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By Root 1835 0

As a result, they are much more embracing of anti-market rhetoric and confiscatory policies. In the United States, most people have CD players and a garden, think of themselves as middle-class, and, at least outside our inner cities, believe at some level in the American Dream. For all these reasons, the possibility that there might someday arise within the United States, or for that matter in any of the Western nations, an antiwhite, anti-market ethnonationalist backlash is extraordinarily slim.

Indeed, precisely because American society is so wealthy overall, America has come to occupy the role of a starkly market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the rest of world. We are now the object of intense resentment, even hatred, spurred by globalization. But this is the subject of chapter 11.

CHAPTER 10

The Middle Eastern Cauldron

Israeli Jews as

a Regional Market-Dominant Minority

The events of September 11, 2001, brought home to Americans the reality of Islamic terrorism and the importance of the Middle East conflict to American interests. The roots of that conflict have been attributed to many sources: religious fundamentalism, “ancient” Arab-Israeli animosities, the dispossession of Palestinian land, the nature of Islam, repressive regimes in the Arab states, American support for those regimes based on our need for oil, and so on.

These explanations are all partially true. But they leave out a crucial dimension of the story: the galvanizing effect of globalization on ethnic conflict. In the Middle East as elsewhere, globalization has wildly disproportionately benefited an “outsider” market-dominant minority—in this case, the Israeli Jews—fueling ethnic resentment and hatred among a massive, demagogue-incited population that considers itself the “indigenous” “true owners of the land.” In the Middle East, however, this conflict occurs not at the national, but at the regional level.

Previously throughout this book I have focused on dynamics internal to nations: specifically, the danger, within individual countries, of sudden democratization in the presence of widespread poverty and a resented market-dominant minority. By contrast, the Arab-Israeli conflict spans a number of different countries, and the market-dominant minority is for the most part located in a separate sovereign jurisdiction. Moreover, the Middle East, with only a few exceptions (of which Israel is one), has so far been seemingly immune to democratization—and the United States notoriously lax in promoting it, particularly among our oil-rich Gulf allies.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is about as loaded and complex as any the world has seen, involving religion, land, geopolitics, colonization and decolonization issues, competing claims to self-determination, and much more. To suggest that the Arab-Israeli struggle is principally about economic disparities would be both absurd and offensive. In addition, it is difficult to disentangle Arab animosity toward Israeli Jews from a broader anti-Semitism or from antisecular, anti-Western hostility more generally. Nevertheless, among many other dynamics, the Arab-Israeli conflict—pitting the region’s 221 million, largely poor Arabs against Israel’s starkly more prosperous 5.2 million Jews

1 —is a classic example of an intensely popular, majority-supported ethnonationalist movement directed against a hated, market-dominant minority. But let’s back up a bit and look first at some of the individual countries in the region.

The Absence of Market-Dominant Minorities

in the Arab Countries of the Middle East

With a few possible exceptions, market-dominant minorities do not exist within particular countries in the Middle East. The ruling elites in the Arab states may be distinguishable in important respects from the poor masses they govern—for example, in their extreme wealth, their Western dress and orientation, or their relative religious moderation—but they are not perceived as ethnically distinct outsiders. Nor does Israel appear to have a market-dominant minority, although the Ashkenazim/Sephardim divide will