The End of Jew-rusalem and the Beginning of What...?

Continuing the trend of blogging about unsettling news stories, I couldn't help but react in dismay as I read this article about the Jewish population crisis in Jerusalem. As it turns out, within 30 years the city may be 50% Arab, thanks to a 3-4% growth rate that has seen the Arab population grow 257 percent since '67, compared to only 140 percent by the Jews. Compounding the problem is that Israeli's just don't want to seem to live in Jerusalem in the first place. Israeli flight, with 17,300 Israelis (mostly young professionals looking for lower cost of living and better jobs) leaving annually, has been a problem for some time.

Yet, what concerns me is not the loss of Jerusalem's Jewish identity and majority, but rather what actions the state will take to retard -- or stop -- a demographic problem which in reality is a microcosm of the larger crisis facing all of Israel. So far the official response has been a series of progressive measures with a bit of the illegal thrown in: Israel's going to pump $1.5 billion into social services, build schools, relocate government agencies to within the city, and build 20,000 settler units in East Jerusalem.

So long as Jewish population and immigration growth remains low, however, these solutions are only delaying a problem the state will have to address some day. In his famous 2003 New York Review of Books essay, Tony Judt expressed the problem in the following way (I quote at length):

In one vital attribute, however, Israel is quite different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse: it is a democracy. Hence its present dilemma. Thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.

Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy "Samaria," "Judea," and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both.

Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah.

Anyone who supposes that this third option is unthinkable above all for a Jewish state has not been watching the steady accretion of settlements and land seizures in the West Bank over the past quarter-century, or listening to generals and politicians on the Israeli right, some of them currently in government. The middle ground of Israeli politics today is occupied by the Likud. Its major component is the late Menachem Begin's Herut Party. Herut is the successor to Vladimir Jabotinsky's interwar Revisionist Zionists, whose uncompromising indifference to legal and territorial niceties once attracted from left-leaning Zionists the epithet "fascist." When one hears Israel's deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, proudly insist that his country has not excluded the option of assassinating the elected president of the Palestinian Authority, it is clear that the label fits better than ever. Political murder is what fascists do.

Since Judt's essay, of course, Israel's demographic reality has gotten worse and not better; its political establishment has turned more rightward, not less. Judt's proposal, along with Virginia Tilley's, is one form or the other of a one-state, binantional solution. My own view is that in a perfect world, such a proposal would be the perfect solution, but that it remains to be seen that such an idea could somehow prove to be the exception in terms of the violent history of multiethnic/religious states.

That said, as the debate heats up in the coming weeks, months, and years as to just what Israel should do given its demographic problem, it's extremely important that neocon and right-wing arguments don't win out for the failure of a reasonable alternative. When the argument is made that "the only way to maintain/save Israel (from the Muslim hordes) is by doing X,Y, and Z egregious actions" there's no reason a very loud voice shouldn't shout back: "If the status quo is dependent on X,Y, and Z, who needs it!"