Annexation is collective suicide for Israel
The current Israeli government, supported by the Far Right, appears to have decided that the outright annexation of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the Gaza Strip is the best way forward for the State of Israel. However, this plan can only lead to the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state: the population figures show clearly that such a Greater Israel will soon have more Arabs and Muslims within it than Jews. Therefore, to go down that route is collective suicide, and Israelis need to understand it. I shall discuss all this and offer alternatives in this post.
Since October 7, 2023, the State of Israel has managed to prevail militarily against its many enemies: it is not victory – as victory is always elusive in the Middle East – but it is a remarkable achievement all the same. More particularly, Hamas – a fundamentalist Sunni political movement and a terrorist organization supported by Iran and Hezbollah – has been degraded to an unprecedented degree. The cost, for the Palestinians in Gaza but, also, for Israel, has been very high, however. There has also been a cost for the Jews of the Diaspora, as the Gaza War has undeniably whipped up antisemitism and given it a form of legitimacy, from North America to Europe and Australia.
The problem, now, for Israel as a Jewish state, is to decide what it needs to do next. And this can only be a process of a political nature. The current government in Israel could be described as a right-wing coalition that is supported by the Far Right, i.e. a motley crew of religious right-wing Zionists and parties that are close to the ultra-Orthodox community within Israel. The Left and the centre of Israeli politics appear weak and fragmented. We read that c. 70% of Israelis would like the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to go, and yet it is not clear whether there would be an alternative that could command a majority among Israeli voters. There is little doubt that Israeli public opinion has shifted to the right over the past decades.
In essence, many – probably most – Israelis feel that the peace process was given a chance (cf. the Oslo Accords in 1993-1995), and they believe that this attempt at peace failed because the Palestinians were never negotiating in good faith. It is not a so-called two-state solution (one Jewish state sitting alongside a Palestinian state) that they wanted (and still want), but a one-state solution, i.e. a Muslim/Arab Palestinian state where Jews, at best, would be second-class citizens. The tragedy of October 2023 has reinforced this perception, and understandably so: the Palestinians in Gaza were given the opportunity to run their own affairs and chose to hand over power to Hamas, who, in turn, planned and executed a ruthless attack on the State of Israel, with a view to destroying it. Whether such a narrative (above) is 100% justified and rational, on the part of Israeli Jews, or not, there is little doubt that it has come to prevail in the psyche of the average Jewish Israeli, and who could blame him (or her)? Israelis are, collectively, in a post-traumatic state of mind, to use the language of psychology, in the wake of October 7th, and this is understandable.
As a result, there is little appetite, nowadays, in Israel, for the two-state solution. According to various polls, it would stand at about 25%: in other words, about 75% of Israelis no longer believe the two-state solution is a viable prospect. Meanwhile, the international community, led by entities such as the EU and the UN, continues talking about the two-state solution as if it was round the corner. The international community believes it can work with the Palestinian Authority (PA). In theory, one cannot see why the PA could not be put in charge of a Palestinian state: after all, for all intents and purposes, the PA has renounced violence and co-operated, willy-nilly, with the Israeli authorities, over the years. It may be corrupt and inefficient – this is the Middle East, after all – but it has not, in recent years, adopted a militant and violent approach to its dealings with the State of Israel.
What of the aims of the current government in Israel? There is strictly no doubt, by now, what the plan of the current administration is, in Israel. Fueled by the inflammatory pronouncements of various extremist political figures in Israel who belong firmly to the Far Right – some of them ministers in the current Israeli government – the blueprint is as follows and can be summed up in one word: annexation.
What the nationalist and populist clique in power in Israel wants is very clear: if possible, it would like to achieve the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, i.e. for the Palestinian population of Gaza to leave and settle in neighboring Arab states (the only problem being that those states have absolutely no desire to welcome those Palestinians); in any event, the plan is to concentrate those Palestinians who will not leave in a reduced portion of Gaza (cf. the Yellow Line, intended to set up a buffer zone along the border of Israel proper); there is talk of re-colonizing northern Gaza, i.e. have Jewish settlers set up communities of their own in the North of the Strip; as for Judea and Samaria, known as the West Bank internationally, the plan is to annex it and integrate it into a larger entity we can call Greater Israel.
This plan excludes the existence of a Palestinian state; it is based on the premise that the two-state solution is dead and will never be implemented; it does not recognize the right of Palestinians to their own state; finally, it denies that there is a Palestinian ‘national identity’. The Israeli government has encouraged, and is encouraging, the multiplication and growth of Jewish settlements within the West Bank. They are regarded as illegal by the international community. They are accompanied by violence perpetrated by fanatical Jewish settlers, who do not hesitate to physically attack local Arabs – be they farmers settled in villages or Bedouins – in order to drive them off the land. In the last analysis, the Arab and Muslim population of the Occupied Territories will be absorbed into Greater Israel, perhaps with fewer rights than those enjoyed by Arab Israelis at present – those Arabs who live within Israel proper in its current borders.
Now, let us forget the ethical and political dimension of the debate, for a minute. Let us forget the ins and outs of colonization. Let us forget the rights and wrongs of the case. Let us focus on the practical consequences of annexation. And let us try to think in the way that the Israeli Far Right thinks and see where this takes us.
First of all, one needs to look at the population figures. I am using rough estimates based on publicly available information, here.
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–Population of the West Bank: 3.40 million Palestinians (and 700,000 Jewish settlers)
–Population of the Gaza Strip: 2.10 million Palestinians
–Total number of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza: 5.50 million
–Palestinian refugees, as registered by UNRWA, residing mostly in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon (refugee camps, et al.): c. 1.20 million
–Total number of Palestinians: West Bank, Gaza and refugees: c. 6.70 million
–Total number of Palestinians: West Bank, Gaza and Arab Israelis (without refugees): 7.30 million
–Total number of Palestinians: West Bank, Gaza, Arab Israelis and refugees: 8.50 million
–Total number of Palestinians, worldwide, including so-called diaspora: 15.20 million (estimate)
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–Population of Israel, in all: 10.10 million
▪Proportion of Jews within Israel, >75%: 7.20 million to 7.70 million
▪Number of Haredim within Israel: 1.40 million approximately
▪Proportion of Arabs (Christian, Druze and Muslim) within Israel, >20%
▪Number of Muslims within Israel (Muslim Arab Israelis): 1.80 million
–Jews living outside Israel (Jewish Diaspora, mostly USA, Canada, France and UK): 8.4 million
–Total number of Jews worldwide (Diaspora and State of Israel): 15.60 million to 16.10 million
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If you look at the figures, they are remarkably evenly split: it is estimated that there are about 16 million Jews worldwide and up to 15.20 million Palestinians. If you look at the State of Israel and the Occupied Territories, to use the term favored by the international community, you have about 7.70 million Jews (perhaps a little bit fewer) against 7.30 million Arabs, most of whom would be Muslims, if you combine the population figures for the Occupied Territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip) with the number of Arab Israelis. If you include all the Palestinians registered as refugees by the UN in neighboring countries, the total number of Palestinians across the Near East, including Israel, reaches 8.50 million.
Let us leave aside the corrosive and unresolved issue of the ultra-Orthodox community within Israel: for all intents and purposes, from an economic and military point of view, that community is dead weight. It is not productive and it is exempt from military service, in the main. So, the economically productive and militarily relevant part of the Jewish population of Israel – those who work, pay taxes and serve in the armed forces – is about 6.30 million. You cannot expect the Haredim to stand up and defend the Jewish state, if they refuse to bear arms and prefer spending all their time studying religious texts – as noble as such an occupation may be.
What will outright annexation of the Occupied Territories result in? It will result, directly or indirectly, in the wholesale absorption of about 5.50 million Arabs/Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are Muslim, into Greater Israel, taking the total Arab population of Israel up to 7.30 million, i.e. near-parity with the Jewish population. If one excludes the Haredim as dead weight (see above), the Arab population will be larger than the ‘useful’, secular and active Jewish population that is trained and prepared to fight for the survival of the Jewish state.
The conclusion is crystal clear: what is staring Israeli Jews in the face if they go ahead with annexation is annihilation from within, i.e. the destruction of the Jewish state as a Jewish state. It is collective suicide, no more and no less.
There is no point in sugar-coating the demographic data and their political implications. Unless you are totally deluded or completely moronic, you look at the figures and you can only conclude that absorbing such a large Arab/Muslim population into Greater Israel, via the annexation route, can only signify the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Since Muslims tend to have large families, it is not far-fetched to imagine that, within 10 years, the Arab and Muslim population of Greater Israel will be larger than the Jewish population.
Of course, those who follow and support the Israeli Far Right will dismiss such concerns, hiding behind sloganeering. They seem to think that, in the long term, it will be perfectly feasible to maintain the status quo within a Greater Israel state, with Arabs and Muslims as second-class citizens. Repression and militarization will do the trick: keep them down, denying their basic rights, and carry on as usual. In other words, run the whole of Israel as the West Bank has been run – as a militarized district where the IDF has, in practice, a free hand.
To imagine that co-existence with a very large Arab population in this dystopian Greater Israel could be harmonious and peaceful, more particularly if the Arabs are treated as inferior citizens, is obviously another form of pathological delusion, given the history of the Near East since 1948.
The only alternative would be the wholesale extermination of all Palestinian Arabs and Muslims, but I believe we can agree that this is not on the cards, for obvious reasons. In other words, there will be a massive transfer of population, i.e. an unprecedented influx of Arabs and Muslims into a Greater Israel political entity.
If what I have outlined above is the Master Plan of the Israeli Far Right, it is utterly delusional. What we have, here, is some kind of Spartan dystopia, whereby Jews are the master class and Palestinians are an inferior class of quasi-slaves. This is not going to work. Look at Apartheid South Africa or post-colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe): you can keep the oppressed down for a certain amount of time but, sooner or later, they will rebel and will gain full political rights. As they are likely to outbreed the Jewish population of this expanded state, and if ‘one man, one vote’ applies, one day, they will be in a position to subvert Greater Israel from within and take it over. And God help the Jews of Israel if the so-called Palestinian refugees rotting in Lebanon or Syria are ‘allowed’ to ‘return’ to their ‘homeland’: this will be the last nail in the coffin of the Jewish state – RIP, the Zionist project.
If Jewish Israelis want to imagine what living in a nation with a very large Arab/Muslim community in their midst might be like, all they have to do is look at countries of Western Europe such as Belgium or The Netherlands (with very large immigrant communities of Arab origin, mostly from Morocco), or at cities such as Marseille, in south-eastern France (with many immigrants from North Africa). Is that what Israeli Jews want? If that is indeed what they want, they should go ahead with the full annexation of Gaza and the West Bank. And those countries I have just mentioned have not been at war, in recent times, with the nations that their Arab immigrants hail from, incidentally – a not-so-minor factor that does complicate the equation, for obvious reasons.
Let me repeat it again: in the short term, annexation may appear to be a brilliant solution; in the long term, it will mean the death of the Jewish state and collective suicide for the Jews of Israel.
Now, once you have looked at the figures, sat back and absorbed their meaning, whether you support the Left, the centre, the Right or the Far Right of Israeli politics, and whether you are religious or not, as an Israeli Jew, unless you are completely deluded, hopelessly irrational, blatantly illogical, and/or distressingly obtuse, you can only draw one conclusion: annexation is a very, very bad idea. Mark my words.
Once you have reached that simple conclusion, you need to look for an alternative, unless you feel that the status quo is working really well and can continue forever, which would be another form of bizarre delusion. What is the alternative to annexation? Back to Square One: let me tell you what it is, and it is the two-state solution. There is no – I repeat, no – alternative that can work in the long term and preserve the Jewish state as a Jewish state.
Many – most, probably – Israeli Jews feel nauseous at the thought of ‘rewarding’ Palestinians with their own little state, more particularly after the events of October 2023. This is understandable. But, in politics, as in everyday life, you do not always get to do what you like with people you like, and you rarely choose your neighbours! But you have no choice. None. So, Israel should get on with it with realism and a modicum of modesty – as opposed to self-defeating hubris – in order to find a way forward with the PA, whose leaders are dying to run Gaza and the West Bank and turn it into their little fiefdom, which will benefit from generous funding, courtesy of the international community.
What is the risk for Israel? If, tomorrow, this Palestinian statelet turns out to be a putrid and toxic abscess bent on the destruction of Israel, the IDF can do what it has just done in Gaza, with undeniable enthusiasm: raze it to the ground. And re-occupy it in due course. Things will have come full circle. But, at least, you will have tried to find a way forward with the Palestinians, which should be acceptable to them. And Israel will cease to be treated as a pariah nation by the international community, while the Arab states of the region – starting with Saudi Arabia – will be only too glad to do business with a virtuous Jewish state, if only because those Arab states and Israel have a common enemy, namely Iran.
Israel needs a new government and a new approach to the Palestinian issue. The policy of annexation is a disaster in the making, led by ideologically driven, blinkered and extremist politicians who have Zero understanding of history: it is collective suicide for the Jews of Israel. The only alternative, whether Jewish Israelis like it or not, is the two-state solution: in effect, the two-state solution is the least bad option, i.e. the only solution. The State of Israel needs to listen to its allies, such as the USA, and to the international community, and do the right thing: it needs to take into account the legitimate demands of the Palestinians, if not for the sake of the Palestinians themselves, then to save the Jewish state itself – its soul and its existence – in the long run. Anything else will lead to the self-destruction of the State of Israel as a Jewish state.
