Hat tip to Arieh Lebowitz for notifying us of this story, as reported in two different news sources:
“A demographic time bomb in the Middle East”
Drew Christiansen Ra’fat Aldajani | Jan. 5, 2015 | National Catholic Reporter
http://ncronline.org/blogs/
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Hebrew U’s DellaPergola: If foreign workers and non-Jewish Russian immigrants are subtracted, Jews are already a minority
“Right-wing annexation drive fueled by false demographics, experts say”
New Palestinian statistics claim there are about as many non-Jews as Jews between the river and the sea. Although one ex-diplomat strongly contests this, official Israeli data suggests Ramallah is correct
Read more: Right-wing annexation drive fueled by false demographics, experts say | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/
And where does Partners stand on demographic time bombs, and the terrible dangers of a non-Jewish majority?
Certainly sounds ominous. I sure hope the US will learn from Israel and take decisive action here before we have a non-white majority around 2050!
Ted
Yes, it is odd that Jews should feel concerned about being a minority in an area of the world that is so open and giving to its minority populations. It’s also strange given how well Jews have been treated over the centuries as a minority in so many countries.
In the US, Jews will remain one of many minorities. In fact, there will be no racial or ethnic majority in the US.
Dear Ralph,
Should Israel ever define its borders, what steps would Israel take to ensure that Jews will forever remain a majority within those borders in this modern, democratic nation state? Would limits be imposed on non-Jewish birth rates? Would there be campaigns to ensure higher Jewish birth rates than minority birth rates? Preferential maternal and health care for Jews, encouraged migration for non-Jews and immigrations for Jews? Laws against non-Jewish residents marrying non-Jews from foreign countries?
Seeking enlightenment on how this will work.
Thank you,
Ted
I want to thank Ted for this softball question. The only measure we’d advocate is for Israel to relinquish control over the territories that should become part of the Palestinian state in a negotiated peace agreement. We, of course, would abhor the repressive and hateful measures that Ted has listed in order to bait us.
There can be no guarantee that Israel will forever have a Jewish majority. There are two major reasons that we care about this:
Jews have been historically persecuted or discriminated against, to one degree or other, in many or most countries where they’ve been a minority; given the bad blood between Jews and Arabs during the approximately 95 years they’ve been in conflict over the same land, a peaceful partition into states with Arab and Jewish majorities respectively, would offer the most hope for peaceful coexistence.
We, of course, would support civil rights and individual liberties for the ethnic minorities in Israel and for any that may live in the new state of Palestine. But history teaches us that the right of Jews to self-determination in a state of their own is important; we would want it to be a liberal democratic state, however, with Jews and Arabs living with equal rights as Israeli citizens, approximately within its 1949-’67 boundaries. At the same time, the Jewish people should not be denying the same right to the Arab people who identify as Palestinians. Hopefully, this too will be a liberal democratic state; but while Israel is far from perfect in this regard, the record of the Arab and Islamic worlds for tolerance and democracy is, tragically, abysmal.