« The Arab-Israel Conflict | Main | Past or the Future »
پیر 25 نومبر 2002Monday, November 25, 2002
Jewish Settlers and Israeli Arabs as obstacle to Peace
One reason for my pessimism for a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the feckless Palestinian leadership. The other is the issue of Jewish settlers in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and ironically the Israeli Arabs. It is basically a demographic issue. According to the CIA World Factbook, there are about 365,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem (about 6% of the population) and about 19.9% of the population is not Jewish most of which is Arab.
Now, any settlement with the Palestinians will involve withdrawing from most of West Bank and Gaza and some of Jerusalem as well (in my opinion, a solution without some part of Jerusalem being part of the Palestinian state will be unaceptable to the Palestinians.) That means withdrawal of the Jewish settlements from the Palestinian state as most of the settlers won’t want to live in an Arab state. The percentage of settlers in the voting population has increased quite a lot in recent years and would increase in the future as well. Even if there is a stop to further settlement, the settlers’ share of the vote would probably increase as they are in general more religious than the general population and hence would have a higher birth rate. Self-interest being one of the more important of motivations for people everywhere, why should they vote themselves out of their homes? This will be especially true for the generation born in those settlements. This would mean that for an Israeli government to win elections based on their committment to peace requires them to win really big within the Green Line. And that’s where the Israeli Arabs create a further complication. Since these Arabs are close relatives of the Palestinians in the West bank and Gaza, no Israeli government can rely on them as the deciding factor for a peace settlement. The decision to give up territory for peace has to be made by the Jewish population. Demographics again make the situation rather bleak as the Israeli Arabs have a higher birth rate than the Israeli Jews, making the election of an Israeli government agreeing to a Palestinian state more difficult with time.
OK, I am feeling very pessimistic now.
Posted by Zack at November 25, 2002 12:11 PM in International Affairs
Advertisements
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.zackvision.com/mt/zv-trbk.cgi/251
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Jewish Settlers and Israeli Arabs as obstacle to Peace:
» Welcome, MSNBC Readers from Procrastination
I hope you like my weblog. Please look at the archives as well and visit again. Thanks, Will Femia of MSNBC Weblog Central for putting me on the Best of Blogs list. Here are some of my posts that you... [Read More]
Tracked on December 1, 2005 11:40 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Note: Disagreements are welcome, but please keep it civil. Any comments full of hatred, bigotry, trolling or spam will be deleted and the commenter banned. Do read the commenting policy.
Valid XHTML: You have to preview your comment to make sure that it is valid XHTML 1.1. You will see the "Post" button on the preview page.
Urdu: To comment in Urdu, include "p[ur](urdu). " (with a space at the end and without the quotes) at the start of every Urdu paragraph. If you want to write an Urdu word(s) in an English paragraph, do it like this: %[ur](urdu)اردو%. If you want to put an English word(s) in an Urdu paragraph, write it like this: %[en](en)English words%.
PGP Signing: PGP-signed comments are encouraged. However, clearsigning Urdu text with GPGshell produces garbage.
MathML: Select the Textile with itex to MathML text filter. What you'll use is itex, which is a superset of WebTeX and differs somewhat from standard LaTeX.
Text Filters: For regular comments, whether in English or Urdu, keep the text filter setting to its default of Textile 2. Change it to Textile with itex to MathML when writing MathML.