeles. That corresponds to Israeli statistics before figures on emigration were made secret—that 600,000 more Israelis had departed Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport than had arrived.

Israel nevertheless counts these "phantom" Israelis as part of its 4.1 million total Jewish population. That is because the yordim ("those who go down," a pejorative term in Hebrew for Jews who leave Israel) are still counted as present in Israel if they visit once every four years.

Israel's emigration figures have been secret for at least a decade. Why? Probably because even more of those Jewish citizens have become "phantom Israelis."

An estimated 60,000 Israelis leave Israel every year, but few declare themselves as emigrants. If in the past decade another 500,000 Israelis have in fact become yordim, that country's resident Jewish population today is not more than three million. Although that roughly equals the 900,000 Palestinian Muslims and Christians living inside Israeli boundaries plus the 2.1 million living in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Palestinians are increasing twice as fast as Jewish Israelis.

If Israeli immigration statistics can be believed, 400,000 to 500,000 Jews (and some non-Jews) from the former Soviet Union made aliya (went up) to Israel since the Soviet empire began disintegrating. But these were counted in the claimed population of five million.

Now few of the former Soviet Union's remaining Jews want to go to Israel. Half are over 50 years old. Of those of any age who plan to leave, most prefer the real "promised land" in the United States. American Jews themselves, except for a fringe, won't go to Israel. The attitude of Israelis toward Americans and Canadians who do immigrate there was reflected in the comment of an Israeli to an American journalist that those who voluntarily relocate must "not be playing with a full deck."

Strike Two

Israel's second strike was economic, although it seemed almost impossible to miss in view of legendary Jewish business acumen. But Israel's statist economic system was collectively mismanaged by avaricious political and religious leaders, the bureaucracy, and Histadrut, the giant labor/capitalist monolith. Israelis call Histadrut's huge headquarters in Tel Aviv "the Kremlin," a not-very -affectionate reference to its stultifying effect on business enterprise.

I recall that in 1956 David Horowitz, president of the Bank of Israel, told a group of visiting American diplomats that Israel would be self-sufficient within four years. When my skeptical colleague from the Foreign Service Institute's Arabic-language school in Beirut, Franqois Dickman, later U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and to Kuwait, expressed doubt, Horowitz reiterated that after 1960 Israel would no longer need foreign aid.

Horowitz was wrong, very wrong. In 1994, Israel's appetite for foreign aid still appears insatiable. When Israeli diplomat Yossi Beilin recently told visiting Hadassah leaders that Israel no longer needs their money, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called his statement "moronic." In both 1993 and 1994 Israel received $6.3 billion from the United States alone. President Bill Clinton already has promised Rabin the U.S. will maintain the same level in 1995.

In 1994, Israel's appetite for foreign aid still appears insatiable.

Without U.S. aid to maintain an artificially high standard of living, emigration from Israel, especially of Ashkenazi (Western) Jews, would increase. When American taxpayers become fully aware of the massive annual raid on their pocketbook, there is no question they will demand a halt.

The power of a network of deceptively named pro-Israel political action committees to bribe congressmen and senators to earmark massive foreign aid sums for Israel has been hidden from the American public by powerful apologists for Israel in the U.S. media. But the facts cannot be ignored forever. Recognition is dawning.

Strike three is timing. Colonialism was at its height in the 1880s when the idea began to take hold of a separate state where Jews might go to escape Christian persecution in Europe. Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands staked out or sought to expand their holdings in Africa and Asia. The area coveted for the Jewish state was part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, "the sick man of Europe."

So Herzl's Euro-centered political Zionism was not out of step with his times. But in the half century between the first World Zionist Conference at Basel, Switzerland in 1897 and the creation of Israel in 1948, the world had changed.

In 1948 the tide of empire was receding everywhere. The notion that Europeans could dominate Africa and Asia was dying. Colonized peoples were gaining their independence. Former political prisoners were becoming prime ministers and the European colonists were preparing to return to Europe or adjusting to life with curtailed privileges under indigenous regimes.

Israel was badly out of step from the day it was established. World sympathy normally was with the former colonized peoples. But the European Holocaust had engendered sympathy for Israel and a feeling that amends needed to be made for Jewish suffering, so the world closed its eyes to the obvious injustice to the Palestinians. Now, 50 years later, the Palestinians still are suffering and that Israeli advantage has wasted away.

The concept of human rights barely existed in politics when Theodor Herzl roamed the chancelleries of Europe at the end of the last century seeking a big-power sponsor for his dream of a Jewish state. But the idea has gained such strength today that it is a central theme of U.S. foreign policy.

As a result, Americans and Europeans are beginning to recall that Ben-Gurion also said Israel ultimately would be judged by how it treated the Palestinians. Ben-Gurion, of course, was hard as nails. He was also sly and disingenuous, especially in dealing with the Western media.

Nevertheless, it must be assumed the Israeli leader meant what he said. His statement was both an acknowledgment that Israel was mistreating the Palestinians and an affirmation of the Jewish ideal, born of Jewish suffering in ancient times in the Middle East and later as a minority in Christian Europe, that the strong should not mistreat the weak. That's what Israel was doing to the Palestinians when Ben-Gurion was in power, and Israeli violations of Palestinian human fights are even worse now.

But now Israel's brutality against the weaker Palestinians runs counter to world public opinion. Increasingly, Americans are coming to realize that although Israel calls itself "the Middle East's only working democracy," democracy works there only for those having "Jewish nationality," in addition to Israeli citizenship.

Finally, America as it is today did not yet exist when Herzl dreamed of a Jewish state as a refuge for Jews persecuted anywhere in the world. Contemporary America's everybody-can-belong pluralism, its excitement, its political, economic and social dynamism has become a magnet attracting people from everywhere in the world, including Israel. For nearly half a century the U.S. has been the indispensable friend without which Israel could not have practiced its ethno-religious exclusivity. Now, as Israel's polar opposite, America's inclusiveness has become the model with which Israel cannot compete. By failing, finally, to adapt to its times, it appears Israel has struck out.

Andrew L Killgore, a retired career foreign service officer and former U.S. ambassador to Qatar is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.