Except for the Balfour Declaaration the Levant as a whole would probably have ended up under French rule after WWI and then become part of “Greater Syria” which is what the Syrians have been angling for since WWII or even earlier. But they would hardly have been left in peace. Egypt has long had aspirations to control the Levant. These actually go back thousands of years, but in modern times Egypt invaded the Levant to conquer it from the Turks in 1831. The war lasted over ten years and virtually depopulated Palestine. The only reason the Egyptians lost was that the British stepped in to support the Turks.

So it’s likely that a Levant without a Jewish state would have seen a great intra-Arab war soon after WWII. Even in their war against Israel the Arab states were mostly interested in what land they could grab for themselves. Since most Arab wars are exercises in the competitive slaughter of civilians (see the Lebanese and Yemeni civil wars, among others) it’s probable that such a war would have depopulated, either from massacre of refugees, what the Arabs optimistically call Palestine today.

It seems to me that Palestine is developing into a thugocracy. Maybe that’s because the so many years of war, occupation, and refugee status didn’t permit the development of functioning political institutions. But I don’t know if those institutions couldn’t have developed, anyway, under the aegis of Arab governments, the PLO, UNWRA, or the EU. And didn’t the Jews in Palestine develop institutions before statehood, a kind of proto-state referred to as the Yishuv?

What we’re seeing here is a government functioning on corruption and violence: like Sicily, but a Sicily with ideological pretensions.

I wonder if things in Palestine will ever get better. Many say that yesterday’s guerillas are tomorrow’s new Third World leaders. But many TW governments emerging after independence were themselves steeped in violence and corruption.

And I can think of two cases where liberation militias sunk into criminality. The Mafia in Sicily was originally known as the Black Hand. I understand that it started out as a guerilla force against the Spanish, who occupied Sicily for centuries. And I recently learned that the criminal “triads” of southern China had their beginnings in the 17th century, when they were loyalists to the Ming dynasty fighting against the establishment of the Qing dynasty.

I think that Palestine would have followed, and will follow, the path of a lot of Third World countries with no democratic traditions and weak civil societies: always hovering between dictatorship and civil war, with at best only a facade of democratic political institutions.

chsw

The world will indeed be a better place.