This work of fiction analyzes the two most dangerous political fault lines running across the Middle East: the Arabian/Israeli-Iranian conflict and the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. In Arabian War Games, the author proposes, through the use of fiction, a scenario where these issues all come to a head in a perfect storm. It is the year 20XX, and the regime in Iran, by then nearly choking to death under sanctions, attempts to cut the noose around its neck by invading Arabia in collusion with its ally Iraq. At the same time, Israeli elites, increasingly obsessed with preserving their Jewish majority and visualizing the Jewish state as slowly drowning in a sea of Arabs, conclude that the time has come to forcibly expel their rapidly growing Palestinian minority into Jordan. The United States, fatigued by Middle East wars, confused by Iraq’s collusion with Iran, overwhelmed by the resultant collapse of global financial markets, and impotent in front of a determined Israel, helplessly watches events play out. Eschewing the tendency of professional predictors to avoid forecasting the outlandish, Shihabi explores these potential scenarios in a granular fashion, paying particular attention to the mind-set and thinking of the ruling elites who are driving these events. Far from mere sensationalism, Arabian War Games is a careful analysis of the stress points currently at play in the region. Not only does Shihabi dissect these fault lines and their possible outcomes with incisiveness, but he also proposes alternative, creative solutions in the hopes that such scenarios can be avoided.
Arabian War Games
Cataclysmic Wars Redraw the Map of the Middle EastBy Ali al ShihabiiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Ali al Shihabi
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4697-8486-1Contents
Israel/Palestine Region...............................viiiPersian/Arabian Gulf Region...........................ixPreface...............................................xiChapter 1: Israel Cannot Survive......................1Chapter 2: Operation King David.......................20Chapter 3: Operation Imam Hussein.....................41Chapter 4: Arabia Stormed.............................71Chapter 5: Israel Pounces.............................124Chapter 6: Pakistan to the Rescue.....................159Chapter 7: The Day After..............................172Afterword.............................................178
Chapter One
Israel Cannot Survive
In my opinion, in the next 15 years we will either see Israel surviving or we will see the end of the Zionist dream. We have 15 years and no more. We are coming toward the end of the State of Israel. —Professor Arnon Soffer, chair of geostrategy, University of Haifa
It is the year 2013. "Peace" with the Palestinians, the much discussed "two-state solution," is going nowhere, despite years of talk, activity and noise by the participants. This is because everybody continues to avoid the awkward issue at the core of Israel's anxiety, the proverbial elephant in the room, which no Israeli government will publicly acknowledge: Israel as a "Jewish state" cannot survive unless she ethnically cleanses herself of her minority Palestinian population. The "two-state solution" will not solve this problem for the Israelis, since it provides the Arabs with their Palestinian state but leaves Israel with only a temporary Jewish majority which, in time, will dissolve in a sea of rapidly reproducing Israeli-Arab citizens. To survive as a Jewish state, Israel will need to get rid of her Arabs, but in this politically correct day and age, no state can openly acknowledge that it "doesn't want" a minority, any minority, let alone one that constitutes over 20 percent of its citizenry. That attitude went out of fashion, at least publicly, with the Führer and his cohorts. So, Israelis continue to play the slow game of "peace talks," a game they have learned to play very well, as they grapple with how to solve their Arab minority problem.
Caesarea, Israel 6:30 p.m., Tuesday, September 3
It is early September as Mordechai Peled, Israel's defense minister, sits on the terrace of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's luxury villa in Caesarea, waiting for the rest of the group to assemble. At the close of an uncharacteristically leisurely day for Peled, he gazes out at the sun setting over the majestic Roman aqueduct that runs down to the Mediterranean Sea in front of him, pondering what he and the others are about to discuss. The prime minister had asked him to drop by his villa to informally review Operation King David, a secret plan to secure the future of the State of Israel, with two other of Netanyahu's close advisors. The plan is set to be presented tomorrow to the Security Cabinet, and Netanyahu wants to make sure he has all bases covered before that critical meeting.
Peled, a short, stocky man in his early seventies, nicknamed "the penguin" by friends, is a tough former general known for his phenomenal intellect and just as phenomenal lack of charm. He is a Zionist of the "muscular" persuasion, a fervent believer in the concept of the "new Jew," the strong, powerful and, if necessary, brutal Jew who can and will fight rather than suffer quietly like the frightened and intimidated caricature of the Jew in European history. He is a cynic, a realist who has no time for idealists who search for the "inner good" in their fellow man. He knows that man, despite having acquired a thin veneer of civility over the course of centuries of progress and prosperity, remains at his core an animal, a savage, with his raw instincts of greed, bigotry and cruelty still firmly intact. Peled is, after all, a student of history, not the history of textbooks but that of the raw, painful emotions belonging to one who is but a generation beyond the Holocaust.
Born to a Polish woman who escaped Nazi Europe and who had lost her family at Auschwitz, Peled remains outraged that gentiles still fail to grasp the immense fear and paranoia that Jewish people feel about the world around them. After all, two thousand years of pogroms in Christendom had culminated for Jews in a Holocaust at the epicenter of "enlightened" Western civilization. It had been led by the nation of Goethe, Hegel and Mendelssohn, where Jews thought they had finally achieved the security of complete assimilation. This was not a pogrom of wild ignorant mobs let loose by events beyond anyone's control. This was genocide carried out in an organized, systematic, industrial manner by their fellow Europeans.
Meanwhile, the Americans, the British and the rest of the "civilized" world, while making sympathetic noises, did little but close their doors to desperate Jewish emigrants. After the war, it served everybody's purpose, including that of a politically opportunistic Israel, to blame everything exclusively on Hitler and his fellow Nazis. But Zionists like Peled knew better. They knew that the Holocaust succeeded thanks to the acquiescence and even active assistance of vast swaths of the European populace. After the war, when the horror was exposed in all of its revolting detail, Europeans reacted by colluding in a mass breakout of collective amnesia and silence. As a result, the Peleds of this world are no longer in a mood to take the goodwill of their fellow humans on faith. This planet they now know is a jungle: the strong survive and the weak don't; it's as brutally simple as that. For Peled, the Zionist has to take Jewish destiny into his own hands, the strong hands of the new Jew: a mighty, militarized and aggressive Jew, not the meek, pathetic figure that shuffled quietly to his death in the concentration camps of Europe.
While U.S. neoconservatives continue to espouse militaristic solutions to political problems, the vast majority of Western elites continue to believe that in this post-cold-war era reasonable solutions to all major political problems can be found. A world of multilateralism, global trade, human rights and new media is, they are convinced, a world rich in possibilities for the betterment of man. There is no political problem, they believe, that can't ultimately be solved in a civilized, mature manner within the overall structure of a modern globalized system of law and order. This naïveté, born out of the current unprecedented era of postwar global peace and prosperity, colors their thinking, particularly that of the American centrists and liberal elites, and hence it has to be humored.
The Zionists, while having paid lip service to those comfortable illusions, know otherwise. They are victims and students of man's long, painful and bloody history. They know that the game with the Palestinians can only be a zero-sum game. Only one people will ultimately survive in historic Palestine, known to them as Eretz Israel, and Zionists like Peled are here to make damned sure it is the Jews who do the surviving.
Peled arrived early for the meeting at Netanyahu's villa, and for the past half-hour he has been enjoying the mild late-summer weather, gathering his thoughts amid a refreshing salty breeze. He hears the other two men being welcomed inside. The prime minister has invited, in addition to Peled, David Halevy, Netanyahu's unofficial senior advisor and confidant, and Professor Ariel Safran, chairman of the history department at Hebrew University and Israel's paramount expert on Palestinian demographics. Netanyahu greets the men in the high-ceilinged foyer as Efraim, the butler, takes their jackets.
Halevy, well into his seventies, is a Zionist of the polished school—urbane, sophisticated and highly attuned to Western elite opinion. Born to a father who was a don at Cambridge and a mother who hailed from an aristocratic German Jewish banking family, he was educated at Eton and went on to earn a degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford. Thereafter, bewitched by the dream of Zionism being realized in Palestine, he decided to immigrate to a newly created Israel and join a kibbutz, where he met his wife and settled down. His career had taken him through the ranks of the Mossad, until he became its head of European operations; then he made a jump into politics as a member of the Knesset for the Likud; and he finally capped a brilliant career as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. Halevy's time in New York had introduced him to America's Jewish elite, an experience that forged his strong ties with and provided him invaluable insight into the views of Israel's most important diaspora community. Today, as a wise senior statesman, his ego is well buttressed by his widely recognized status as Netanyahu's "consigliere."
Professor Ariel Safran is a giant in two ways: first, within the Israeli academic establishment, where his apocalyptic views on Israel's demographic dilemma were first developed, and second, because he is physically imposing and grossly overweight. A native-born Sabra, he singlehandedly created the field of Israeli demographic studies by spending his career modeling the future trends of Israel's Jewish and Arab populations. He has carefully studied reproduction rates and currents within these different segments of Israel's population, and he continues to game different scenarios in an effort to determine how Israel can retain a Jewish majority and ensure that she ultimately does not become inundated by the sea of Arabs around and among her.
Safran is somewhat frazzled and excuses himself to use the restroom, where he attempts to both gather his composure and smooth the creases in his dark linen shirt. Having traveled to Caesarea from his farm in the Negev, Safran feels dry and dusty, stinking of cigarette smoke.
Netanyahu and Halevy wait together in the foyer for Safran's return from the lavatory. David steals a glance at his well-built friend who still manages, in his sixties, to maintain the physique and arrogant posture of the elite paratrooper he once was. Halevy is, of course, very well acquainted with the background and views of the man standing with him. Netanyahu is a Zionist of the Jabotinsky School, which adheres to the "iron wall" ideology of its namesake, who, as early as the 1920s, harbored no illusions that the Arab majority in Palestine would voluntarily accept a Jewish state in their land. For Jabotinsky, a Jewish state in Palestine could only be established by brute force, and it would only survive and be able to prosper behind an iron wall of military strength that Arabs could never pierce. He had no illusions that a consensual arrangement could ever be reached with an indigenous population to give up its country to foreign colonizers. And indeed, this outlook had permeated Netanyahu's mission in life. His father Ben-Zion had after all been a Jabotinsky disciple. And Netanyahu himself is now determined to finally put in place that very iron wall his idol had insisted on, to ensure the future of his people as uncontested owners of their "ancestral land."
Upon Safran's reemergence, Netanyahu walks both men to the terrace, and the three take their seats near Peled. These members of Israel's ruling class, its self-confident elite, are now here to discuss their country's survival, which they recognize is seriously in doubt. The swagger—arrogance, even—that they often project onto the world stage hides a deep, nagging unease that, every so often, makes them break out in a cold sweat of fear. Israel, they all continue to worry, will not be able to survive as a "Jewish state."
Efraim takes their orders and, after a brief delay inside, reenters the terrace with a tray of fruit and drinks. Halevy admires the view—and good-naturedly teases Netanyahu about living in Israel's most exclusive residential community. "Ben-Gurion must be rolling over in his grave," he jokes. "Here you are the leader of a country created by socialists, yet you get away with living in exclusive luxury, neighbor to a Russian billionaire and the Baron de Rothschild. Zionists invented the kibbutz, but you patronize a California-style gated community of millionaires."
Netanyahu takes a sip of his beer and responds to Halevy's jibe. "Well, we have all come a long way." He smiles awkwardly. "After all, Israel has certainly come a long way!" The men then marvel at Israel's great progress since the dream of a Jewish state was born in 1897 at the first Zionist Congress in Basel. It was to become a reality, in Palestine, only fifty years later, and now Israel has made herself into a military, economic and technological power with vast global influence. This achievement is nothing short of miraculous—so miraculous, they chuckle, that even to some secular Zionists it has become an article of faith that Zionism is in the miracle business. For the men assembled, however, faith in miracles is a luxury they are not willing to bet on.
Their nightmare is Palestinian population growth, that "cancer" rapidly spreading among them, which Professor Safran has publicly argued will have to be expunged if their young state is ever to have a chance at survival. "Let me lay out the parameters of the demographic disaster that awaits us," Safran begins, once setting down his coffee and lighting a cigarette. "Today, 20 percent of Israel's seven million citizens are the descendants of the Palestinian Arabs who managed to avoid being expelled in the 1948 war. They were able to do this on account of a major strategic mistake that Ben-Gurion made when he prematurely stopped the 1948 War of Independence and thus failed to finish the job of ejecting all the indigenous Arabs from Eretz Israel. He got cold feet and did not want to upset the Great Powers at that time. We have been paying the price for that huge mistake ever since. In fact, not only have those Arabs remained in Israel, but we have also had to give them Israeli citizenship and hence `the vote.' These `Israeli-Arabs' are now reproducing at double the rate of Israeli Jews, and they are consequently projected to exceed a third of our population by 2025."
Now, within his comfort zone of theory, statistics and analysis, Safran's previous edginess is gone. He continues, "Remember that we insist on defining Israel as the `Jewish state.' By that definition, then, the Arabs among us are obviously disenfranchised. After all, our national anthem mentions only Jews, the law of return applies only to Jews, and even our Independence Day celebrates our victory over the Arabs." The three other men nod in recognition. "All our important leaders are Jewish, every single president, prime minister," he cocks his head at Netanyahu, "key cabinet minister and general," gesturing with his cigarette in Peled's direction, "is and has always been a Jew. We have never even bothered to elect or appoint a token Arab to any of these key positions. This in a democracy that is supposed to guarantee all its citizens equal rights. This reinforces the Israeli-Arab's deep sense of bitterness and anger at being treated as an alien in his land. Now, history teaches us that such feelings are inevitable with a defeated people. We must realize that unless such people are uprooted or annihilated, they never forget. In their closed ethnic communities, they preserve and reinforce this sense of anger and humiliation—and they nurture their fury until it explodes. Such minorities can and do cause state breakdowns. It is only a matter of time. We can't ignore this time bomb within us.
"Even today," Safran goes on, "Arabs constitute over 30 percent of the zero-to-nine-year age group in this country. That is the immediate future staring us in the face. Let me also remind you gentlemen that these figures are actually worse than they seem, since they conceal a painful fact, namely that close to a million Israelis now live abroad, mainly in the U.S. and Europe. We have thirty thousand Israelis living in Berlin. For God's sake, Berlin! Don't our people have any shame? What's more, the trend is growing, as many European governments, presumably to assuage their guilt about their role in history, are now presenting Israelis with residence and citizenship on a silver platter. To make matters worse, those that emigrate are inevitably the best educated and most ambitious, since such people are by nature the most mobile and can most easily find jobs and resettle abroad. Finally, we can hardly rely on fresh Jewish immigration into Israel, because Jews, in recent decades, have overwhelmingly voted with their feet and gone to America or Europe instead of Israel, when given a choice.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Arabian War Gamesby Ali al Shihabi Copyright © 2012 by Ali al Shihabi. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
