While Palestinian Demographics Follow Western Trends, Israelis Continue to Buck Them

July 12 2021

Although the Israeli presence in the West Bank is widely considered a terrible crime against the Palestinian people, it has in fact brought health and prosperity. Yoram Ettinger looks at the statistics:

[F]rom the end of 1967 (586,000 people) until the end of 1992 (1,050,000 people), the Arab population of Judea and Samaria expanded by 79 percent, compared to a mere 0.9-percent growth during the 1950-1967 Jordanian rule. The unprecedented Arab population-growth rate was the outcome of the unprecedented Israeli development of health, medical, transportation, education, and employment infrastructure in Judea and Samaria, following the stagnation during the Jordanian occupation of the area. In addition, Israel offered employment opportunities, in its pre-1967 core, to Judean and Samarian Arabs, who preferred working in Israel to the faraway Arab Gulf states, West Africa, or Latin America.

But this rapid population increase, Ettinger explains, follows a pattern familiar from other cases when “a Third World population . . . benefits from a considerable modernization of infrastructure.” In such instances, a demographic surge is followed by a leveling out, as members of the group in question begin to have fewer children. By contrast, Israeli Jews’ fertility rates remain the highest for any Westernized population. Ettinger explains:

Jewish demography [results from] the Israeli state of mind, which is top-heavy on optimism, faith, patriotism, attachment to roots, collective responsibility, the centrality of children, and a frontier mentality in the face of costly Jewish history and contemporary existential threats in the stormy, violently intolerant, . . . Middle East. . . . Israel’s left and right, doves and hawks, secular and religious, wealthy and poor . . . consider children as a means to enrich their own lives, and secure the civilian and military future of the Jewish state.

Israel’s robust demography refutes the assertion that its Jewish majority is threatened by a supposed Arab “demographic time bomb.”

Read more at Ettinger Report

More about: Demographics, Israeli society, Palestinians

The Mass Expulsion of Palestinians Is No Solution. Neither Are Any of the Usual Plans for Gaza

Examining the Trump administration’s proposals for the people of Gaza, Danielle Pletka writes:

I do not believe that the forced cleansing of Gaza—a repetition of what every Arab country did to the hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews in 1948— is a “solution.” I don’t think Donald Trump views that as a permanent solution either (read his statement), though I could be wrong. My take is that he believes Gaza must be rebuilt under new management, with only those who wish to live there resettling the land.

The time has long since come for us to recognize that the establishment doesn’t have the faintest clue what to do about Gaza. Egypt doesn’t want it. Jordan doesn’t want it. Iran wants it, but only as cannon fodder. The UN wants it, but only to further its anti-Semitic agenda and continue milking cash from the West. Jordanians, Lebanese, and Syrians blame Palestinians for destroying their countries.

Negotiations with Hamas have not worked. Efforts to subsume Gaza under the Palestinian Authority have not worked. Rebuilding has not worked. Destruction will not work. A “two-state solution” has not arrived, and will not work.

So what’s to be done? If you live in Washington, New York, London, Paris, or Berlin, your view is that the same answers should definitely be tried again, but this time we mean it. This time will be different. . . . What could possibly make you believe this other than ideological laziness?

Read more at What the Hell Is Going On?

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Palestinians