DANIEL GREENFIELD: IMAGINING A POST ISRAEL MIDDLE EAST
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/imagining-a-post-israel-middle-east/
Let us suppose for a moment that all the people who boycott Israeli products, boo Israeli orchestras and deliver long speeches at the UN got their wish and the Middle East was suddenly a Post-Israel place. While in the real world this would be a violently genocidal event, let us imagine that the whole thing was settled peacefully with the Saudis paying every Israeli one million dollars to get on a plane and leave. The Israelis took the deal and within a month there wasn’t a single Jew to be found anywhere from Eilat to the Golan Heights and from Tel Aviv to Arad.
As the last El Al plane takes off, circles over Ben Gurion Airport and heads to the South Pole, the one place on earth where there are no mosques, no suicide bombers and no cartoon riots, which is to become the new Jewish homeland, all the passionate Keffiyah-wearers, both Muslim and non-Muslim, can finally breathe a sigh of relief at having managed to make another spot on earth Judenrein before wondering what comes next. And what does come next in the Post-Israel Middle East?
Sure all the “refugees” can swarm in from Jordan and Lebanon to their “homeland,” before turning around and going back to their refugee camps where the UNRWA takes care of them, feeds them and educates their children. Jordan and Lebanon also have something that the brand new state of disaster known as Palestine does not have… jobs.
Jordan and Lebanon aren’t the best places on earth, or even in the Middle East, but they’re marginally functional compared to the Palestinian Authority, a corrupt welfare state funded by the US and EU and run by men with Soviet doctorates in revisionist history and no experience doing anything but putting out press releases after their latest terrorist attack.
The ancestors of the “refugees,” who show up waving house keys on the evening news every few days, came to Israel looking for jobs when the British Empire replaced the Ottoman Empire. Since then they have been going where the jobs are, anywhere from Detroit to Kuwait City, which gave them the boot after they allied with Saddam Hussein. They aren’t interested in returning unless there are jobs waiting for them.
The indigenous Zionist colonialists will leave behind factories and hospitals, lush orchards and even crocodile farms. But they also left behind greenhouses in Gaza that were turned into terrorist training grounds. Infrastructure doesn’t create jobs, even when someone else builds it for you and shows you how to use it. It’s what you do with the infrastructure that counts.
The US and the EU poured fortunes into industrial parks that were supposed to provide jobs and make peace rewarding. And then there’s the casino that was supposed to lure wealthy Israelis to gamble the night away, but instead became a terrorist rocket launch site and got shut down by the Israeli Air Force.
The Palestinian economy consists mostly of foreign aid with a side order of tax revenues paid by a few businessmen and construction workers who mostly have jobs building Israeli settlements. When that last El Al plane heads to the South Pole to build Zion on Ice, all those jobs will be gone and the foreign aid will go too.
The Palestinian Authority and its army of fake refugees collected foreign aid only because they could point to Israel as the bully keeping them down. But without Jews to terrorize, the aid from the Muslim world will vanish in a flash, and without Jews to complain about, so will the aid from the United Nations and the European Union, leaving the Palestinian Authority as busted as its casino.
Most of the population of the Palestinian Authority will leave within a year or two in search of work, leaving the area as barren as it was in the 19th century under Ottoman rule. The terrorist groups will also move on to sell their services in new regional conflicts, starting fights in Syria, Egypt and Jordan, which will roll in and claim the territory.
In five years there will be no such place as Palestine, just fond memories of a country that never really existed being exchanged by old men over cups of bitter coffee as they wax nostalgic for their days of fighting for “Falasteen.” Bombs will occasionally go off, but the targets will be the Jordanian or Egyptian soldiers patrolling the ruins of Tel Aviv or the dirty flea markets of Jerusalem.
And the rest of the region? Jordan will probably fall to anyone who wants to claim it sooner or later. Sooner, if the United States decides to abandon it. The Muslim Brotherhood will try to merge Egypt and Syria. Their efforts will work out about as well as the brief period when Egypt and Syria were merged into the United Arab Republic.
For the most part everything will keep on going the way it would have anyway. Iran and the Gulfies will hiss threats at each other over the Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf if you’re in Doha or Riyadh). Shiites will go on killing Sunnis. Salafis will go on killing everyone else. One government will fall to be replaced by another and then be overthrown in its own time. The Egyptians will riot and starve, in no particular order.
Everyone will gather after Friday prayers to shout, “Death to America,” even though American food is the only thing keeping them alive. A few of the bearded yellers will forget and shout, “Death to Israel,” only to be reminded that there is no more Israel. And then they will remember that the joy they felt when that last El Al plane took off was mixed with sadness because those burly farmers and soldiers, truck drivers and politicians, who beat them in war and peace, also gave them a temporary sense of purpose and unity.
Getting rid of the Jewish State will not make the region more stable, heal any wounds, deter terrorism or improve the life of even a single Muslim. The killings will go on and so will the tyrannies. All the old crimes and atrocities will continue without the illusion that they are being done for the greater purpose of destroying the collaborators of the Zionist Entity.
The Middle East will not change without Israel. It will be the exact same place that it always was. Unlike George Bailey, Israel did not make the Middle East better. Nor did it make it worse. Israel did nothing to the Middle East. It just tried to survive living in the middle of it and showed everyone else what was possible.
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