Sharon’s Price
I note an interesting article that analyzes how Israel’s Sharon is shaking down the US Treasury for $14 billion to ensure “compliance” with US Middle Eastern policy. How much money in total has the US poured down this inevitable sinkhole? I ought to find this out. Currently the Israel Government is riding high on an Imperialist roll. WIth most of the other armies in the region demoralised or neutralized, its expanionist tactics are opposed only by useless self-immolatory tactics by ghettoized Palestinians. I guess this extra $14 billion will ensure an even more rapid expansion.
However, recently I read Ecological Imperialism : The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 and the chapters analyzing Europe’s failed expansionist adventures (Vinland, the Crusades) were as revealing as those describing the successes (the Canaries, the Americas, the Australs). Especially the Crusades, where a massive strategic deployment and migration of European forces (almost two million people in total) for more than century finally ended in utter annihilation and left a lasting legacy of suspicion among the local inhabitants. The Crusades initially succeeded magnificently, capturing al of its strategic targets albeit with a catastrophically high casualty rate. However, the culture and biota of the European colonizers proved to be sub-optimal, and in any case Europeans have only really been successful when expanding into lower-density regions where the level and quantity of diseases in the native population is significantly smaller than within typical Europeans from densely populated regions.
None of this was true for the Crusaders. The native inhabitants were already supremely adapted to their environment and were found in great profusion, their biotas had competed with the European/Mediterranean biota for millenia, and they had shared all their major communicable diseases. Perhaps more closely analogous to the Israeli colonization of the Middle East (which I see in large part as a land grab driven by the lebensraum demands of millions of East European immigrant refugees from the collapse of the Soviet Block),the Crusaders came not as conquerors — prepared to establish working societies with the native cultures — but as displacers. They established apartheid states based around religion, emphasized differences between Christians and Muslims (and Jews), and forbid intermarriage. As a result, their fertility rate was significantly lower than the native Muslims, Jews, and Semitic Christians, their populations remained marginal and dwindling. Their caste system never gained the support of the local cultures and so within a couple of hundred years they were swept away.
It may not happen today, or tomorrow, or within ten or fifty years. But eventually, for whatever reason, the political and financial support from the US for Israel’s hegemony over the region will fade away, or that theocracy will be transformed into something more secular and inclusive. If history teaches us anything it is that we are doomed to know we are repeating cyclical patterns. Expansion, followed by dieback. So it goes.