by Paul Morland
you can give up on all other problems. You can give up on nuclear disarmament, you can give up on ever winning a war against terror, you can give it up. You can give up any hope of our faiths ever working really amicably and in a friendly way together. This, this, this is the problem, and it is in our hands.
This suggestion, highly questionable at the time, came to look even more difficult to justify in the following year when strife swept through the wider Middle East.57
There are several reasons for the disproportionate focus this conflict receives, at least in the West. One is that the story of the Zionist enterprise is intimately bound up with European history, given that the Zionist movement was at first a movement of European Jews responding to anti-Semitism in Europe. A second is that, for so long, the regimes across the region seemed to have their societies within their grip and in many countries very little seemed to be happening politically, throwing the focus on the question of Israel and Palestine. Third, the conflict is often seen as one between people of profoundly different cultures and origins, which is always easier for Western consumers of the news media to grasp–or to think they grasp–than conflicts, say, between Sunnis and Shias or Druze and Maronites. Finally, on a more cynical but perhaps realistic note, it was pleasanter to report on a scuffle on the West Bank from the comfort of the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, or to take a short trip from there down to the border in Gaza, than to make the effort of reporting the civil war in Yemen in the early 1960s or to send back news from the bloody and dangerous front line between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s–the media have been able to operate more freely here than in other parts of the region.
The conflict, first between Israel and its neighbours, then increasingly between Israelis and Palestinians, was always modest in terms of casualties when compared to others. Nevertheless, it had the tendency to capture front pages in the West in a way that far bloodier conflicts in the region never could. The best estimate is that around 50,000 have died in conflicts related to Israel since 1950, roughly in a ratio of two Arabs to one Israeli; deaths of Muslims in the Israel–Palestine conflict represent, at 1%, a small fraction of total Muslim deaths in conflict since the middle of the twentieth century even before the current outbreak of bloodshed in Syria, Libya and Yemen.58 Nevertheless, for many this has been the Middle East conflict.
With the revolutions and strife in Egypt, civil breakdown in Libya and civil wars and the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, the Israel–Palestine conflict has been somewhat overshadowed. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile for our purposes to understand that conflict because, as has been argued extensively elsewhere, it is one which, more than most, has had demography at its heart.59 This can be seen from three angles, namely the great influx of Jews into Mandate Palestine and then Israel, the birth rates of Jews and Palestinians, and the fate of the territories captured by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967.
The state of Israel would not exist without the Jewish immigration which has been attracted, in ever larger waves, first to Ottoman Palestine, then to Palestine under the British Mandate, and, since 1948, to the state of Israel itself. There has been both a ‘push’ and a ‘pull’ aspect to this population movement–both the attraction of Zionism and the land of Israel as a homeland and the impulsion of anti-Semitism and persecution in the lands from which Jews have emigrated. Before the First World War there were around 60,000 Jews in Palestine, some recent Zionist immigrants, some the descendants of small waves of religious Jewish migration over the centuries. Many were displaced by the war but, under the umbrella of the Balfour Declaration, the Treaty of Lausanne and the British Mandate, the Yishuv or Jewish community in Palestine reconstituted itself. Between the wars it experienced waves of immigration first from communities in eastern Europe and then, after 1933, from Jews escaping Nazi persecution in Germany. In 1925 there were over 30,000 Jewish immigrants, in 1935 there were over 60,000, these representing the two peak years of the interwar waves.60
At this point a word must be said about the Holocaust, the Jewish tragedy which, from a demographic angle, is an exception to the rule that wars and disasters cannot in the modern era fundamentally reverse the human tide. We have seen how the European population kept growing through the decade of the First World War, albeit more moderately than previously, and how despite the man-made famines and persecutions of Stalin and Mao, Russian and Chinese numbers kept growing. By contrast, where a relatively small population is singled out for annihilation by an efficient executioner, the demographic impact can be devastating. In 1939 there were 9.5 million Jews in Europe; by 1945 there were 3.8 million.61 Globally, Jewish numbers are still below those of the pre-Holocaust era, and as a share of world population, Jews have fallen from around 1 in 150 people to around 1 in 750.
Despite a shift in British policy and efforts to restrict Jewish immigration in the face of increasing Jewish desperation but growing Arab opposition, the Jewish population in British Mandate Palestine had by 1948 grown tenfold from its post-First World War level. Even in the face of a war for its survival, newly born Israel prioritised immigration and within its first five years of existence it had more than doubled its Jewish population.62 The initial wave came from the displaced persons camps of Europe, then from the Arab lands where Jews suffered discrimination, persecution and in some cases expulsion. Today in Morocco the number of Jews who remain is perhaps 1% of its peak level in the 1940s. In many Arab countries which once had tens or hundreds of thousands of Jews whose communities dated back well before Islam, not a single Jew remains. More recently, Jewish immigration to Israel has come from Russia and the lands of the former Soviet Union. In 1990 nearly 200,000 Jews came from the Soviet Union and between 1968 and 1992 as a whole, over three-quarters of a million.63 Having grown from 60,000 to 600,000 between the end of the First World War and its independence in 1948, Israel’s Jewish population has again grown tenfold to over 6 million in the years since 1948. Thus while globally Jewish numbers have sunk in absolute and relative terms, in Israel they have grown exponentially.
The numbers alone make it evident that immigration has been Israel’s lifeblood and that without it, the country could not have come into existence, never mind survived and prospered. For this reason, Aliyah, or Jewish immigration to Israel, has always been a driving imperative of Zionism. The state has required a solid population base, particularly in the face of Palestinians’ exceptionally high birth rate. The imperative for the Jews to be a majority was always explicit; as Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, stated: ‘In some place, in this place, we have to stop being a minority.’64 Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was obsessed by numbers: ‘The State cannot be firmly based, its mission will not be fulfilled and the vision of redemption will not be realised except through immigration.’65
There is lively historical debate over whether the exodus of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948–9 Israeli war of independence was in some way preplanned or preordained by the Zionists, but whatever the reality of this highly controversial issue, the fact remains that it would have been difficult to build the state had its Arab population not largely moved–or been moved–to neighbouring countries or to those parts of Palestine not initially under Israeli control. Similarly, without the great wave of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and other Arab lands, the survival of the state would have been difficult, particularly after the destruction of European Jewry for whose salvation its creation had been originally designed. It has been estimated that, without immigration in the wake of the Balfour Declaration, the Jews of Israel would today constitute a population at most of a quarter of a million, as opposed to over 6 million.66 Under such a scenario, it is unthinkable that the state of Israel could have come into existence, or, had it done so, could have survived.
Another aspect of the Arab–Israeli conflict which is striking from a demographic perspective is fertility rates. It is never easy to prove why a group as a whole has a fertility rate at a particular level–general
ly, the best way is to compare its fertility rate to those of other comparable groups, look at the statements of its leaders, and examine any studies of its population which have tried to get to grips with the reasoning behind fertility choices. In the cases of Palestine and Israel, a strong case can thus be made that both have exceptionally high fertility rates which have been driven to a considerable extent by the conflict and by what can be termed ‘competitive breeding’. The increase in the Palestinian population has been rapid both within Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the early 1960s Israeli Arab women were bearing no fewer than nine children each.67 The Arab population of Israel rose from a little over 150,000 after the 1948–9 war to over 800,000 forty years later, a compound annual growth rate of over 4%.68 In the early part of the twenty-first century, the fertility rates in Gaza and the West Bank were still around five–almost double the rate in Morocco, for example–despite the fact that female literacy in the former was almost universal whereas in the latter it was probably below 50%.69 At least part of this very high fertility rate can be attributed to the conflict with Israel and an attempt to compete with a fast-growing Jewish population: Yasser Arafat is supposed to have spurred Palestinians into a demographic race with Israel, while Hamas has described Palestinians as engaged ‘in a demographic war that does not know mercy’.70 One Israeli demographer recounts a visiting Arab school headmaster, who while making a gesture indicating the reproductive organs, commented: ‘[T]his is our only weapon.’71
The other factor that has bolstered Palestinian numbers in the above area has been the dramatic increase in life expectancy and fall in infant mortality rates. In the occupied territories, infant mortality at the time of the Six Day War was around one hundred per thousand. Since then, whatever else might be attributed to the Israeli occupation, infant mortality has seen this fall to twenty per thousand, below the average for the region as a whole. Life expectancy over the same period has extended from the mid fifties to the mid seventies72–a figure comparable to some of the more deprived parts of the UK, such as Glasgow, or the poorer states of the USA. This is in line with the sort of modernisation seen elsewhere: for example, before 1967, there had never been a university in Gaza or the West Bank, but today there are half a dozen such institutions.
The Palestinian fertility rate has come down sharply in recent years: today, it is around three children per woman both among Arabs in Israel and those in the West Bank, although somewhat higher in Gaza. The pattern it is following is more or less normal, albeit one in which falls have been delayed by the conflict, which has motivated large families. Israeli Jewish fertility is more extraordinary. Early Zionist immigrants to Palestine were predominantly from east European Jewish families who had already undergone a demographic transition, and when Jews from the Middle East joined them in Israel after 1948, their birth rate too fell rapidly to what would be considered ‘normal’ for a modern society. Jewish Israeli fertility reached two and a half by the mid 1990s but then went into reverse. Today it is at a level of three children per woman and nearly three and a half for Israeli-born women.73 This is at least a child more, or 50% higher, than that of any other country in the developed world.
While this is to some extent the product of exceptionally high fertility rates among Israel’s ultra-Orthodox, it is also a secular phenomenon. Again it cannot be definitively proven that it is a response to the conflict, but it is notable that Jewish birth rates in the United States, where the only other multi-million Jewish population lives, are among the lowest in that country. It is likely that high Israeli Jewish fertility has more to do with the specific situation in which Israeli Jews find themselves than with anything to do with Judaism or Jewishness as such, reflecting a more communitarian and less individualist society than most countries of comparable modernity and maybe also a fear of losing children in a war. It is true that ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jews do have an exceptionally high fertility rate wherever they live, and they make a meaningful contribution to rising Jewish fertility in Israel. For Haredim, large families is a matter of prestige. But both the ultra-Orthodox and secular in Israel have a higher fertility rate than Jews of similar religiosity (or lack thereof) outside Israel. It may be that the greatest demographically related challenge Israel faces today is not maintaining its Jewish majority–at least within its 1967 lines–but preserving its economic success as the number of Haredim rises, given their resistance to modern education and, in the case of many men, their preference for a lifetime of study rather than employment.
Feminists in Israel and women who do not particularly want to have large families or families at all have certainly pointed to a pronatalist culture that runs deep, going well beyond government policies like generous child benefit and the world’s highest spend, per capita, on helping couples with fertility treatments. As sociologist Larissa Remennick comments: ‘Making and raising children is a national Israeli sport… The wish to mother is expected by default from all women, regardless of their education, careers and other achievements.’ One woman who runs a Facebook page for women who do not want to have children complains that it is ‘really hard to be the one who doesn’t want to be a mother in a country where there is a straight path from kindergarten to high school to the army to marriage to children’.74
Without the vast immigration of Jews and the resurgence of Jewish fertility, the state of Israel would have had profound difficulties in sustaining itself. Nevertheless, the countervailing high fertility of Palestinians, even if now less pronounced than recently, has put Israel in a quandary regarding the fate of Gaza and the West Bank following their capture during the Six Day War. Many Israelis would like to annexe them, for either ideological or security reasons, but so far this has not happened with the exception of Jerusalem (which is of exceptional ideological importance) and the Golan Heights (which has only a light population of Syrian Druze). To incorporate the territories and their people into Israel proper would result in a population more or less evenly balanced between Arabs and Jews, and with the loss or impending loss of a prized Jewish majority which has always been core to Zionist aspirations. Priding itself on its democracy, Israel has not been prepared to annexe the areas without offering citizenship to their peoples, and so the West Bank has retained its ‘occupied’ status while Israel has completely withdrawn from Gaza although it still controls its air space and most of its borders.
Demography has played only a part in the fate of Gaza and the West Bank–ideological, economic and security concerns are prominent too–but the part it has played is an important and often unappreciated one. After the 1967 victory Yigal Allon, at one point Israel’s acting prime minister, proposed the annexation of the sparsely populated Jordan valley, abandoning the more populated western part of the West Bank to Jordan, thus ensuring much additional territory with few additional Arabs. While this has never been adopted as official Israeli policy, it did guide the location of early Jewish settlements, which tended to be predominantly in the Jordan valley. When Israel reached the Oslo Accord with the Palestinians, the border between the areas which the Palestinians were to control and the area over which Israeli control would continue was broadly in line with the Allon Plan, with allowance made for Israeli settlements in more populated Arab areas which had been established since Allon’s day. The fence erected by Ariel Sharon has never been formally proposed as a border, but it has been claimed that Sharon saw it as much in terms of the demands of demography as the requirements of security.75
So far as the Gaza Strip is concerned, its demography too has shaped its fate. Initially Ariel Sharon was a proponent of Jewish settlement here, but it was pointed out to him that a few months of Palestinian population growth was the equivalent to the entire Jewish population: demographically, it could not be absorbed. By pulling out of the Gaza Strip, Sharon could surrender an area representing around 1% of the total area under Israeli control while extricating himself from the difficulties involved in the direct occupation of over a million Palestinians. I
t is likely that this was a major consideration in his 2005 withdrawal. In the area Israel continues to control–that is, pre-1967 Israel plus the West Bank and the Golan Heights–it is unlikely that there will ever be a Palestinian majority, particularly given the lower and falling fertility rate on the West Bank. Nevertheless, the precise numbers and percentages as well as the population prospects are matters generating much debate, which seem to lie at the heart of this demographically charged conflict.76 In any case, it is clear that there will continue to be a large Palestinian Arab population within the area Israel currently controls whether or not it has the potential to become a majority.
Again, while demography is not all of destiny, it acts as an unseen hand. At the point of the Palestinian intifada of 1987, the median age of Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank was barely fifteen. It was not much higher when the second intifada broke out in the early years of the current century. Today the median age in the Palestinian Territories has passed twenty and by mid-century it will be heading for thirty. This is not to argue that further intifadas are impossible, but it is notable that each time one seems to be getting started, it fizzles out. Twenty is still a young median age, and there are plenty of disenfranchised and angry young Palestinians who might spark an uprising any day, but the likelihood of one diminishes as the society ages. Whatever else they may rely on to advance their cause, it seems less likely that Palestinians will be able to depend on the raw street anger and violence associated with young, unattached men with nothing to lose. Over the next twenty-five years, short of any surprises, including population movements in or out of the area, the populations of the contending sides are likely to be more or less even, contributing to an ongoing stalemate.