Two religiously-identified new states emerged from the shards of the British empire in the aftermath of World War II. Israel, of course, was one; the other was Pakistan.

They make an interesting, if infrequently-compared pair. Pakistan's experience with widespread poverty, near-constant internal turmoil, and external tensions, culminating in its current status as near-rogue state, suggests the perils that Israel avoided, with its stable, liberal political culture, dynamic economy, cutting-edge high-tech sector, lively culture, and impressive social cohesion.

But for all its achievements, the Jewish state lives under a curse that Pakistan and most other polities never face: the threat of elimination. Its remarkable progress over the decades has not liberated it from a multi-pronged peril that includes nearly every means imaginable: weapons of mass destruction, conventional military attack, terrorism, internal subversion, economic blockade, demographic assault, and ideological undermining. No other contemporary state faces such an array of threats; indeed, probably none in history ever has.

The enemies of Israel divide into two main camps: the Left and the Muslims, with the far Right a minor third element. The Left includes a rabid edge (International ANSWER, Noam Chomsky) and a more polite centre (United Nations General Assembly, Canada's Liberal Party, the mainstream media, mainline churches, school textbooks). In the final analysis, however, the Left serves less as a force in its own right than as an auxiliary for the primary anti-Zionist actor, which is the Muslim population. This latter, in turn, can be divided into three distinct groupings.

First come the foreign states: Five armed forces that invaded Israel on its independence in May 1948, and then neighboring armies, air forces, and navies fought in the wars of 1956, 1967, 1970, and 1973. While the conventional threat has somewhat receded, Egypt's U.S.-financed arms build-up presents one danger and the threats from weapons of mass destruction (especially from Iran but also from Syria and potentially from many other states) present an even greater one.

Second come the external Palestinians, those living outside Israel. Sidelined by governments from 1948 until 1967, Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization got their opportunity with the defeat of three states' armed forces in the Six-Day War. Subsequent developments, such as the 1982 Lebanon war and the 1993 Oslo accords, confirmed the centrality of external Palestinians. Today, they drive the conflict, through violence (terrorism, missiles from Gaza) and even more importantly by driving world opinion against Israel via a public relations effort that resonates widely among Muslims and the Left.

Third come the Muslim citizens of Israel, the sleepers in the equation. In 1949, they numbered merely 111,000, or 9 percent of Israel's population but by 2005, they had multiplied ten-fold, to 1,141,000, and to 16 percent of the population. They benefited from Israel's open ways to evolve from a docile and ineffective community into a assertive one that increasingly rejects the Jewish nature of the Israeli state, with potentially profound consequences for that the future identity of that state.

If this long list of perils makes Israel different from all other Western countries, forcing it to protect itself on a daily basis from the ranks of its many foes, its predicament renders Israel oddly similar to other Middle Eastern countries, which likewise face a threat of elimination.

Kuwait, conquered by Iraq, actually disappeared from the face of the earth between August 1990 and February 1991; were it not for an American-led coalition, it would quite certainly never been resurrected. Lebanon has been effectively under Syrian control since 1976 and, should developments warrant formal annexation, Damascus could at will officially incorporate it. Bahrain is occasionally claimed by Tehran to be a part of Iran, most recently in July 2007, when an associate of Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, Iran's supreme leader, claimed that"Bahrain is part of Iran's soil," and insisted that"The principal demand of the Bahraini people today is to return this province … to its mother, Islamic Iran." Jordan's existence as an independent state has always been precarious, in part because it is still seen as a colonial artifice of Winston Churchill, in part because several states (Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia) and the Palestinians see it as fair prey.

That Israel finds itself in this company has several implications. It puts Israel's existential dilemma into perspective: If no country risks elimination outside of the Middle East, this is a nearly routine problem within the region, suggesting that Israel's unsettled status will not be resolved any time soon. This pattern also highlights the Middle East's uniquely cruel, unstable, and fatal political life; the region ranks, clearly, as the world's worst neighborhood. Israel is the child with glasses trying to succeed at school while living in a gang-infested part of town.

The Middle East's deep and wide political sickness points to the error of seeing the Arab-Israeli conflict as the motor force behind its problems. More sensible is to see Israel's plight as the result of the region's toxic politics. Blaming the Middle East's autocracy, radicalism, and violence on Israel is like blaming the diligent school child for the gangs. Conversely, resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict means only solving that conflict, not fixing the region.

If all the members of this imperiled quintet worry about extinction, Israel's troubles are the most complex. Israel having survived countless threats to its existence over the past six decades, and it having done so with its honor intact, offers a reason for its population to celebrate. But the rejoicing cannot last long, for it's right back to the barricades to defend against the next threat.

Pauli J Ojala - 5/31/2008

Could you comment, whether my details are correct in a dissident essay in
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-Jews-statistics.htm ?

Pauli Ojala, evolutionary critic
Biochemist, drop-out (MSci-Master of Sciing)

Joseph Mutik - 5/14/2008

There isn't one iota of truth in your message. I only said that USA worked and will work in its own interest and Israel will be alone to defend itself when USA will consider so.
On the other hand I am an optimist and if you you read my message, below, i believe that Arabs work on behalf of Israel by increasing oil prices.
Conclusion: your hate is talking, again.

omar ibrahim baker - 5/14/2008

Mutik's post is over revealing!
It takes a blind, deaf, dumb and numb American NOT to appreciate its message and portent.

There is a NEW, or newly declared, prequalification, precondition, prerequisite for one to be eligible for the presidency:
**** How far would he, or she, go to protect Israel and Israel's interests?****

Had the presidency in question been Israel's that would be quite OK and only to be expected!
BUT it is NOT Israel's presidency that we are considering here!.

It is the Presidency of the USA!!

And the man, apparently speaking for the majority of his ilk, is very clearly unabashed and unapologetic about it:
To be eligible for the presidency of the USA a candidate's MAIN concern should be Israel and Israel's interests, NOT the USA and USA interests!
Concern here would, of course, easily translate into allegiance and loyalty .
Mutik should be lauded for his outspokenness and clarity: for a candidate to hope to become President of the USA it is Israel and Israel's interests that should be his priority
NOT the USA and USA interests.

That is how Mutik, and most of his ilk, will or should vote!
Now it is up to those Americans who believe that a candidate's main concern and loyalty should be the USA and to the USA to appreciate what is going on in their milieu!
Reading or rereading Walt and Mearsheimer would help a great deal!

Joseph Mutik - 5/12/2008

The best example is the Aug. 19, 1991 pogrom in Crown Heights, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. A driver of the Chasidic rabbi accidentally hit a black kid after being hit in the back of his car and lost control of the vehicle. The blacks begun a pogrom killing, destroying and looting Jewish property in the Chasidic section of Crown Heights. The black mayor of New York city, David Dinkins, closed his eyes and for three days didn't send police to stop the pogrom. As a result he lost the reelection and Giuliani became the mayor of New York city.
Daniel Pipes, the "war monger" as you call him, wrote this article because Barak Obama can be the David Dinkins like president of the USA. In 1973 Richard Nixon didn't want to resupply Israel with the needed weapons Israel lost in the first few days of the war (because of the very advanced rockets Egypt got from the USSR) but his chief of staff Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger worked behind his back and made Nixon send supply to Israel against his will (you can find a lot about this here on hnn.us).
If Obama becomes president and his advisers and relevant department secretaries will be unfriendly to Israel and if Israel will be in a situation like the 1973 war Israel will be left alone by the USA.
The alleged Israeli nukes are not the solution. If they really exist they are the ultimate protection against pushing the Israeli Jews into the sea.

omar ibrahim baker - 5/12/2008

Israel's unruly neigbours are a nuisance to Israel!
Israel should do something about that; it can no longer accept to live in this bullies infested neighborhood.
What kind of neighborhood is that where the polite,mild, glasses wearing, keen, intellectually inclined and artistically endowed youth are constantly bothered by ruffians who happen to be their next door neighbors ??
Well either Israel moves out into a better neighborhood or forces the neighbors to move out!
BUT for one thing Israel’s best friends, in North America and Western Europe, would rather not have her as a neighbor and judging by past experience it is more pragmatic for the neigbours to move out !
In that respect Israel’s friends will definitely help; as they did in the past!

Joseph Mutik - 5/11/2008

Oil prices will force the western world to replace the imports from Arab and non Arab countries with cheaper alternatives like local reserves and alternative fuels, new types of automobiles etc. Israel will be foolish to have "peace" with an impotent Abbas or hudna (truce) with the criminals of Hamas. In 20-30 years the Arab power will begin to dwindle without the blackmailing power of oil. The so called "Palestinians" will not be able to find work in Egypt or Jordan and they'll have to leave for places with better economic perspectives because instead of investing in a economic infrastructure they prefer to invest in armament.
There is no reason to have an illusive peace now with a party that doesn't intend to keep its side of the bargain.
As soon as the oil prices hit $150/barrel I'll throw a big party.

Long live Israel!

omar ibrahim baker - 5/11/2008

The future of Israel will be substantially determined by three major factors:
A-Its intrinsic military and economic prowess in the Middle East context
B- The perception of the region of what Israel IS and what its regional role Is
C-Israel’s own perception of its identity, role and relations with its regional environment.

EMPOWERMENT of ISRAEL
Israel ‘s present relatively superior power, in the regional context, was/ is the outcome of the forcefulness, “statesmanship” , deft employment of the Holocaust and of evolving international and regional developments and the total dedication and incorruptibility of its early leaderships ; as internal factors.
Of no less importance are two external factors that have played a crucial empowering role of Israel both at the inception and early implementation of the Zionist colonialist project stages and have sustained it later and ever since, namely:
-Unlimited and unconditional Western, mainly US, support
-Arab general societal and governance drastic weaknesses mainly the absence of public/popular participation in the decision and policy making state(s) mechanisms and the lack of a concerted common vision of and the consequential common action called for to meet the existential challenge that Israel is and came, increasingly, to present to the region in general and to the Arab nation in particular.

Both internal and external empowering factors are ultimately bound to peter out.
Successive Israeli leaderships have NOT shown the statesmanship and forcefulness and, particularly, the incorruptibility of their predecessors, whose mission was to build, nor will they since “having a good life” and “security “, for both themselves and the Israeli “people” , are their primary concerns.
Western and particularly US unlimited support is bound to dwindle because of its extremely high financial and political cost to the USA, and of escalating American public resentment .
Arab weaknesses will eventually, and inevitably be overcome and done with
None of the above expectations would, however, conceivably preclude Israel from maintaining a crucial, decisive (?), military capability but that would entail an increasingly heavy burden of spiraling cost, and lost services, that will further foment the unhappiness and dissatisfaction of the Israeli public with what Israel evolved into versus what it has promised to offer.
Fortress Israel, ad infinitum, will become increasingly unsupportable, unacceptable and severely disenchanting to the Israeli people as the alternative to the safe haven and the “democratic” well fate nation/state most of them have historically aspired to!

REGIONAL PERCEPTION of ISRAEL
From day one of its establishment Israeli policies have done everything conceivable to confirm and ingrain in the region’s consciousness its intrinsic colonialist Zionist nature.

Israel has irrevocably confirmed its expansionist nature by exceeding its land allocation of the UNGA Partition of Palestine resolution in 1948, the occupation of the rest of Palestine and annexation of Jerusalem in 1967, its all but declared creeping annexation of the West Bank by means of the Settlements and the Wall, the de facto annexation of the Syrian Golan and its persistent ambitions for and designs about Sinai

That all its expansionist achievements were attained through war has equally irrevocably confirmed its inborn aggressive nature .

Israel’s early ethnic cleansing and later disfranchisement of Palestinian Arabs in their homeland, its semi dormant but actual transfer ambitions and its recently disclosed plans for an exclusively Jewish Palestine/Israel together with its relentless denial of the Palestinians’ Right of Return to their homeland have unerringly validated, beyond any doubt, its racist nature.

That all sporadic international and ceaseless Arab states’efforts to achieve a settlement based on the principle of “Land for Peace” were aborted by Israel irrefutably and irrevocably identified it as the Zionist colonialist project aiming at an exclusively, or predominantly, Jewish nation/state to dominate the region to be attained through the dislocation, dispossession, disfranchisement and subjugation of the indigenous Palestinian Arab people from and in their homeland..
Thus the early, mainly Palestinian Arab, perception of what Israel IS and of the scope of the regional ROLE it was established to assume has proved indisputable and has been deeply embedded in Arab and Moslem consciousness, sub consciousness and culture as a security and existential challenge to be met at all costs.



ISARAEL’S PERCEPTION OF ITS IDENTITY
Whether perceived by the majority of Israelis as the earlier sought after ” Jewish homeland” and “Safe Haven” or as the, latter, dominant ” regional superpower” the Israel that has evolved from the sixty years of its establishment failed to be accepted by and to integrate into its regional environment.
The negative regional perception of its character that has increased in intensity and widened in geographical reach with the passage of time was in direct response to its own perception of its regional ambitions and role.
As long as Israel perceives itself as a Zionist nation/state ie a state dedicated to an exclusively Jewish Palestine which translates, regionally ,as an aggressive, expansionist and racist state with domination ambitions it will remain unintegrable into and inadmissible by the region .
AND its rejection and isolation will deepen and hostility to it will increase thus negating and reversing for ever whatever promise it made to world Jewry.
THEN at best, from a Zionist perspective, it will be “fortress Israel”; at worst, from the same perspective, it will implode and scatter away possibly shattering the region in the process!.

art eckstein - 5/10/2008

Arnold, I assume by that last phrase that you mean Ahmedinejad.

Arnold Shcherban - 5/10/2008

are nowadays just a verbal fraud coming from the both sides. Not only IDF enjoys the status of the most
effective and powerful military machine armed with an overwhelming nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, the international community, including the most of large countries figured in the Pipes' article as allegedly adversarial to the state of Israel will never allow the extermination catstrophe to happen.
The latter can only occur in a maliciously intended imagination of a
war-monger.