It’s too late for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine

it’s perhaps not surprising that Israel’s best demographers foresee an increasingly religious Israel. The Haredim will account for 20 percent of the population by 2030, and between 27 percent and 41 percent in 2059, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.

Moreover, a comprehensive survey conducted on behalf of Germany’s Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Foundation, in cooperation with the Macro Center for Political Economics in Tel Aviv, of youth aged 15-18 and 21-24 suggest this age group is far more right wing than their parents. In particular, these young people are less tolerant of Palestinian-Israelis. When given a choice between an Israel that is more democratic and less Jewish or less democratic and more Jewish, they chose the latter.

Numerous polls show that a majority of Palestinian-Israelis want to remain citizens of Israel. However, religious Zionists believe that Palestinian-Israelis are hostile to Israel. Large majorities see Palestinian-Israelis, their fellow citizens, as a threat and would like to see the government push them to leave the country.

A changing army
Allied to the increasing propensity to religiosity among Israeli Jews are trends in the composition of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a change that raises questions about the reliability of the army.

The IDF is increasingly a religious army, recruited from the settler community in the West Bank.

The rate of settler recruitment to combat units in the IDF is 80 percent higher than the rest of country. In 2011, two-thirds of draftees from West Bank settlements served in combat units, compared with 40 percent from the rest of country.

As the Christian Science Monitor recently observed, “The percentage of officer cadets who are religious has grown tenfold since the early 1990s.” Ten years ago, Orthodox Jewish men accounted for 2.5 percent of military graduates. Today, that figure has grown to more than 25 percent.

In some combat units, Orthodox men now make up 50 percent of new combat officers — four times their share in the population. There are now entire units of religious combat soldiers, many of them based in West Bank settlements where an implicit alliance between some settler communities and the IDF are commonplace. These religious combat soldiers answer to hard-line rabbis who call for the establishment of a greater Israel that includes the West Bank. These changes are paralleled by a decline in the number of combat soldiers and officers coming from secular families.

Putting an agreement into