Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
tableland of the Jordanian town of Irbid was dizzyingly dramatic. The road in the late 1990s
was lined with dusty garages, rickety fruit stands, and knots of young men hanging about,
smoking. At the bottom lay a ribbon of green fields along the river, where, on the other
side, in Israel, the mountains rose just as steeply. The Jordanian border post and customs
offices were a series of old cargo containers in a vacant lot. The river is narrow. You cross
it in a bus in literally seconds. On the opposite side was a landscaped park separating the
traffic lanes: like a traffic island anywhere in the West, but a wonder after the bleak, dust-
strewn public spaces of Jordan and much of the Arab world. The Israeli immigration hall
was like any small air terminal in the United States. The Israeli security men wore Tim-
berland shirts barely tucked into their jeans to make room for their handguns. After weeks
in the Arab world, these young men seemed so tradition-less. Beyond the immigration hall
lay new sidewalks, benches, and tourist facilities; again, like any place in the West. And yet
it was an empty, unfriendly public space; nobody was simply hanging about, as in the Arab
world, where unemployment was endemic. The Israelis manning the booths were imper-
in Israel in the 1970s and had served in its military, arriving here the way I had allowed me
to see it anew. Israel seemed so unnatural to the Middle East, and yet it was such a blunt,
sturdy fact.
To the entire Muslim world, at once united and enraged by mass media, the plight of the
Palestinians represents a totemic injustice in the affairs of humankind. The Israeli occupa-
tion of the West Bank may not have been a visible factor in the first stages of the Arab
Spring but we shouldn't kid ourselves. The facts have, to a certain extent, become mean-
ingless; perceptions are everything. Undergirding it all is geography. While Zionism shows
the power of ideas, the battle over land between Israelis and Palestinians—between Jews
and Muslims, as both the Turks and the Iranians would have it—is a case of utter geograph-
ical determinism.
“Jews will very soon become a minority in the lands they occupy or rule from the Jordan
River to the Mediterranean (by some calculations this has already happened), and some
demographers forecast that in fifteen years they will make up as little as 42 percent of the
population in this area.” So wrote Benjamin Schwarz, the national editor of
The Atlant-
ic
, in that magazine in 2005, in an article entitled “Will Israel Live to 100?” Since then
little has changed to affect those calculations, or his dispassionate analysis. The birth rate
in the occupied Arab territories is ludicrously higher than in Israel: in Gaza, population
growth is double that of Israel, with the average woman having more than five children
over her adult lifetime. Consequently, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a con-
sensus emerged within the Israeli political, military, and intelligence communities that Is-
rael must withdraw from virtually all of the occupied territories or become an essentially
Apartheid-like state—if not immediately, then over time. The result was “the fence”: an
