Keeping Israel's Jewish majority

Georgie Anne Geyer
August 19, 2005

WASHINGTON -- I have not been known for my admiration for Israel's hard-line Prime Minister Ariel Sharon--but then, neither have been many Israelis. He was, in his own word, a "bulldozer" who used any and all military means to keep the Palestinians down. His original solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, expressed innumerable times by him in earlier years, was, "There is a Palestinian state--it's Jordan."

But this week, sorrowfully but with steel-like determination, that same Ariel Sharon--who had stood by and watched Palestinians be massacred at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in the early '80s in Lebanon--oversaw the removal of Israeli settlements from Gaza, perhaps ushering in a new era.

One had to feel deep emotion for the sobbing, moaning Israelis, brought there originally by the Israeli military in the late 1960s as a kind of immigration buffer against the Palestinians. Many of them must feel double-crossed.

But one also has to feel pity for the long-suffering and humiliated Palestinians, 250,000 of whose immigrant antecedents fled to Gaza after the 1948 UN partition and then war with Israel. Today, they are 1.5 million poor, angry souls jammed into a tiny, miserable piece of land that is barely 10 miles wide and 30 miles long. Their cities are a congeries of ghostly white buildings that stand like bare skeletons in a violent and joyless world.

The Israeli settlers were brought to Gaza at a time of economic decline, when "new lands" were available there and in the West Bank. They were, in a sense, religious mercenaries sent out to secure the borderland. The Palestinians were escaping to anywhere, driven out of their original homeland by corrupt and fanatic Arab leaderships that would not accept the UN partition; they were the human detritus of the chaos in the Arab world.

So now what? Even if Gaza "works" after 38 years of occupation, even if the Egyptians agree to seal their border with Gaza against arms and drug smuggling, even if suddenly the Palestinian Authority can rise to the occasion, even if the Palestinian settlers can control their passions and work the precious greenhouses left to them, even if Hamas and other radical groups born and bred in Gaza suddenly become willing to move into the political sphere--what will or could come next?

My judgment is that Gaza will indeed work--and that Gen. Sharon, for all of his past trespasses, deserves substantial credit for it. But those who think that Sharon will move to free the entire West Bank for a Palestinian state linked with Gaza are, I fear, bound for disappointment. Indeed, the Israeli-Palestinian narrative has, without our quite noticing it, taken on a totally different form.

Prime Minister Sharon spoke a few revealing words this week. Listen carefully: "We are now," he said somberly, "going to redeploy behind a defensive fence."

This, to me at least, means that he may have actually given up his lifelong vision of a "Greater Israel," stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordanian borders and perhaps beyond. In fact, many are saying that the Gaza pullout signifies that even Ariel Sharon has accepted Israel as it is today, slightly enlarged by the wall it has been building, but with that wall now destined to mark the borders of the land.

Why would a man like Sharon so pare down his dreams? The answers are found no longer in military might, but in demographic might.

First of all, enough Western Jews did not come to Israel to fill out his dreams. Today, only 5.26 million Jews, of 13 million to 14 million in the world, live in Israel, and immigration has fallen so that last year, a record low 21,000 Jews immigrated to the little country. Second, as the prominent Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently reported, the proportion of Jews in the combined populations of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza has dropped below 50 percent for the first time. This means, to many Israelis, that they will have to choose between a Jewish state or a democratic one that would include a majority of Arabs.

Indeed, Aluf Benn, the respected diplomatic editor of Haaretz, wrote recently: "Sharon personifies this change of heart. His two key decisions--the construction of the `separation' barrier between Israel and the West Bank and the pullout of Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip--are both designed to address the demographic imbalance. The fence was planned to leave as many Palestinians as possible on its eastern `other' side.' The Gaza withdrawal will turn the Green Line there into an ethnic frontier. ...

"Sharon had not been an easy convert; he previously rejected the demographic argument as leftist propaganda. In recent months, however, Sharon has altered his line. Preserving a Jewish majority in Israel has become his top priority."

Benn recalled how, to a Jewish audience in Paris recently, the prime minister explained further: "The future of the Jewish people depends on the nature of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. In this spirit we initiated the disengagement plan. That would secure the Jewish majority in the land of Israel."

The implications for the greater Middle East remain to be seen. But there is more and more evidence that with the relocation from Gaza, Sharon really means to batten down around historic Israel and let the Arabs go their own maddened ways.

Georgie Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington.

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