Ilan Pappe on the Israeli election and the ‘demographic problem’

[Monkie]

Ilan Pappe is a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa..

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n08/print/papp01_.html

Ilan Pappe on the Israeli election and the ‘demographic problem’

From left to right, the manifestos of all the Zionist parties during the recent Israeli election campaign contained policies which they claimed would counter the ‘demographic problem’ posed by the Palestinian presence in Israel. Ariel Sharon proposed the pull-out from Gaza as the best solution to it; the leaders of the Labour Party endorsed the wall because they believed it was the best way of limiting the number of Palestinians inside Israel. Extra-parliamentary groups, too, such as the Geneva Accord movement, Peace Now, the Council for Peace and Security, Ami Ayalon’s Census group and the Mizrachi Democratic Rainbow all claim to know how to tackle it.

Apart from the ten members of the Palestinian parties and two eccentric Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox Jews, all the members of the new Knesset (there are 120 in all) arrived promising that their magic formulae would solve the ‘demographic problem’. The means varied from reducing Israeli control over the Occupied Territories – in fact, the plans put forward by Labour, Kadima, Shas (the Sephardic Orthodox party) and Gil (the pensioners’ party) would involve Israeli withdrawal from only 50 per cent of these territories – to more drastic action. Right-wing parties such as Yisrael Beytenu, the Russian ethnic party of Avigdor Liberman, and the religious parties argued for a voluntary transfer of Palestinians to the West Bank. In short, the Zionist answer is to reduce the problem either by giving up territory or by shrinking the ‘problematic’ population group.

None of this is new. The population problem was identified as the major obstacle in the way of Zionist fulfilment in the late 19th century, and David Ben-Gurion said in December 1947 that ‘there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent.’ Israel, he warned on the same occasion, would have to deal with this ‘severe’ problem with ‘a new approach’. The following year, ethnic cleansing meant that the number of Palestinians dropped below 20 per cent of the Jewish state’s overall population (in the area allocated to Israel by the UN plus the area it occupied in 1948, the Palestinians would originally have made up around 60 per cent of the population). Interestingly, but not surprisingly, in December 2003 Binyamin Netanyahu recycled Ben-Gurion’s magic number – the undesirable 60 per cent. ‘If the Arabs in Israel form 40 per cent of the population,’ Netanyahu said, ‘this is the end of the Jewish state.’ ‘But 20 per cent is also a problem,’ he added. ‘If the relationship with these 20 per cent is problematic, the state is entitled to employ extreme measures.’ He did not elaborate.

if this article doesnt chill you to the bone, and you dont see a problem, but before you comment, i suggest you exchange the words jews and israel with whites and america, or germans and germany, and then you can tell me how wonderful the democratic "state" of israel is and how we should support it.

[Lexingtonian]

1. your link doesn't seem to work

and you're taking what is going on and being said all too literally.

The Middle East doesn't work the way literal-minded people tend to imagine.

[itzamirakul]

2. Perhaps part of the population problem is the actual number of Jewish

people living in Israel. A recent article in the NY Daily News, ca Feb. 14,2006 says,

IMMIGRATION OF ISRAELIS TO U.S. FUELS CONCERN
by Matthew Kalman
<snip>
JERUSALEM - More Israelis live in New York than in Tel Aviv, a surprising report from the Israeli Consulate found.

There are 800,000 Israelis -- more than 10% of the entire population of Israel - living in the United States.

Consulate officials believe that up to 400,000 of them live in the New York Metropolitan area along - that's more than the total population of Tel Aviv, which stands at 370,000. An additional 200,000 live in California and about 100,000 in Florida.
<end snip>

Together, the original article and this article make it appear that a major part of the problem is that there is becoming too few Israelis to really live on and fully occupy their land. It also helps explain the recent agreement with AIPAC to reinforce America's pledge to support Israel in the event of attack.
Losing so many young people to immigration provides a problem in replenishing the troops. Israel used to have a mandatory military service requirement, so by immigrating to America, many young people are leaving behind that mandatory service and can elect to "volunteer" for service in the U.S.if they so choose.

[Poll_Blind]

3. Any state so concerned with maintaining a certain racial makeup...

...is destined to commit atrocities against a growing minority, just for living.

I never understood why, after the atrocities committed against the Jews by the Germans before and during the second World War, there would be a movement of Jews who wished to initiate a racial-majority state themselves. To be certain the Israelis do not demand a 100% Jewish state.

However, what will Israel do if the non-Jewish blood grows to 41%? What do they do if that 1% refuses to leave?

Claim Imminent Racial Domain and expel the persons? Many years ago a black friend of mine joked about being late to a birthday party we were both attending because he was stopped by an officer of the peace for driving while black. It was unsettling but he turned it into a joke. Still, the implications hung around me in my thoughts for weeks and years afterward.

However, the thought that Israel would remove from it's population an otherwise-solid citizen merely on the grounds that they do not have Jewish blood coursing through their veins is as odious as any other example of similar behavior in history of which, unfortunately, there are many. Too many related to the persecution of Jews as a racial group, themselves.

This desire to disallow the reproductive growth of any minority is racially prejudicial. The desire to have at least a certain percentage of Jews in Israel is racist. For those reading closely, it is definition 2 for "racism" listed on the Merriam-Webster website:

2 : racial prejudice or discrimination

Who here will promote this racial prejudice? Who here will condemn it? Who will claim that one set of horrors visited on Jews in the past justify another set visited in the future on the non-Jewish minority?

PB