Slater, Autonomous Zones, and Israel

Submitted by Lowell Blackman (Israel), Jan 14, 2009 at 17:12

Given Europe's obsequiousness of late, Chris Slater's scenario, or "fourth outcome" is not as far-fetched as one may think. The problem that could rise from this state of affairs is this: although these "Muslim autonomous zones" or "Muslim microstates" will exclusively comprise populations of Muslims, nothing says that Muslims living outside and choosing to remain outside those "zones" will cast their lot in or assimilate with the Christian majority amongst whom they reside. Younger Muslims and the second and third generation of Muslims living amongst the Christian populace might look to those Muslim zones or entities with great pride, especially if the present practice of preaching jihad and loathing of the West and Christianity continue in European mosques. This will inevitably create an unstable situation, a "fifth column" of sorts, and who is to say that those Christian areas with considerable Muslim populations geographically bordering the Muslim entities might not demand an anschluss in the name of self-determination. What then? Will Europe cede even more territory?

(In the 1850s through the 1890s, a group of Christian Templars, who believed in the impending Second Coming, arrived from Germany and established colonies in the land of Israel in what is now Tel Aviv, Haifa, and up north in a town called Bethlehem of the Galilee. In the years after the area passed from Ottoman hands to the British Mandate, the settlements and populations grew, but by the third generation, the loyalty of the Templars now found its expression less in Jesus Christ and the Second Coming and more in the Third Reich and the Nazi Party. This became a problem for the British, so much so that during the Second World War, the British moved them en masse, trading them for British hostages held in Germany.)

I say that this is not so far-fetched because we, here in Israel, could well be facing a similar situation. If a Palestinian state comes into being, what is to say that Israeli Arabs living in areas adjacent to that Palestinian state - Umm al-Fahum and the Triangle, for example, and even large swaths of the Galilee - who identify with either or both the Palestinian or Islamist "struggle" against Israel and the "Zionist state" will not demand autonomy at first in the name of self-determination and then later, their own anschluss with the new state? In the wake of this, Israel will either have to relinquish more of its territory to avoid conflict or will have to make a radical decision to expel the Muslim populace from these border areas into the new Palestinian state. In the event of the latter, those former Arab areas will forever become Palestina Irredenta and grounds for continuing the conflict and the popular "armed struggle" will carry on. Since the "international community" has rarely shown its sympathies towards the State of Israel and its territorial integrity, it is possible that they will again support the Palestinians and call on Israel to surrender territory.

How similar scenarios will all play out in Europe is anyone's guess. The only Europeans capable of providing a harsh response to the creeping process of Islamization are, by and large, the nativists of the extreme right. The elites of Europe, left leaning and craven as they have become, still believe they can do business with the Muslim world and make lots of euros at it. The European civilization they have created and built up over centuries – both dark and light – does not seem uppermost on their mind as worthy of saving.

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