SMALL-NATION PERIL
THE population of Israel is about 10 million. This represents nearly half of the world’s Jewish people. The founding idea of modern Israel was to offer a sanctuary for Jews in their biblical home in the Middle East, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s mass murder of 6 million Jews.
Yet, 78 years after the Holocaust, anti-Israel protesters throughout the Middle East, the great cities of the Western world and iconic American universities chant death threats and “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.” Their signature slogan is shorthand for the erasure of the Jewish state and everyone in it.
There would currently be zero chance that Jews could live peaceably under any current Middle Eastern government. In the postwar era, nearly a million Jews were persecuted, ethnically cleansed and forcibly expelled from all the major Arab countries — Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria and Yemen — despite hundreds of years of residence.
Anti-Israel hatred still remains a staple in most of the nearly 500million-person Arab world, and indeed is commonplace among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.
And Israel is only one of a number of small, vulnerable states. Most of them are in the volatile Eastern Mediterranean and Mideast. All are surrounded by hostile neighbors.
The others have also suffered a long history of persecution and periodic genocide — catastrophes that are not necessarily permanently relegated to their ancient pasts.
Bitter proxy fighting between Armenianand Azerbaijan-allied forces in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh corridor recently ended with the defeat of Armenian supported forces. As a result, shortly before the Hamas massacre of Jews on Oct. 7, some 120,000 Christian ethnic Armenians were expelled from the region by Muslim and Turkishspeaking Azerbaijan.
This current ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh comes a little more than a century after the Turkish genocide of Armenians that led to more than 1 million people being driven out of their ancestral homes and slaughtered.
Christian Armenia, with only 3 million inhabitants, is even smaller than Israel. And it is nearly surrounded by hostile Muslim states.
As in the case of Israel, the world mostly either ignores the old, familiar brutal scenario, now recurring with the same aggressive players — or does not care.
Christian Greece — a NATO and European Union member — also is similar to Israel in being relatively small, with a population of 10.5 million. Roughly a century ago, Turkish forces ethnically cleansed Greeks from ancient Ionia and its capital of Smyrna, a homeland of Greek peoples for millennia.
Like Armenia, it shares a border with its historical aggressor Turkey.
Greek islands off the coast of Asia minor are currently subject to constant overflights by Turkish military jets. To Greece’s north are the historically volatile Balkans.
Across the Mediterranean lie a number of often violent and unstable North African nations, the frequent source of massive, destabilizing illegal immigration.
And all these small nations’ vulnerabilities are neither abstract theory, nor ancient history. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example, has recently weighed in on the tensions currently buffeting them all.
With apprehensions rising over Turkish violations of Greek air space in the Aegean, Erdogan has threatened to send a shower of missiles into Athens. He also has ominously weighed in on the Oct. 7 massacres and the Israeli response to it: “We will tell the whole world that Israel is a war criminal.”
In all these cases, small and vulnerable countries hold transparent elections and ensure individual rights — in stark contrast to their larger and more aggressive neighbors. Their very continued existences hinge on Western alliances and support — from the European Union, NATO and especially the United States.
In the past, they all suffered catastrophes because they differed from their neighbors in ethnicity, religion and history — and were seen as either expendable or irrelevant to their supposed allies and patrons in the West. If we are not careful, what supposedly cannot happen again most surely will.