The Red Thread of Israel's “Demographic Problem”

In the spring and early summer of 2018, Israeli forces shot or gassed more than 16,000 people. The ferocity of this response to the massing of Palestinians near the barrier surrounding the Gaza Strip is striking but not astonishing. It reflects a fundamental truth and springs from a deep fear. The t...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Middle East policy 2019-03, Vol.26 (1), p.141-149
Main Author: Lustick, Ian S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Apartheid
Arab Israeli relations
Architects
Army
Citizenship
Demography
Fear & phobias
Founders
Hate
Intervention
Jewish people
Land
Leadership
Minority groups
Mothers
Negotiation
Palestinian people
Partition
Prime ministers
Refugees
Safe levels
Sovereignty
Strikes
Summer
Truth
Violence
Zionism
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In the spring and early summer of 2018, Israeli forces shot or gassed more than 16,000 people. The ferocity of this response to the massing of Palestinians near the barrier surrounding the Gaza Strip is striking but not astonishing. It reflects a fundamental truth and springs from a deep fear. The truth is that the essential aspiration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century architects of the Zionist movement was to ensure that somewhere in the world — and that place came to be Palestine — there would be a majority of Jews. The fear is of Jews losing the majority they achieved. For centuries, said the founders of Zionism, Jews lived as a minority everywhere and as a majority nowhere; everywhere as guests, nowhere as hosts. This unnatural condition they identified as the taproot of anti‐Semitism. Gentile fear and hatred of Jews would end, or at least diminish, to safe levels once Jews could point to a land where they, like other “normal” peoples, were a majority and among whom lived others as minorities and as guests. Demographic predominance in Palestine thus became Zionism's categorical imperative. The contradiction between this objective and other Zionist goals (including settling and ruling the “whole Land of Israel”) explains much about the history of Zionism and Israel. It also explains Israel's unblinking use of violence against thousands of men, women and children and why Israel's inability to sustain a Jewish majority is accelerating its adoption of less and less deniable forms of apartheid.
ISSN:1061-1924
1475-4967
DOI:10.1111/mepo.12406