Fasten Your Seatbelt The landscape was dominated by sand, debris, barefoot children and defeated adults. And this was the "capital" of the Gaza Strip. We didn't even go into the refugee camps. In Jericho, a couple of months after the Oslo Accord was signed, I went into the Akbat Jaber refugee camp. With its medieval-looking hovels, Akbat Jaber makes Gaza City look like a model of ur- ban renewal. After hearing from one and all that "peace" had failed to change their lives one whit, I asked the opinion of a bearded man in a white robe. A Hamas supporter, he spoke good Hebrew, and his response soon turned into a ha- rangue. By the time he was miming how he planned to slice open my belly, say- ing, "I won't cut in small slices like Arafat or Sadat, I'll cut in big slices," a lively crowd had gathered. A young man on a nearby rooftop was inspired to throw a rock at my car, and my PLO escorts and I knew it was time to get out of there. Have things improved? Not at all. Since the peace accord was signed, the income of Gazans has gone down at least 25 percent, mainly because most of those who used to work in Israel are now barred from crossing the Green Line, due to the frequent terrorist attacks. But even if computers ever replace sub- machine guns in the territories, even if the Palestinians ever settle down and get their economy on track, it will always be dwarfed by Israel's. Living next to the prosperous Jews, the Palestinians' re- sentment will only become sharper. The growing appeal of Islamic fun- damentalism, the insolubility of the Jerusalem issue, the unlikelihood of up- rooting tens of thousands of Jewish set- tlers, and the impossibility of safely "separating" from the Palestinians or sup- pressing them by force — all these are obstacles to peace. Real bad ones. They don't point to a continuation of the sta- tus quo but to its further deterioration. The Palestinian Authority's Bureau of Statistics places the current Arab pop- < ulation in the West Bank and Gaza at roughly 2.5 million, slightly higher than most Israeli estimates. The bureau's "low" projection for the year 2012 — figuring on zero immigration from the Palestinian Diaspora — is 4.3 million. How we're going to deal with that is any- body's guess, but it looks like we'll be tangling with a hostile people, and con- tending with terror, for a good long while. Some might call all these predictions a nightmare scenario. Personally, I don't think they're particularly original. All these observations — that the country is growing frighteningly overcrowded and that Israelis don't know how to cope with it, that the individual's connection to the land and people is dissipating, that a lot of Israelis are getting further ahead and a lot of others are falling further behind, that peace is unlikely in our time — these are not uncommon notions here at all. And I want to stress that economic growth has brought all sorts of im- provements to the society, and there will be more. In some ways, Israel will be a better country. An advancing economy will make for better educated individuals with greater scope, more worldly and industrious, more varied, curious and interesting. There may be wars ahead, but I don't think there will be catastrophic wars, because our weaponry is much more catastrophic than our enemies', and the military establishment, along with gov- ernments of both right and left, are de- termined to keep it that way. The chief menace will be terror. But terror or no terror, the Israeli people will still be around. It won't be Zionist fervor that keeps them here, but the same thing that keeps Canadians in Canada and Belgians in Belgium — it's home. In sum, we'll be more and more "normal" — self-absorbed, bourgeois, sophisti- cated, harried — almost identical to people in the West. Only we'll still be in the Middle East. ❑ Predictions From Four Experts Security A few years into the next millenium, Iran may have the nuclear bomb. Iraq, under Saddam Hussein or an eq 211y ambitious successor, will likely be free of international sanctions and will have begun rebuilding its forces. Syria will have upgraded its chemical weapons and advanced toward nuclear capability, beyond its current basic research. Even if there is peace with Syria, the Middle East will not be an appreciably safer place for Israel, predicted Ze'ev Eytan, an expert on regional military affairs at Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Israel, however, will still be stronger than all Arab states combined, Mr. Eytan said. It is focusing now on building up its intelligence — developing satellites and warning systems to detect enemy movements. In weaponry, the prime current project is the Arrow anti- missile missile, a joint U.S.-Israeli development. Any peace will be fragile, so Israel still will have to con- tend with the possibility of a multinational, armed coali- tion rising up against it, possibly under Syria's leadership, possibly under Iran's. "It's not enough to be able to look at the figures on paper and say 'Israel is stronger, therefore nobody will attack her,' " Mr. Eytan said. "Israel was stronger than all her enemies in 1967, but we still had the Six-Day War. It was the same in 1973, and we got the Yom Kippur War. Israel didn't do anything to Iraq in 1991 and was much the stronger, but still Saddam Hussein fired his missiles at Tel Aviv." So pass the ammunition and hope for the best. Religion 44 In another generation, the ultra-Orthodox, because of their high birthrate, will constitute half the population of Jerusalem. Israel's capital will be under their near-ab- solute political control. In national life, however, the Orthodox monopoly on civil religion — marriage, divorce, burial and determin- ing "Who Is A Jew" — will be broken. The Supreme Court, not the Knesset, is already seeing to that, said Daniel Tropper, director of Gesher (Bridge), an organization that promotes religious-secular understanding. But hold your applause. "Except for a few individual rabbis in the Conservative and Reform movements, I don't think these communities will have the spiritual force to provide the religious alternative that Israel so desperately needs," Mr. Tropper noted. In the short run, the Israeli secular and religious com- munities will grow even farther apart and more set in their ways. But at some later point, he predicted, both communities are going to start questioning their own directions. "We may begin seeing serious cracks in the haredi com- munity, which now seems so solitary and impervious. In order to protect themselves, they've become very extreme and narrow, and some of their youth are finding that hard to accept," said Mr. Tropper. "The secular community, for its part, has a spiritual void that it has not yet discovered. When they do, they will become more and more open to some sort of spiritual answer. This is a worldwide phenomenon that hasn't yet hit Israel, but it will," he continued. When these opposing camps find themselves in crisis, brought on by extremes of piety and impiety, they may begin to approach each other. "All religious, Zionist and traditional communities should realize that their real enemy is not one another," Mr. Tropper said, "but the lowest common denominator brand of Western secu- larism that, with its domination of the media, threatens all of Israeli society." Water Israel's first desalination plant was scheduled to go into operation in 2010. Because of the rapid growth in pop- ulation exhausting water resources, the plant is now slat- ed for opening in 2005, probably in the port city of Ashdod. "There's no other answer for Israel except desalina- tion of Mediterranean Sea water. We're fast using up our fresh-water supplies, and recycling can only do so much," said Arnon Sofer, Haifa University geography profes- sor and one of Israel's premier water experts. Water plays a tremendous role in Middle East politics. Much of Israel's water comes from the Golan Heights and the West Bank. Giving up these territories, and rights to their water, would mean hastening Israel's need for mass-scale desalination, said Mr. Sofer. But as grievous as Israel's water shortage is, the neigh- boring Arab countries' is far, far worse. Their economies are undeveloped, so the extravagantly expensive desali- nation option is unfeasible for them. This is the case with the Palestinians, and with Syria, but much more so for Egypt. "Egypt is a lost cause. It has about 60 million people, and it just doesn't have the water to provide for them. If America doesn't give Egypt water, possibly in exchange for wheat or something else, then there's going to be another Khomeini there," Mr. Sofer predicted. Asked if he thought the competition for scarce water would bring about a Middle East war in the next genera- tion, he replied, "Water is never a reason for war, but it's always a good excuse for one." Israeli Arabs Israel's 900,000 Arab citizens are caught in a wedge. They are not accepted as equals in Israeli society nor as nationalistic Arabs by the Palestinians and Arab states. Since the intifada began in 1987, they've become much more politicized, strongly supporting the Palestinians' drive for a state, and stepping up their own battle for civic equality in Israel. Believing that they cannot and should not try to inte- grate fully into the Jewish state, some aspire to "cul- tural autonomy," including Arab control of Arab-sector Israeli schools, radio and television. Azmi Bishara, a leading Israeli Arab intellectual and professor of philosophy at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, is a chief proponent of cultural autonomy. He be- lieves that the coming decades will see greater economic and civic advancement for Israel's Arabs, but not full ac- ceptance, because this is a Jewish state and they are not Jews. "A Palestinian state will not necessarily make things better for Israeli Arabs. It might be counterproductive," Mr. Bishara added. "Many Israeli Arabs might [envy] a Palestinian state as a place where national aspirations are expressed, while here in Israel they have nothing to look for." He believes the Islamic movement has a limited politi- cal future here. "The movement does not have the illu- sion that it can attain power in the Jewish state, so it is more modest and pragmatic than Islamic movements in Arab countries." Also, the process of modernization that Arabs are undergoing in Israel should steer them away from poli- tical Islam. "This is not an indigenous modernization, but a forced, 'deformed' modernization, brought about by Israel's expropriation of the local Arabs' farmland, which turned them from farmers into workers," Mr. Bishara said. "With modernization comes the Israelization' of many Arabs, which is perverted as well, because they are losing their Arab identity without truly gaining a new one."