If there were no Israel

Edward Glick, guest opinion

While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is busy seeking a solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, is spending almost all his waking moments calling for Israel's destruction. The world's other Jew-haters spend nearly all their time hiding their politically incorrect anti-Semitism behind politically correct anti-Israelism.

So let's imagine that a genie makes Israel disappear and also makes all of us lose our memory of the "Zionist entity" and of the modern Jewish state.

What would an Israel-free Middle East be like?

For starters, the only democracy in the region will have vanished.

And since there would still be Arab hostility, dictatorship, cronyism, corruption, overpopulation and socioeconomic dislocation, Hamas, Hezbollah and the other Arab leaders would have to find a new scapegoat toward which to deflect the anger and despair of their people.

Palestine would still be as underdeveloped as are most of the Arab states, whose combined gross domestic product is less than that of Spain.

Their people saddled with one of the highest birthrates in the world, most Palestinians would still be unemployed and unemployable, partly because of the inability or unwillingness of their rulers to create viable institutions and infrastructures, and partly because there would no longer be an Israel for the Palestinians to work in.

East Jerusalem and the West Bank would be still ruled from Amman, the Gaza Strip would still be ruled from Cairo and the Golan Heights would still be ruled from Damascus. Syria would still be the de facto ruler of Lebanon and its Christian minority, and it would still be a threat to both Palestine and Jordan, which it considers to be part of southern Syria.

The Arab states without oil would still resent the Arab states that have oil -- and the wealth and power that flow from it. And water, always in short supply in the Middle East, would eventually become the most precious liquid in the region.

The animosity between the 85 percent of Muslims who are Sunnis and the 15 percent who are Shiites would not abate.

Egypt would still be persecuting its Coptic Christian minority. And Cairo, the capital of the only real nation-state in the Arab world, would still be vying with Baghdad, Damascus and Riyadh for the leadership of that world. The Kurds would still be pressing Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran for a state of their own, and the latter would still be refusing to give them one.

Iraq would still covet Kuwait, which it considers a renegade province. Iraq and Iran -- like their Babylonian and Persian forebears -- would still despise and occasionally go to war with each other. Both would still be seeking weapons of mass destruction, and Iran would probably have them.

Iran would still be run by the ayatollahs. And the United States, even under President Barack Obama, would still be facing the specter of an atomic, biological or chemical version of 9/11.

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, funded in no small amount by Saudi money, would still be trying to punish us for, among other transgressions, stationing our infidel soldiers -- especially our women soldiers -- in the land which contains Islam's sacred cities of Mecca and Medina.

Finally, even without a Jewish polity and without either a one-state or a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, there would still be at least 1.3 billion Muslims living on this planet. If only 1 percent of them are Islamists and jihadists, that means 13 million people who are hellbent on terrorizing infidels back to earlier centuries of real and imagined Islamic glory.

Edward Bernard Glick, a professor emeritus of political science at Temple University, is the author of "Between Israel and Death." He lives in Southwest Portland.