| Spengler discusses the impact of population statistics. A useful way of understanding the pattern of events, with interesting graphs for clarity (I do love graphs!). Here are the key bits: |
A generation from now, the Palestinians will make peace with Israel, for a simple reason: they will grow up - literally. Palestinian Arabs comprise one of the fastest-aging populations in the word.
United States President Barack Obama was misinformed when he told the America-Israel Political Action Committee May 22 that "the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories".
In fact, Palestinian fertility on the West Bank has already converged on the Israeli fertility rate of three children per woman, if we believe the Palestine Ministry of Health rather than the Palestine Authority's Statistics Bureau.
By 2040, the stone-throwing kids of the First Intifada will be close to retirement age, and the gun-toting young men who dominate today's Palestinian employment picture (or those who still are alive) will have families. If they missed out on high-tech jobs, the spillover from the West Bank's economic growth - driven in turn by Israel's economic miracle - will keep them employed in service industries. Absent additional violence, the West Bank will flourish while Egypt and Syria descend into penury and chaos.
There is no urgency to make peace, except in the minds of the Palestinians' present leaders. The world has allowed them to rule a little fiefdom as warlords of private armies, with little accounting for billions in foreign aid, and the opportunity to indulge in a grand ideological tantrum on the tab of Western donors.
The window is closing for radical Islam. That makes the present an exceptionally dangerous period, because the radicals know that it is closing. Contrary to what Obama said on May 22, the radicals understand better than anyone else that time and demographics are against them. The Palestinians of the West Bank are better off than any other Arabs in the region by any tangible measure - health, literacy, higher education, per capital income.