This guy almost always gives good talks.
I'll try to brief and summarize some of his ideas in the first half of his talk.
- Even the problems of Syria go away tomorrow, there is going to be a flood of refugees from the Arab states to Europe. There is a huge population increase and not enough jobs.
- Arabism - the idea that Arabs will unite together and that will be more important than states hasn't recovered since the 1967 War when Israel won in 6 days. Israel hasn't recovered from the win but that is discussed later.
- If Arabism is a failure, why go the political Islamist route instead of going for Marxism or other ideology?
Culture matters. The Arab world is big on tradition and resistant to change because they don't have the separation of religion and state, the Middle East is a society where people are members of a group, not individuals, reform has almost always been imposed from the top down. It hasn't been organic and grown from the people.
The consequence of recent history - disintegration of some Arab states, the rise of Iran's power and influence
Israel's founding fathers were paranoid about Arab states aligning with USSR and becoming and overwhelmingly powerful conventional force so Israel developed nuclear weapons. But the bigger threat to Israel today comes from non-state actor and Iran. Israel now has common interests to align with Arab states to deal with Iran or its proxies or groups like ISIS.
And that was just the first half
I'll try to brief and summarize some of his ideas in the first half of his talk.
- Even the problems of Syria go away tomorrow, there is going to be a flood of refugees from the Arab states to Europe. There is a huge population increase and not enough jobs.
- Arabism - the idea that Arabs will unite together and that will be more important than states hasn't recovered since the 1967 War when Israel won in 6 days. Israel hasn't recovered from the win but that is discussed later.
- If Arabism is a failure, why go the political Islamist route instead of going for Marxism or other ideology?
Culture matters. The Arab world is big on tradition and resistant to change because they don't have the separation of religion and state, the Middle East is a society where people are members of a group, not individuals, reform has almost always been imposed from the top down. It hasn't been organic and grown from the people.
The consequence of recent history - disintegration of some Arab states, the rise of Iran's power and influence
Israel's founding fathers were paranoid about Arab states aligning with USSR and becoming and overwhelmingly powerful conventional force so Israel developed nuclear weapons. But the bigger threat to Israel today comes from non-state actor and Iran. Israel now has common interests to align with Arab states to deal with Iran or its proxies or groups like ISIS.
And that was just the first half
