A WORLD WITHOUT ISRAEL

A World Without Israel - Josef Joffe (Foreign Policy)
Imagine that Israel never existed. Would the economic malaise and political repression that drive angry young men to become suicide bombers vanish? Would the Palestinians have an independent state? Would the U.S., freed of its burdensome ally, suddenly find itself beloved throughout the Muslim world? Wishful thinking. Far from creating tensions, Israel actually contains more antagonisms than it causes.

Israel's elimination from the regional balance would hardly bolster intra-Arab amity. The retraction of the colonial powers, Britain and France, in the mid-20th century left behind a bunch of young Arab states seeking to redraw the map of the region. From the very beginning, Syria laid claim to Lebanon. In 1970, only the Israeli military deterred Damascus from invading Jordan under the pretext of supporting a Palestinian uprising.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Nasser's Egypt proclaimed itself the avatar of pan-Arabism, intervening in Yemen during the 1960s. Nasser's successor, Sadat, was embroiled in clashes with Libya throughout the late 1970s. Syria marched into Lebanon in 1976 and then effectively annexed the country 15 years later, and Iraq launched two wars against fellow Muslim states: Iran in 1980, Kuwait in 1990. The war against Iran was the longest conventional war of the 20th century.

None of these conflicts is related to the Israeli-Palestinian one. Indeed, Israel's disappearance would only liberate military assets for use in such internal rivalries.

Those who think that the Middle East conflict is a "Muslim-Jewish thing" had better take a closer look at the score card: 14 years of sectarian bloodshed in Lebanon; Saddam's campaign of extinction against the Shia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War; Syria's massacre of 20,000 people in the Muslim Brotherhood stronghold of Hama in 1982; and terrorist violence against Egyptian Christians in the 1990s.

Would the Islamic world hate the U.S. less if Israel vanished? To begin, the notion that 5 million Jews are solely responsible for the rage of 1 billion or so Muslims cannot carry the weight assigned to it. Second, Arab-Islamic hatreds of the U.S. preceded the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza. Recall the loathing left behind by the U.S.-managed coup that restored the shah's rule in Tehran in 1953, or the U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1958.

As soon as Britain and France left the Middle East, the U.S. became the dominant power and the No. 1 target.