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CounterPunch
December
7, 2002
Understanding
the Existential Threat
Israel's Demographic Obsession
by WILL YOUMANS
When pundits and commentators declare that Israel's
war against the Palestinians is existential, they are correct
but not in the way they mean. The Israeli obsession with demography
demonstrates that Israel ideologically conceives of the Palestinians
existentially as threats--Palestinians are threats to the Zionist
vision just by being alive. Such numerical concern exhibits a
deep-seated fear of all Palestinians regardless of age, political
persuasion, and so on.
This obsession is binary and inverse:
they want more Jews and less Palestinians.
The Associated Press reported that the
newly revived Israel Council for Demography's mandate "is
to encourage Jewish households to have more children, using incentives
such as housing benefits and other government grants." This
government-funded enterprise is headed by Social Welfare Minister
Shlomo Benizri of the Orthodox Jewish Shas party. The council
actively discourages Jews "from abortion and intermarriage."
Besides governmental initiatives with
ethno-religious purity as their mission, the non-governmental
sector is teeming with demographic activism.
Academics in Israel wax on about the
Palestinians as a "demographic threat." Last January,
there was a major convention on "The Balance of National
Strength and Security in Israel" sponsored by leading academics.
Ha'aretz reported that:
"The speakers were Israel's foremost
political, defense and academic experts, and the 300 participants
were also high-profile people. As the chairman and guiding spirit
behind the convention, Dr. Uzi Arad, a former political advisor
to Benjamin Netanyahu, said, 'If you weren't there, it showed
you weren't in the major league.'"
That many brains came together to conclude
what most Israelis know and fear--there are too many Palestinians.
Indeed, Palestinians do have a very high
birth rate. The Gaza Strip has the highest rate of natural population
growth in the world: 4.4 per cent. However, Palestinians have
a very high death rate. Their health conditions under military
occupation are under constant bombardment. Israel deals with
the population explosion already: extrajudicial assassinations,
making sure to kill about ten Palestinians a day regularly, collective
punishment, home demolitions, and so on.
The Jerusalem-based Institute for Jewish
People Policy Planning recently completed a study on Jewish demographics.
As part of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, it received
government funding. The institute is chaired by former Mideast
peace negotiator and full-time Israeli propagandist Dennis Ross.
It declared that by 2020, Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza,
East Jerusalem and Israel proper will outnumber Jews. This was
not run-of-the-mill detached study, but was announced with some
alarm--in that circled-wagon kind of way.
According to the survey, the number of
Jews in the world is declining. As a result, the institute "convened
an emergency session" to address what it called the "'demographic
crisis,'" Ha'aretz reported. In the same article, the chairman
of the Jewish Agency, Sallai Meridor, stated that the "demographic
threat" from Palestinians inside Israel and the occupied
territories "'must certainly influence our borders policy.'"
This is about as clear a reduction of
the conflict as possible. To Israeli officials, a decrease in
the Jewish population is deemed a "demographic crisis,"
whereas when more Palestinians are born, even those with citizenship,
it is a "demographic threat." Can anyone really deny
that Israel's interest is to maintain ethno-religious purity?
Doesn't that blatantly contradict its democratic posturing?
I forgot! Maintaining the Jewish character
of Israel is actually the widely acknowledged goal of Israeli
and American policies. I forgot for a second that Israel was
granted an exemption from post-colonial values. Israeli officials
are living out their own 19th century imperial heyday, perhaps
because the European Jews most of Israel's leaders descend from
were excluded from the imperial splendor and colonial illogic
that made European powers so beautifully backwards.
Dr. Uzi Arad responded to allegations
that the abstract of the conference mentioned above advocated
the transfer of Palestinians. "The word 'transfer' has aggressive
connotations," he said, as if its "connotations"
reduce its applicability. Like most Israeli officials, he prefers
the softer, sanitizing vocabulary of power that makes occupied
into "disputed," settlement into "neighborhood,"
ethnic cleansing into "transfer," resistance into "terrorism,"
and utter domination into "peace."
Israeli officials follow a long-line
of purveyors of colonial doublespeak. One such famous mantra
that was due for retirement ages ago finds the oppressor claiming
that the oppression is actually a favor for the oppressed. To
demonstrate, Dr. Arad justifies expelling Palestinians with the
recycled colonial line about civilizing the natives who are unable
to care for themselves:
"The Palestinians have made a decision
that they want the highest rate of natural population growth
in the world, but they don't have the means to support it. They
are all crowded together in a tiny area. So what should those
who are really interested in their welfare do? Leaving them in
the Gaza Strip means sentencing them to a life of misery. If
you object to moving them elsewhere only because it looks like
transfer, you are basically confining them to a concentration
camp. Should a humanitarian solution be turned down only because
of what it looks like to some people?"
Well it depends where they are moved
to. Surely, the good doctor does not have in mind their ancestral
homes, which now are either inhabited by Jewish Israelis, or
have been destroyed and planted over with trees in one of Israel's
many famous environmentalist campaigns--a similar brand of Israeli
humanitarianism towards the Palestinians.
His first point about a Palestinian "decision"
to have a high birth rate sounds like a conspiracy theory (picture
a smoke-filled room with a cabal of hijab-wearing grandmothers
sitting around a table with charts and tables everywhere).
Demography so worries Israeli officials
that Ehud Barak used it to justify a two-state solution, or more
aptly, one-and-half-states. He wanted the Palestinians to have
a half-state in which they could practice their half-sovereignty
to give Israel full security. With this, Israel could retain
a Jewish majority and its cheerful democratic pretensions. Since
those borders are a lost fiction even through the peace processes'
(<R.I.P>.) rosy lens, it leaves an undemocratic Israel
where 3.5 million Palestinians live under its rule as legally
and administratively-defined threats, non-humans devoid of basic
rights, such as the freedom of mobility.
Even Sallai Meridor, the Jewish Agency
head, is shifting positions as a result of this new threat. He
was a greater Israel advocate. He held that Israel proper rightfully
included the West Bank, Gaza, and possibly more. Now, he is discussing
borders for the same reason Barak argues.
When I give talks to high school students,
I merely present an aggregate demographic picture of the history
of Palestine/Israel since it really says everything. I tell them
that in 1890 the population of Palestine was 8% Jews. One hundred
years later, it was 55%. These numbers are not enough to understand
what transpired to give rise to the Jewish state, so I tell them
that Israel's founders destroyed over 453 Palestinian towns and
villages and exiled 800,000 Palestinians. Now, there are more
than 4 million Palestinian refugees. At that point nothing else
needs to be said.
Critics will dismiss this as a gross
simplification. However, there can be no doubt that the Israeli
officials who worry about demography see it the same way. Meridor
commented, "we cannot concede on the Palestinian right of
return issue. And particularly, we must increase immigration.
That is a vital need for Israel, like water in the faucet."
With his typical smarm, Dennis Ross said, "if Israel wants
to remain the center of the Jewish people, it must certainly
remain a Jewish and democratic state."
What can the prospects for peace really
be if Israeli officials consider the Palestinians inherently
antithetical to the state and political order? That dooms the
Palestinians to enemy status just by living. Israel's security
imperative is impossible short of the vanishing of the Palestinian
existence. Zionism's leading proponents never did and still do
not see the land as a pie different parties can share. For them,
it is about maintaining the ethno-religious purity of the power
structure. Power thus cannot and will not be shared with the
demographic threat.
The demographic transformations of that
land over the past century tell the story. Short-term, dramatic
changes in demography usually happen through and are maintained
by force, and the calculated application of it. For Israel's
founders, it was about importing a Jewish character to a land
that had another distinct character (plus highly visible minorities
of diverse backgrounds). This kind of replacement by its very
nature requires violence for its success. This was not about
simple peaceful immigration; it was about changing the ethno-religious
composition of a land through power. Just as Israel's founders
were more than willing to use might to achieve a demographic
goal, so are its leaders today.
Will Youmans
is a third year law student at UC-Berkeley. Contact him at youmans@boalthall.berkeley.edu
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