Israel, A Nation Once Again
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Israel's Jewish population is approaching six million. If current birth rates hold steady that significant milestone will be reached in time for next year's Independence Day. If there is to be one.
In the sixty-four years that the revived country
has existed, there has been a dramatic population
shift. Western and Eastern Europe and Russia, where
the majority of Western Jews once lived, now hold a
fraction of the Jewish population. The Muslim world,
former location of the majority of Eastern Jews, is
barely worth mentioning.
Globally the Jewish population is divided between
Israel and the United States. Israel is the home of
the majority of the world's Jews, but the combined
Jewish Anglosphere is still larger, not so much
because of the United Kingdom, but because of North
America, which holds the largest number of Jews. In
a development that would have been all but
incomprehensible a century ago, the majority of Jews
in the world speak English or Hebrew. Smaller
numbers speak French and Spanish, but in a
generation hardly any will speak Russian or Arabic.
The majority of Jews live in the American
Hemisphere. If we subtract Israel, the Eastern
Hemisphere would barely muster up ten percent of the
Jewish population because its Jews have for the most
part either moved to the Western Hemisphere or to
Israel.
Israel is the last Jewish outpost in the Eastern
Hemisphere. The last significant Jewish populations
there are either in the far west, in the United
Kingdom and France or legacy populations in Russia
and the Ukraine. The latter have no future and the
former are dwindling under pressure from the growing
Muslim population in Europe.
Over the last century, Jews have been moving West,
though not quickly enough to outpace the Nazis and
the Communists. The migration has gathered up Middle
East Jews and Eastern European Jews, leaving a
handful scattered on the Western shores of Europe,
while the majority have either rebuilt in Israel or
moved on to America, Canada or Latin America.
Jews have often been referred to as the 'canary in
the coal mine' and accordingly Jewish migrations may
foreshadow Christian migrations from the Eastern
Hemisphere.
The Christian populations of the Middle East appear
to be going the way of the Jewish population. In
thrall to Muslim propaganda, the media blames Israel
for the vanishing Christians of Bethlehem, but how
does one explain a comprehensive regional Christian
decline and exodus?
The fall of Egypt into the hands of the Brotherhood,
Turkey into the hands of the AKP Islamists and the
strong likelihood that the Brotherhood will take
Syria and Hezbollah will take Lebanon, along with
Muslim control over Gaza and the West Bank represent
the end of the remaining centers of Christianity in
the Middle East. It is not difficult to foresee a
near future where Israel is the last remaining safe
place in the region for Christians.
What is happening to Middle Eastern Christians is
what has already happened to Middle Eastern Jews.
Unlike the Jews, the Christians have no regional
state of their own. The closest thing to it is
Lebanon, which serves as an ugly example of what the
binational Jewish-Muslim state that some called for
and are still calling for would truly look like.
Had Christians turned Lebanon into a Christian
Israel, then they would have been able to survive in
the region. Middle Eastern Christians are on average
better educated and more successful than the cult of
a mass murderer that has colonized the region. A
Christian Middle Eastern state would have stood head
and shoulders above its Muslim neighbors, in every
sense of the word. But instead coexistence was tried
and it failed. Just as it is failing in Europe.
The migration of European Christians is happening at
a slower rate, but it is happening as well. A Times
poll found that 42 percent in the UK would like to
leave. It is a safe assumption that the 42 percent
does not come from the ranks of the bearded asylum
seekers and the dole-hounds in the East End. The UK
is seeing the largest emigration numbers in recent
history, as many as three a minute leaving the
country, the majority heading out to more distant
corners of the Anglosphere.
Not all Europeans have the same linguistic support
system of former colonies making emigration more
difficult to contemplate. Emigration from the
Netherlands has hit an all time high, headed to most
of the same places, either outside the hemisphere or
to distant Australia and New Zealand. The Portuguese
are heading to Brazil, and the Spanish, Greeks and
Italians are also hitting the exit doors. While the
process doesn't seem all that drastic now, it is the
opening round of a migration that will drastically
accelerate as the Muslim colonization of Europe,
with its accompanying violence goes on.
European Christians are following the path of
European Jews, just as Middle Eastern Christians are
following the path of Middle Eastern Jews, seeking
stability, safety and opportunity outside countries
that are on the path to becoming unlivable for
anyone who doesn't preach in a mosque, sell drugs or
rob tourists. Most are not leaving because they are
aware of the problem, but because they are aware of
the consequences.
Had Europe not imploded so badly in the twentieth
century, the history of the Jewish State might have
been quite different. Israel's Second Commonwealth
didn't manage to attract a majority of the Jewish
population from Babylon and the various Greek
states. Israel's Third Commonwealth was in better
shape, despite the tiny borders and constant
threats, but it is doubtful that it would have the
population that it does today, if Jewish life in the
Eastern Hemisphere had not become so impossible.
To survive the hostility and chaos of the Eastern
Hemisphere, Jews crossed the ocean to the Americas
and rebuilt a fortified republic in their homeland.
In the natural course of events, the republic would
have mainly picked up idealists, nationalists and
the devoutly religious. It would have been a viable
country, but a smaller one, with more in common with
Ireland than its energetic overcrowded self.
Israel's composition is a fossil record of various
periods of persecution, Russian Jews, German Jews,
Middle Eastern Jews and then Russian Jews again. Its
politics, its technology and its religion have taken
second place to its need to protect itself, and the
intellectual, the commercial and the religious had
to make way for the military. Israel has been
defined as much by that external pressure as by the
idealism-- and that combination is perhaps the
truest summary of the Jewish experience.
An Israel at peace, without constant assault by
enemies and a storm of hatred thundering against it
would not have truly reflected who the Jewish people
had become over the millennia. It is the external
pressure which has forced the Jews to find ways out
of traps, to survive impossible situations and to
accept constant change, while holding on to the
things that mattered.
Its founders may have dreamed of a Hebraic European
state, with short work weeks, plentiful cafes and
vigorous debates over philosophical questions and
social justice. But Israel was unable to escape its
Jewish destiny, instead it became a country of Jews,
a national diaspora, alone among the nations of the
world, fascinating, repulsive, beloved, hated, but
rarely ignored.
The Jews had defied history, instead of all flooding
into the American Hemisphere to take up careers as
fair-minded liberals or inhabitants of self-made
ghettos, they made a last stand amid the ruins of
the Middle East. They built a successful state,
defied their enemies and have outlasted the best
European efforts to compromise them into oblivion.
They survived every Muslim army that came at them,
won wars against impossible odds and held on in a
region where the one thing that everyone could agree
on was that they should be gone. And being Jews,
they spread their hands and wondered why they were
hated.
Israel is a non-Muslim country in a region where
after centuries of conquests there aren't supposed
to be any non-Muslim countries. It is an indigenous
minority trying to fly the flag in an Arabized
region and it can only survive by succeeding at
everything it does. It has managed to defy the odds,
like the Armenians, it has proven that it is
possible for an indigenous minority to build a
successful state out of a diaspora and defend it
against Muslim aggression. Those ignorant of history
might call it colonialism, but it actually represent
indigenous peoples rolling back Muslim colonialism.
If worst comes to worst for Europe, perhaps one day
Americans and Australians will resettle England and
Scotland, the way that Jews resettled Israel. But
the larger question may be who will resettle
Australia and America? Retreating across the ocean
to another continent is no real solution. Not in the
age of the jet plane that can just as easily carry
thousands of Muslim settlers, as be hijacked by its
Muslim passengers and rammed into major landmarks
and centers of government.
Israel may be civilization's last stand. Even if it
fails, it was a nobler effort than pretending that
nothing was wrong while heading out the door to
other continents where it would take longer for the
Jihad to reach their grandchildren. It is not an
ideal state, founded by European Jews, it suffers
from most of the afflictions of Europe, it has the
labor relations of Greece, the political malaise of
France, the intellectual culture of a bygone Germany
and yet it also has a military that combines the
best of England, Switzerland and Ancient Israel. And
most of all it has Jews.
Jews are a peculiar people, there is a great deal
of talk about them, good and bad, but like most of
the peoples of the world, they simply are. They
exist and have gone on existing to the irritation of
that part of mankind which was aware of them. There
are prophecies about them, in their blood runs the
veins of the prophets and kings whose words and
deeds are on the lips of even those who hate them.
But still they go on living their day to day lives
until it seems as if there is nothing particularly
special about them, and then unexpectedly they do
something extraordinary, cure a disease, unlock the
mysteries of the universe or build a country that
stands as a bulwark against all the rage and hate of
the East.
Few eyes turn to Israel on its Independence Day, not
unless there are stories about rock throwing Muslims
or outrage over another Jewish house going up in
Jerusalem. Even many of the Jews on the other side
of the ocean have closed their eyes and their hearts
to it. In synagogues those who recognize the new
miracles of the Lord, rather than only the old, give
thanks and praise for that day. For most it is only
another day.
As each of our birthdays reminds us that we are
still alive, so too Israel's birthday reminds us
that it is still here. It won its independence as an
infant, at 19 it defeated seven armies. At 40 it
launched its first rocket into space. At 44 it made
a terrible life decision that it has still to
recover from. It is 64 now, and yet booming with
life, with anger, love, doubt, fear and a thousand
other human tremors. It has gathered to itself the
dead lost in the ashes and seen them born again amid
its rebuilt ruins. It has stood on ancient mountains
and reseeded the land and made it green again. It
has reclaimed a legacy of a lost people and a lost
land better than even its dreamers and visionaries
could have imagined.
Who knows what it will do next?