RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Middle East as it exists now has no future. Its borders were drawn by European colonial powers for their own purposes. The political agendas behind those borders are long dead. The kings and coalitions they were meant to protect have vanished.

ISIS is determined to tear apart the borders of the region and it’s not alone. Iraq and Syria are caught in cycles of violence because their national borders are prisons trapping incompatible religious and ethnic populations in multicultural tyrannies. The world has spent a lot of time trying to redraw Israel’s borders when it should have been redrawing the borders of the entire region.

There are only two solutions for ending the violence in Iraq and Syria; tyranny or denationalization.

As long as Sunni and Shiite Arabs and the Kurds are trapped together in a single country they will never be at peace.

All of this is really bad news for Arab Christians because they are a fragile religious minority in a region swiftly redefining itself by religion. The Arab Nationalism that shielded them is dead. That leaves them with few options except to form temporary coalitions with the representatives of older systems, the Baath Party and the Egyptian military, or the minority Shiite Islamists.

There is no future in such coalitions. The Egyptian military was nearly toppled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Next time the Brotherhood might finish the job.

The Baath Party in Syria has become a Shiite Alawite front and an arm of Iran. Hezbollah is even more so. Christians are persecuted in Iran. When Shiite Islamists gain the absolute power to impose their clerical will, that will lead to Christians becoming an even more persecuted minority.

It’s inevitable that the lines will be redrawn, whether by international agreement or by ethnic cleansing. ISIS is pursuing the latter course. Even if we destroy ISIS, the best way to preempt it is by redrawing the lines to create countries based on stable ethnic and religious majorities.

And this time we ought to take Christians into account.

If not for Israel, the Middle East would be mostly empty of Jews today. The disastrously unworkable borders that were assigned to Israel were swept away by the Muslim refusal to accept them. Their subsequent two invasions of the Jewish State allowed Israel to redraw more workable borders.

The Christians of Lebanon however were stuck with unworkable borders destined to make them into a minority in their own country. While the British shrank Israel’s borders to make it unlivable, the French expanded Lebanon’s borders to include too many Muslims. Through mass immigration from the USSR and the Middle East, through traditionalist populations, Israel was able to retain some parity with the Muslim birth rate. Christians however fell drastically behind in the demographic competition.

Middle Eastern Christians have the education and the economic skills to run their own states. Unfortunately they don’t have the birth rate to dominate any state under the current borders and they have not been able to unite the various disparate Christian populations under one flag the way that Israel was able to bring together different Jewish populations.

Both of these obstacles would have to be overcome for a Christian state to exist in the Middle East.

Middle Eastern Christians have been following a minority strategy, but the events in Syria and Iraq show that this strategy is no longer viable. The minority strategy depends on patronage from a central government which benefits from the business skills and tax revenues that Christians bring in. As a vulnerable minority, Christians can serve as middle men between the government and the population.

But a different type of government appears to be on the horizon.

In Egypt and Turkey, the political Islamists have built up business oligarchies. Meanwhile in Iraq and Syria, the more direct kind of Islamist offers a choice between conversion and death.

Jews made the decision to abandon being useful to various Caliphs and Sheiks and set up their own country. It will take a leap, but not an impossible one, for Christians to do the same. From Egypt to Syria, from Iraq to Gaza, it is all too obvious that relying on influence over demographics is a doomed strategy.

Gambling on the Arab Nationalists was a bad move, but gambling on the Shiites is an even worse move. And yet the only remaining options are emigration to the West or setting up a religious majority state.

Israel’s experience shows the perils of the latter course, but there may be no better option. Western Christians have the same demographic weakness as Eastern Christians. France, which attempted to set up Lebanon as a Christian enclave only to see it totter under the impact of Muslim demographics, is now seeing its own cities flooded by Muslim immigrants. France expanded its civic borders to admit too many Muslims and may be as doomed as Lebanon.

However Eastern Christians suffer from fewer illusions about Islam than Western Christians do. With a state or states whose borders offer a solid demographic majority, a competent military could secure their territory in ways that Western Christians with no memory of persecution would instinctively reject.

Should the West come to accept the necessity of denationalizing Iraq and Syria into viable religious and ethnic majority states, there would be an opportunity to transform Lebanon by integrating parts of it into more viable Muslim states and to build an independent Christian state or states in Iraq and/or Syria.

The Armenians were able to do it. The Maronites have struggled to hold on to a state. The Assyrians made their own brave effort that ended in the Assyrian Genocide.

And therein lies the problem.

The Islamism that is displacing Christians has placed religion over ethnicity. The ranks of ISIS contain Sunni Muslims of all ethnicities and nationalities. To stand against the rising tide of Islamism, the Christians of the Middle East will have to transcend ethnic and doctrinal differences. They will have to put aside past memories of persecution and old rivalries if they are to have a future in the region.

An independent Kurdish state could also make an independent Assyrian state possible, but it won’t last very long as a purely ethnic enclave.

Israel survived by building the biggest tent possible around a combination of ethnicity and religion. ISIS and its Islamic counterparts have focused on religious purity over ethnicity. A federation of mutually supportive Christian states rooted in ethnicity, but transcending ethnic and religious differences to stand together, are the only option for maintaining Christianity in the Middle East.

Islamic transnationalism can swamp any ethnic state with ferocity and pure numbers. Israel held out because its internal quarrels between Western and Eastern Jews were mediated by religion and its religious differences were mediated by a common ethnicity. This balance allowed Israel to survive. Alternatively the approach of the Agudah would have left Jews in the Christian position, as quarreling fragments striving for influence while floating adrift and persecuted in a Muslim ocean.

If Christians are to survive in the Middle East, they will have to find their own version of that balance. Middle Eastern Christians have shown courage in battle, ingenuity and business skill. They will have to stop thinking like a minority and put those qualities to use in building an independent future.