Israel's Arab and Muslim foes have been relegated to an area barely more than a hundred times Israel's size, and they feel the squeeze.
Jerusalem, March 9 - An ethnic cohort composing the overwhelming majority of the Middle East's demographics has managed to convince Western media and politicians that in fact they constitute the weaker party in a struggle to undo Jewish sovereignty on a sliver of land, where a minuscule ethnicity accounting for less than three percent of the 250 million people in the general vicinity of the Levant have managed to reestablish their ancient sovereignty after centuries of majority conquest and occupation.
Muslims, who represent more than nine tenths of the region's population and exerted control over most of it since the eighth century, insist the odds have always been stacked against them in their fight to defeat Zionism, just as they were hopelessly outnumbered, outgunned, and outfunded in 1948 when a few thousand Holocaust survivors held off seven invading Arab armies plus local bands of irregular troops: six hundred thousand Jews in nascent Israel vs. millions of Arabs posed an obstacle the Arabs could not hope to overcome, with the Jews facing an arms embargo and their inland communities blockaded. To make the situation worse, in the decades prior to the 1948 war, British Mandate authorities barred Jews from weapons and military training while showing no such concern for the welfare of Palestine's Arab residents, cementing a further disadvantage in place.
The people of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and others nearby, with assistance from more distant places such as Pakistan, face an uphill battle in their campaign to oust Jewish rule from Israel, which, if the reckoning includes what it has not formally annexed but still controls, occupies a whopping area about the size of New Jersey whereas its Arab and Muslim foes have been relegated to an area barely more than a hundred times that, and they feel the squeeze.
Moreover, the areas that the Jews control long remained blessedly free of accessible natural resources to clutter their economy, whereas many of its neighbors already had to grapple with oil and natural gas deposits more than a century ago, resources that force the governments and citizens to deal with large infusions of foreign currency reserves and the disposition of such funds ever since, placing the Arab countries at a further disadvantage.
Experts believe the hopelessness of the anti-Zionist endeavor in demographic and historic terms plays a significant part in the current rapprochement between the Jewish State and several of its once-hostile neighbors.