Love of the Land: Israel's bogus demographic threat

Israel's bogus demographic threat

Dr. Aaron Lerner/Yoram Ettinger
IMRA
12 February '10

Theodore Herzl (in 1900) and David Ben Gurion (in 1947) did not subordinate their vision and long-term strategy to tenuous demographic constraints: A Jewish minority of 8% and 33% respectively between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Their defiance of odds was responsible for the 1948 establishment of the Jewish State.

In 2010, there is a solid 67% Jewish majority in the combined area of pre-1967 Israel and Judea and Samaria. However, some Israeli politicians employ toxic demographic assets. They inflate the number of Arabs in Judea and Samaria in order to scare the Jewish State into a retreat from a most critical area, historically and security-wise.

The following OpEd, by Haim Rozenberg, former Head of Long-Term Planning at RAFAEL (Israel Defense Ministry's Armament Development Authority), addresses the issue of toxic demographic assets.

Shabbat Shalom,
Yoram Ettinger

Toxic Demographic Assets

Haim Rozenberg
News First Class
February 8, 2010

Haim Rozenberg, former Head Long-Term Planning, RAFAEL (Israel Defense Ministry's Armament Development Authority

Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, said on February 4, 2010 that there are 12 million persons between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean: 6 million Jews and 6 million Arabs. Therefore, he concluded, a two state solution would spare Israel the wrath of Apartheid. Really?!

Barak's conclusion is based on a dramatic error of a two million person gap.

In fact, the total population west of the Jordan River is 10 million. According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS), Israel's population includes 6 million Jews and 1.5 million Arabs. The ICBS has not dealt with Judea, Samaria and Gaza Arabs since 1997.

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Love of the Land: Israel's bogus demographic threat

Love of the Land: In defiance of demographic fatalism

In defiance of demographic fatalism

Yoram Ettinger
Opinion/JPost
30 December 09

In 1948, prime minister David Ben-Gurion declared independence in defiance of demographic fatalism, which was perpetrated by the country's leading demographers. He rejected their assumptions that Jews were doomed to be a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, that a massive aliya wave was not feasible, that the Jewish fertility rate was declining to below reproduction levels and that the Arab fertility rate would remain the highest in the world, irrespective of modernity.

Instead, Ben-Gurion highlighted demographic optimism and aliya as top national priorities, coalesced a solid Jewish majority and planted the seeds that catapulted Israel to a Middle East power, highly respected for its civilian and military achievements.

In 2005, in capitulation to demographic fatalism, prime minister Ariel Sharon retreated from Palestinian terrorism, uprooting 10,000 Jews from Gaza and Samaria. Sharon abandoned his lifelong ideology of defiance, subordinating long-term strategy and security concerns to doomsday demography. Thus, he facilitated Hamas's takeover of Gaza and its ripple effects: slackened posture of deterrence, intensified shelling of southern Israel, the 2006 Second Lebanon War, 2008's Operation Cast Lead, the Goldstone Report and the exacerbated global pressure on Israel.

DEMOGRAPHIC ASSUMPTIONS have played an increasing role in shaping national security policy since 1992. But what if these assumptions are dramatically wrong? For example, since the beginning of annual aliya in 1882 - and in contradiction to demographic projections - the Jewish population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean has grown 238-fold, while the Arab population increased only sixfold. Since 1948, the Jewish population has increased almost tenfold, and the Arab population has expanded threefold.

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Love of the Land: In defiance of demographic fatalism

Love of the Land: Another Tack: In awe and esteem

Another Tack: In awe and esteem

Sarah Honig
JPost
05 November 09

Extreme acts are sometimes exonerated by history. When we view the world through our insular prism, we can easily lose perspective. Things may be swiftly magnified to grotesque proportions, like our trepidation of world censure, for instance. Frantically exaggerated anxieties then send us into a panic of self-reproach. Most often our self-inflicted alarm is unwarranted. Occasionally exploits sure to get Israel into hot water internationally may be the right thing to do. Losing our collective head isn't only unnecessary, it's downright harmful.

This was true even before our state was born, before we could be painted as an ogre imperialist Goliath, when we were history's most helpless underdogs. The world hardly empathized with us then either.

Exactly on this date 65 years ago - November 6, 1944 - two young Lehi fighters, 19-year-old Eliahu Hakim of Haifa and 22-year-old Tel Avivian Eliahu Beit-Zuri, assassinated Walter Edward Guinness, first Baron Moyne, in Cairo. He was the British minister resident in the Middle East. While the Holocaust was still ongoing, world opinion managed to expend more outrage on the two Eliahus, as they came to be known, than it did on their victim's appalling record.

The Labor-led Zionist establishment in pre-state Israel lost no time or vehemence in denouncing the assassination and launching what came to be dubbed the saison (the "hunting season" in which Lehi and Irgun members were pursued and turned over to the British). On November 20, 1944 David Ben-Gurion addressed the Histadrut convention and ordered the expulsion of "all Revisionists from all workplaces - be they in an office, factory or grove... the same goes for students in higher or secondary education, or any other school."

YET, INCREDIBLE as it sounds - given the strident anti-Israel incitement of Cairo's current state-run media under Hosni Mubarak's aegis - the Eliahus evoked widespread sympathy among Egyptians. Students demonstrated for them in the streets and rallied against sentencing them to death. Prominent Egyptian lawyers volunteered to represent them, adhered to the political defense decreed by the Eliahus and avidly espoused their nationalist Jewish sentiments.

Hakim set the tone: "We are the accusers at this trial. We accuse Lord Moyne and the government he represented of murdering hundreds of thousands of our brethren and usurping our homeland... Where is the law that would hold them answerable for their crimes? Though absent from the books, it is engraved in our hearts. Hence we had no alternative but to take justice into our own hands."
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Love of the Land: Another Tack: In awe and esteem