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Overcast Palestine and peace: It’s all about demography
The demographic race between Jews and Arabs is at the heart of the national conflict in Israel. Of course, it’s also a conflict over borders, religion, culture, and language — but it’s mainly a national conflict, and the main arena in which it takes place is demographic. Our strategy has to be demographic expansion and blocking Arab-Muslim migration to Israel.
If we don’t understand that victory in the conflict — Jewish or, G-d forbid, Arab — is demographic in nature rather than military, then we will lose.
The Palestinians understand this, Israel less so.
A large number of policymakers think that Israel has already won and that it only has to reinforce this victory in an agreement. The Zionist Left led us to the 1993 Oslo Accords since it thought that Israel had already defeated the Palestinians militarily in 1948 and the Arab states in a series of wars during the following decades, so all that remained to do was all to reinforce the victory over the Palestinians with an agreement that forms two states.
This isn’t how PLO leader Yasser Arafat and his people saw it.
They understood that demographic expansion would decide and one side would win, not “everyone.” They placed their hopes on the enormous Arab-Muslim demographic majority around Israel migrating, particularly as the Arab birth rate plunges.
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An overview of the main events in the Israel-Palestinian conflict since its beginnings in the 1920s proves that Arafat was more realistic than Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the architects of the Oslo Accords.
During the first part of the conflict, 1921 to 1948, the Jews posed something of a demographic threat to the Arabs. In the decades following Israel’s independence, both sides threatened each other demographically.
At the start of British rule in 1918, and with the Third Aliyah (1919-1923), the Arabs understood the new danger. Their response was the Nebi Musa Riots in 1920 and more serious riots in 1921, at the height of the Third Aliyah.
In 1922, practically all of the nations of the world were closed to millions of Jews who wanted to emigrate. The Land of Israel became their only refuge, significantly increasing the threat the Arabs saw in them, as the letter of the mandate obliged British authorities to allow mass immigration. In 1924, the first mass Jewish aliyah, known as the Fourth Aliyah, began, illustrating further the size of the Jewish demographic threat.
It wasn’t just “pioneers” who were arriving, but a popular migration, and behind it stood millions who were imprisoned in the anti-Semitic trap in Europe. After a while, this increased threat led to the mass riots organized by the Arab leadership in 1929.
But the series of murderous attacks didn’t stop the Jewish masses, who were trapped in eastern and central Europe with only the “national home” in the Land of Israel open to them. The British succeeded in suppressing the disturbances, and in the 1930s, when anti-Semitism increased even more in Europe, a massive wave of immigration (the “Fifth Aliyah”) began and eventually doubled the size of the Yishuv.
Ultimately, it became one-third of the country’s population and a national group that afterward, in 1948, was capable of standing on its own two feet.
The Arabs responded by launching the Arab Revolt, later rebranded as the “great Palestinian revolt,” which raged between 1936 and 1939.
Demographically, the 1948 War of Independence was the decisive result of the Jewish demographic threat over the Arabs and of the crucial need of hundreds of thousands of Jews (disastrously, no longer millions) to make aliyah — first from Europe and afterward from the Islamic countries.
Henceforth, the demographic threat has been mutual. Because of this, Israel did not allow Arab refugees to return and passed the Law of Return, which within three years again doubled the Jewish population and created a large Jewish majority in Israel which grew at an unprecedented rate.
The continued wars and hostility helped Israel prevent Arab migration into the country. Even after the military victory and occupation in 1967, and until the Oslo Accords, there was only small Arab migration from the territories into the sovereign State of Israel. Maybe this is what led to Israel’s complacency regarding the possibility that it would happen in the future.
Meanwhile, there were further waves of immigration after 1967: from the Soviet Union in the early 1970s and later from the former USSR in 1989, the sheer volume of which rendered the “Palestinian womb” strategy void. This possibly explains why the Palestinians adopted the “Phased Plan” for overcoming Israel demographically, fulfilling it with the Oslo Accords.
Presumably they understood that, in the face of Jewish immigration to Israel, they had to open up the country to Arab migration from the surrounding areas, and that this would only be possible under “peace” or peaceful conditions. Only their intransigence in the negotiations disrupted and slowed — so far, temporarily — the fulfillment of their demographic ambitions.
The Oslo Accords were not just based on the illusion that Israel had won, and that now they could dictate that the Palestinian national movement recognize the Jewish nation-state inside the Green Line. They were based on the illusion that partition removes the Arab demographic threat.
Labor party leaders who prompted the Oslo Accords drilled into their supporters that Arab refugees would “only” return to the Palestinian state, which would control its own immigration policy, but not to Israel. It was and remains a dangerous and reckless intellectual failure.
What’s taking place now, with “family unification” and the phenomenon of illegal aliens and settling collaborators inside sovereign Israel, would take place en masse under the conditions of permanent peace.
Israel would necessarily be dragged into not just allowing unlimited entry of people through means of ignoring the expiration of tourist visas, who under conditions of “peace” would be found in Israel itself, especially in its courts, where they would ask in naivete or malice for mass “family unification.”
Never, not in 1937, not in 1947, and not in 1994 or in any proposal for a “solution” to the conflict, did the idea of partitioning the country into two states divided by a sealed-border come up. It is not economically or operationally feasible. Whoever hopes for this is fostering a pipedream.
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Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas placed a warning sign before us when he raised the idea of bringing Syrian civil war refugees into Israel. Under the conditions of a “permanent peace” with a Palestinian state, which would control the population passage into it, we would face a similar threat with every demographic upheaval in the region.
Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, in the areas of the western land of Israel, it’s impossible to prevent an Arab-Muslim demographic trickle into the country, definitely not under peace conditions, but also not under conditions of calm (as the current political crisis will prove).
The Palestinian demographic strategy explains their behavior during negotiations until now and why they thwarted them.
Firstly, they insist on the “right of return” of the descendants of refugees. Secondly, they demand to control immigration into the “State of Palestine.” Thirdly, they demand territorial continuity with the Arab world, ie the Jordan Valley, so that they will be able to open the area between the Jordan and the sea to immigration. Fourthly, they are not ready to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
This is not a matter of “narrative,” of adherence to their national story, as those with superficial thoughts tell us, but an issue of strategy, since recognizing Israel as a Jewish state requires recognition of Israel’s right to protect itself demographically from Arab migration and essentially giving up on the “right of return,” which for them is an important demographic weapon.
Therefore, Israel’s demographic strategy has to be derived from the need to block the Palestinian strategy.
•Firstly, we need aliyah, as much as possible, without moaning about “overcrowding.”
•Secondly, in every situation, it’s up to us to prevent Arab-Muslim migration into the entirety of the land between the river and the sea.
•Thirdly, any political arrangement has to be based on recognition of the right of the Jewish nation-state to demographic self-defense, and it is incumbent upon us to stick to the so-called “Nation-State” law and to enact a basic law for regulating immigration.
•Fourthly, it is incumbent upon us to settle the Jordan Valley with mass urban settlement that will frustrate any idea of contiguity between Arab-Muslim territory in Israel and in Jordan.
If we don’t quickly understand the essence of the struggle, we might win a few battles, but we will lose the war.
Avi Bareli is a historian and researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. This article appeared in Israel Hayom.
