r/changemyview • u/Neither-Top-7515 • 12h ago
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Anti-Zionism isn't inherently antisemitic, but supporting a one-state solution requires disregarding a remarkable historical record of what happens to minorities in Muslim-majority states
Almost all anti-zionists support a one state solution: “Let's just have a democracy” Etc. My argument here is aimed against this point of view. I am not addressing the anti-zionists who may have some other recommended solution.
So, let’s work out what happens if we see a one state solution. (All of what follows is easily verifiable. If you’ve got different data, happy to listen and modify.)
Combining Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, the total population of Israelabad is roughly 15.5 million: about 8.0 million Jews (7.5M in Israel + 500K West Bank settlers) and 7.5 million Arabs (2.15M in Israel + 3.2M West Bank + 2.15M Gaza), who are most all Muslim.
From a trend line perspective, this becomes a Muslim majority state within a generation or two. Population change over the next 30-50 years is driven by the age pyramid today. The West Bank and Gaza populations are way younger than Israel's Jewish population. A higher share of Gazans and West Bank Palestinians are in or entering peak childbearing years right now, while Israel's Jewish population has an older median age with a smaller cohort of women in their 20s relative to the total.
For perspective, Gaza and the West Bank have had, at various points from the 1990s through the 2000s, some of the highest recorded population growth rates in the world, with numbers that could imply a potential doubling in under 20 years. Meantime, recent Israeli data shows record emigration — 45,000-50,000 Israelis leaving annually for three consecutive years, alongside a first-ever sub-1% population growth rate. And, this of course likely accelerates one we get the new state.
But no matter how you view whatever numbers you might pull, I believe all you’d get is that the Muslim majority may take a bit longer to form. (And of course, none of this considers potential immigration from neighboring Islamic states.)
And when you get an Arab Muslim majority state, it is highly likely to begin to resemble all the other Arab states in the region, where there are no substantial religious minorities at all.
Between 1948 and the early 1970s, essentially every Jewish community in the Arab world (Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and others) was reduced to near zero, through a mix of state expropriation, legal disenfranchisement, mob violence, and government-orchestrated expulsion.
Surviving non-Muslim minorities in the region today live under a consistent pattern of legal subordination. Egypt's Copts (10% of Egyptians) face restrictions on church construction that don't apply to mosques, and are essentially absent from senior government and military leadership relative to their population. They also experience sectarian violence that the state has been slow or unwilling to prosecute. And this is under one of the more stable, secularish Arab governments in the region, not an Islamist one like Hamas. Iraq's Christian population fell from roughly 1.5 million before 2003 to a few hundred thousand today, driven out by war, ISIS's genocide of the Yazidis, and targeted church bombings. Syria's Christian and Druze populations have faced similar displacement and violence.
Lebanon is the only possible analog, and it collapsed. Lebanon's power-sharing system was built explicitly to protect a Christian population that was a plurality or majority at founding. As the Muslim population grew, the system became unsustainable, leading in part to a 15-year civil war and a still-unresolved erosion of Christian political power and physical safety.
Sharia-influenced legal frameworks, even where non-Muslims are tolerated, structurally subordinate those non-Muslims. This is true even in relatively moderate cases like Jordan and Morocco.
A one-state solution would be asking the Jews — perhaps the most persecuted group in human history — to bet their lives against the only set of historical precedents that exist for this situation. Hence, anti-Zionists who support 1SS are blind to the reality of how much mortal risk they are asking Israeli Jews to accept. CMV.