The basic problem with Zionism

Demography is destiny

Around 80,000 people in northern Israel have been evacuated from their homes. They’ve been evacuated now, in most cases, for ten months and there’s no reason to think they are going back any time soon, because a millenarian paramilitary group called 'the Party of God’ keeps firing rockets at the places they used to live. Now that it’s summer, there’s a lot of dry tinder around and more or less on a daily basis one of these rockets sets off a big fire. The obvious response to this is to go to war, but Israel can’t do that because, if they do, the Party of God will fire 1,500 rockets per day, overwhelming Israel’s rocket-defence system, and causing hundreds, more likely thousands, of casualties, with the most likely result being a stalemate, followed by a truce deal that the Party of God will just ignore like they did the last time.

If you will it

Now, I’ll admit that I got bored reading Altneuland and skipped to the end a few pages in, but I did read the Wikipedia page and I’m pretty sure that isn’t in there. So, something obviously went wrong. What?

Obviously, any historical phenomenon is multi-causal, but sometimes it’s possible to identify one cause that renders the rest fairly trivial, and this is one of those cases. It all comes down to numbers.

In 1900, the population of Palestine, excluding Jews, was around 550,000. The global Jewish population was probably around 8,000,000. This means that if even just 1/5 of the world’s Jews had moved to create a new Jewish state in the entire land of Israel, they would have had a 75% - 25% majority. We know that such a demographic majority would have been sufficient to create a tolerably civil peace, because these are the numbers in the state of Israel today, and things there are basically OK. Indeed, it stands to reason that things would actually be a lot better than they are right now because Jewish-Arab relations are shaped by the framework of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which Israeli Arabs are the cousins - often literally - of people blowing up Israeli buses and being manhandled at checkpoints. In the absence of this constant source of tension, it’s not out of the question that a large proportion of Arab citizens of Israel would have fully assimilated to some kind of quasi-Jewish Israeli identity, as many early Zionists intended.

The problem is that the Arab population of Eretz Yisrael didn’t stay at half a million, it grew, and grew, and grew some more. It grew so fast that, in the vast majority of years, it outpaced Jewish population growth through immigration and births combined. The Zionists had to abandon their plan to peacefully overwhelm the natives through numbers, and instead had to compete for a piece of land that wasn’t big enough for both peoples, and, after more than a century of demographic growth, isn’t really big enough even for one of them.

Many Zionists like to engage in a form of cope in which they ascribe this Arab population growth not to Arabs having babies, but in their having moved to Palestine from surrounding areas. This is basically false: Arab immigration did happen, but it contributed only 10-20% of Arab population growth. The Arab population grew for the same basic reason as it started to grow around the whole non-European world, because having been gifted technology developed in Europe, they stopped losing half or more of their children to malaria and malnutrition. However, even if it was true, it would be completely irrelevant, because how the Arab population grew makes no odds as to the failure of Zionism as a practical project, only the brute fact that it did.

The history of the Zionist movement as it has unfolded has been a series of attempts to deal with the basic failure to constitute an overwhelming majority of the population of Eretz Yisrael, upon which the success of the project as originally conceived was based. First, self-defence militias were formed to deal with attacks from the growing hostile Arab population. Then, when partition came, 800,000 or so Arabs were expelled or otherwise pressured into fleeing from their homes. Then, when the Gaza strip and West Bank were used by these expelled populations as bases for constant raids on Israel, they were occupied, and so on to the Lebanon, and here we are today.

At each stage of this process, the Zionist leadership employed the minimum amount of brutality needed to solve the most immediately pressing problems, which was sometimes quite a lot of brutality (and doesn’t exclude the reality that troops on the ground from time to time gave in to baser instincts). From a tactical and strategic perspective, their achievements are extremely impressive, scarcely believable even, until you realise that the Zionist Yishuv (which still exclusively ran the country into the early 1970s) was among the highest human capital entities in history. However, each victory led to the Arabs regrouping, improving their capabilities, refining their tactics, and creating a new set of harder to solve problems. Meanwhile, Israel’s human capital that can be put to work solving these problems has progressively declined from the time when it was almost exclusively Ashkenazi population of people self-selected for commitment and competence. This was to some degree inevitable, but has happened at a pace significantly in excess of what was strictly necessary.

In Jerusalem, there is a square called Kikar Davidka, named after a big cannon-gun thingy sitting the middle. This gun wasn’t really for shooting; it was almost operationally useless. Its purpose was to make a big boom, after which the Arabs of the time would scatter and flee, very useful in a war where this was the main strategic goal. Fast forward to today, and after multiple iterations of the cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism, Hamas have developed tactics sufficiently effective that even with the most advanced technology and huge American financial assistance, Israel cannot defeat them without killing literally hundreds of thousands of people, and perhaps not even then. Of course, this has come at the cost of enormous suffering for the Palestinian population at large, but this is a choice they had to make, and they have made it willingly. At the risk of employing dehumanising language (very bad - no do that), one can liken the situation to bacteria treated with repeated, but limited, doses of antibiotics that re-emerge, each time more resistant and virulent.

Now, some of my readers will say, the solution is therefore very obvious: just kill them all. I have two very normie objections to that namely that (a) that would be wrong and (b) we wouldn’t get away with it anyway, which perhaps I shall elaborate upon in future posts. However, let’s say that we can just exterminate them, this itself just proves that Zionism has failed, because not one single early proponent of Zionism thought that the project required the extermination of five million people to succeed, and, if they had, not one of them would have become a Zionist.

Laying the blame

An obvious question that arises from this is whether the Zionists were culpably responsible for getting us into this mess by not accurately predicting future demographic trends in the territory they wanted to take over. In retrospect, it seems obvious that the Arab population would grow rapidly if there was nothing to stop it, that’s literally just basic maths. However, the reality is that, in 1900, pretty much everyone seems to have just assumed that European demographic supremacy would continue for ever. The Jewish population had been growing exponentially: doubling between 1700 and 1800, then tripling between 1800 and 1900, while Palestine’s Arabs just kind of milled around and picked olives or whatever. As far as anyone knew, the Jewish demographic advantage was poised to get even better.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the early opponents of Zionism, argued that the Zionists would fail because Arabs would simply outbreed any conceivable rate of Jewish settlement. The most prescient criticisms were made by Ahad Ha’Am, and many of these touched on the vital demographic question, but he was concerned about the feasible rate of settlement (something the Balfour declaration solved, at least temporarily) and was oblivious to the real issue. If someone had raised the spectre of an Arab war of the womb, they would likely have been laughed out of the room as a paranoiac. The Rising Tide of Colour wasn’t even published until 1920, by which time Zionist settlement was already too advanced to be wrapped up without some kind of catastrophe.

What future demographic trends are *you* not adequately taking into account?

However, assigning blame is not really the issue anyway. The point of understanding where Zionism went wrong is to understand what to do now. If you think the fundamental problem is ideological, then you search for an ideological solution. If you understand that the problem is that there are just too many Palestinians, then you try and solve that instead. Of course, my old Kahanist buddies have their solutions, but they aren’t the only ones out there. There are some more humane ones - I promise.