Israel, Ireland and the peace of the aging-By Spengler
Sometimes, the best thing to do is nothing at all.
A generation from now, the Palestinians will make peace with Israel, for a simple reason: they will grow up - literally. Palestinian Arabs comprise one of the fastest-aging populations in the word.
United States President Barack Obama was misinformed when he told the America-Israel Political Action Committee May 22 that "the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories".
In fact, Palestinian fertility on the West Bank has already converged on the Israeli fertility rate of three children per woman, if we believe the Palestine Ministry of Health rather than the Palestine Authority's Statistics Bureau.
There is endless debate about the Palestinian population numbers. Israel's peace party has advanced the "demographic argument" for years, and has been consistently wrong. The decisive data point is that Palestinian Arab fertility has plunged and, in consequence, the Arab population will age rapidly. That augurs well for peace, a generation from now. After three-quarters of a century of warfare, starting with the 1937 Arab uprising against British rule in Palestine, it's not a hardship to wait one more generation.
In this regard,the Northern Ireland peace agreement of 1998 is worth revisiting. At the Obama White House, the Irish sense of victimhood blends easily with the president's own anti-colonial resentment, and the Third World sympathies of such advisers as the Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett.
year's crop of 700,000 college graduates meets world standards. The education that young Arabs receive at the settlers' university on the West Bank is better than anything available among Israel's Arab neighbors. In a quiet way, the settlers of Samaria may do more for peace than the diplomats.
By 2040, the stone-throwing kids of the First Intifada will be close to retirement age, and the gun-toting young men who dominate today's Palestinian employment picture (or those who still are alive) will have families. If they missed out on high-tech jobs, the spillover from the West Bank's economic growth - driven in turn by Israel's economic miracle - will keep them employed in service industries. Absent additional violence, the West Bank will flourish while Egypt and Syria descend into penury and chaos.
There is no urgency to make peace, except in the minds of the Palestinians' present leaders. The world has allowed them to rule a little fiefdom as warlords of private armies, with little accounting for billions in foreign aid, and the opportunity to indulge in a grand ideological tantrum on the tab of Western donors.
The window is closing for radical Islam. That makes the present an exceptionally dangerous period, because the radicals know that it is closing. Contrary to what Obama said on May 22, the radicals understand better than anyone else that time and demographics are against them. The Palestinians of the West Bank are better off than any other Arabs in the region by any tangible measure - health, literacy, higher education, per capital income.
They have the good luck to reside next to one of the world's most dynamic economies. In a generation the world may have moved beyond the likes of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. That gives Abbas an incentive to gamble while he still has chips on the table. If the radicals can be contained through the present generation, though, they can be extirpated in the next.
Note
1. See The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies Bar-Ilan University. Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 65
In the history of the world, no tyranny has ever voluntarily relinquished power or been replaced by peaceful means.
Have a nice day
Aryeh Zelasko :-)
Beit Shemesh
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