DISTORTIONS…AND THE AGENDAS THEY SERVE

TIME OUT
David P. Goldman
Tablet, July 20, 2011

 

“Time isn’t on Israel’s side” must be the most-repeated phrase in Israeli politics, in the Jewish state as well as in the Diaspora. It’s Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni’s refrain.… Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, said so in a Jerusalem speech to Jewish legislators from various parliamentary democracies June 29. We’ve heard the same shibboleth this year from Australia’s Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, Turkish commentator Omer Taspinar, Rabbi Donniel Hartman of the Shalom Hartmann Institute, Jewish Week editor Gary Rosenblatt, and many others.

The claim that Israel is fighting the clock has two components: diplomacy and demographics. Israel’s diplomatic isolation will corner the Jewish state while fast-breeding Arabs will overwhelm the population balance between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, goes the argument. On both counts, though, the facts speak against the notion that time is running out for Israel. Time, on the contrary, seems to be on Israel’s side.

The Palestinian Authority’s much-feared march toward a United Nations vote for statehood has become something of an embarrassment. A vote for statehood in the General Assembly has no legal implications, and the United States [has suggested it will] veto the measure in the Security Council. Some Palestinian leaders think that token support in the General Assembly will do more harm than good; Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki last week offered to withdraw the U.N. vote if negotiations with Israel restarted before September. And even the Kingdom of Jordan might vote against Palestinian statehood, according to the Middle East Research Center’s Alexander Bligh.

Arab rhetoric in support of Palestinian statehood, moreover, isn’t matched by real support. Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister, complained last week that Arab donors have paid out only a third of their pledges to his government, leaving the Palestinian Authority without enough cash to pay public employees’ salaries. “The Palestinians cannot count on the friends cheering them on rhetorically to step up financially if the going gets rough post-September,” warned Michael Singh, an associate fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.…

Israel hardly seems as isolated as it did before Greece blocked another Gaza flotilla earlier this month, and the IHH—the Hamas-linked Turkish “charity” that sponsored the Mavi Marmara flotilla last year—dropped out of the exercise. Israeli diplomacy seemed quite effective.…

Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Muslim countries…have shifted their rhetoric away from Israel and toward the risk of rising Iranian influence. Only a few months ago, conventional wisdom stated that the United States needed a Middle East peace deal to steer the Arab Spring in a pro-American direction. But as it turned out, the Arab Spring had little to do with the Palestinian issue, and as the political chaos in the Arab world became less tractable, Israel’s position improved.… Civil wars in Yemen and Libya and renewed political unrest in Egypt have validated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim before the U.S. Congress in May that “Israel is the one anchor of stability” in “an unstable Middle East.…”

Even if the Arab revolt and its consequences have eased Israel’s diplomatic isolation and undercut the pressure for a settlement with the Palestinians, that does not serve Israel’s interests, according to President Barack Obama. “The number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories,” he told the America-Israel Political Action Committee in May.

Whether the proportion of Arabs in Judea and Samaria as well as in Israel itself is growing may be the most politicized demographic question in the world. Yet the Israeli Jewish fertility rate has risen to three children per female while the Arab fertility rate has fallen to the point where the two trend lines have converged and perhaps even crossed. A 2006 study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies claims that the West Bank and Gaza population in 2004 was only 2.5 million, rather than the 3.8 million claimed by the Palestinian authorities. Presumably the numbers were inflated to increase foreign aid and exaggerate the importance of the Palestinian population.

Most of the phantom population, the report argues, comes from births that never occurred: “[The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics] projected that the number of births in the Territories would total almost 908,000 for the seven-year period from 1997 to 2003. Yet, the actual number of births documented by the PA Ministry of Health for the same period was significantly lower at 699,000, or 238,000 fewer births than had been forecast by the PCBS.… The size of the discrepancy accelerated over time. Whereas the PCBS predicted there would be over 143,000 births in 2003, the PA Ministry of Health reported only 102,000 births, which pointed to a PCBS forecast 40% beyond actual results.”

Palestinian fertility on the West Bank has already fallen to the Israeli fertility rate of three children per woman, if we believe the Palestinian Ministry of Health numbers rather than the highly suspect Central Bureau of Statistics data. The Begin-Sadat estimates were disputed by other Israeli demographers, notably Sergio DellaPergola of the Jewish People Policy Institute. Yet the idea that economic and cultural modernization leads to falling birthrates is a commonplace among demographers who study the developing world. In 1963, Israeli Arab women had eight or nine children; today they have three, about the same as Israeli Jews.…

More recent data also show that the Israeli Jewish birth rate has risen faster than predicted. Jewish births rose from 96,000 in the year 2000 to 125,000 in 2010, while Arab births fell slightly over the same period—from about 40,781 to 40,750, according to a new study by Yaakov Faitelson at the Institute for Zionist Strategies.… While Israel’s ultra-Orthodox minority contributes disproportionately to Jewish population growth, most of the increase in Jewish births comes from the secular and non-Orthodox religious categories, which average 2.6 children per woman. Faitelson notes that the ultra-Orthodox fertility rate fell over the past decade, while the fertility of the general Jewish population rose.

If present trends continue, the proportion of Jews in Israel and the West Bank will remain roughly constant; it may even rise. Muslim fertility is falling faster than anywhere in the world, with some Muslim countries—notably Iran, Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia—reaching levels well below replacement. “In most of the Islamic world it’s amazing, the decline in fertility that has happened,’’ Hania Zlotnik, head of the United Nations’ population research branch, told a 2009 conference.…

If Israel’s total fertility rate holds at three, its population will reach 24 million by the end of this century, the United Nations’ population model predicts. And if the low fertility rates prevailing elsewhere hold steady, Israel will have more people under the age of 25 than Turkey, Iran, or even Germany. It will be able to field the largest army in the Middle East. And it will have a thriving high-tech economy, enormous energy resources, and a reliable supply of desalinated water. Israel has a near-optimal mix of economics and demographics, while time is running out for Arab countries that have failed over and over again to rise to the demands of the modern world.

There is just one remaining argument that the clock is ticking against Israel, namely “linkage” between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s strategic threat to Israel.… Yet it is hard to find a policy analyst of any stripe today who will defend the idea that an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, even if such a thing were possible in the present environment, might meaningfully reduce the Iranian threat. In the uncertain aftermath of Arab revolts [the] “linkage” argument has quietly faded into the inoperative list of embarrassing past polic[ies]. The commonplace argument that time is not on Israel’s side looks like it will be next.

 

WHAT MILLION MISSING ISRAELIS?
Yogev Karasenty & Shmuel Rosner
Foreign Policy, July 28, 2011

 

Demography is like magic. Put the right numbers in the wrong hands, and you get manipulation. Put the wrong numbers in the right hands, and you get miscalculation. But the case of “The Million Missing Israelis”—an article published on ForeignPolicy.com at the beginning of July by Joseph Chamie and Barry Mirkin—is a hard one to categorize. Indeed, the two writers have the wrong numbers. They also make some statements that might raise suspicions related to motivations—namely, that their demography is driven by a political agenda rather than science.

Chamie and Mirkin argue that the unpublicized story of emigration from Israel is no less significant than the story of Jewish immigration back to the homeland, and that it has reached a point at which it should be considered a threat to Israel’s future as a Jewish state—both demographically but no less important ideologically. “The departure of Jewish Israelis also contributes to the undermining of the Zionist ideology,” the authors write, based on the assumption that a million Israelis have chosen to leave the country since its 1948 birth. Magnanimously, they take the trouble to also include lower estimations of departing Israelis—“the official estimate of 750,000 Israeli emigrants—10 percent of the population”—but even so, that doesn’t change the perception that Israel is just like “Mexico, Morocco, and Sri Lanka.” Not the most exemplary models of prosperity and success.…

We should start with this simple statement: There are not a “million missing Israelis.…” According to Israel’s Bureau of Statistics, since the establishment of the state up until the end of 2008, 674,000 Israelis left the country and did not return after more than a year abroad. An unknown number, estimated to be between 102,000 and 131,000, have died since, putting the number of living Israelis abroad at the end of 2008 at 543,000 to 572,000 (if one counts the dead abroad, one should also count the dead in Israel—this will not change the number of leaving Israelis but will definitely change the percentage of them).

An updated model developed by the Bureau of Statistics at the end of 2008 put the number of not-returning Israelis abroad at 518,000, but added to it a category of 290,000 “non-resident” Israelis. This last number is a tricky one, as it includes the children of Israelis born abroad if they were registered with the Israeli authorities. Such children have never lived in Israel and can hardly be considered “missing,” but if one adds them to the mix one gets to 808,000 Israelis, of which more than 100,000 have already died. Bottom line: Some 670,000 to 700,000 official “Israelis” (including children) live outside Israel today.

But here’s where the narrative gets more complicated. Much more complicated—and fascinating—if one cares to understand the real story of missing Israelis. Israel is a country of many immigrants, as Chamie and Mirkin did bother to note when they wrote about “another important factor contributing to the outflow of Jewish Israelis,” that is, “previous emigration experience.” But they didn’t quite explain the meaning of what they’d written: Israel is a melting pot for some—not unlike the United States—but also a stop-on-the-way-to-someplace-else for others. In many cases, it is a gateway for people escaping repressive regimes or poverty.

Take, for example, the huge wave of immigrants who flew in droves to Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to Israeli Interior Ministry records, 1.1 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union entered Israel between January 1989 and December 2002. However, 8.8 percent of those newcomers—some 100,000 olim (the Hebrew term used to describe those choosing to “climb up” to Israel)—had decided not to remain in Israel and quite quickly moved on to their countries of choice. Should such newcomers be counted as “leaving Israelis”? Should their departure be considered a blow to Zionist dreams? Or maybe these immigrants were merely people leaving the Soviet Union, making the first available escape, without ever seriously considering Israel as their long-term place of residence?

The answer of course is that some were and some weren’t. Some wanted to live in Israel but then regretted it; some were headed for America and would only pass through Israel, as it was an accessible route.… [Irrespective], Israel’s ability to retain more than 90 percent of Soviet immigrants is in fact quite impressive, when one compares it, for example, with foreign-born “ethnic” Germans immigrating to the mother country between 1954 and 1999 but leaving it at a staggering 60 percent rate.

Want some more complications? The threat of “leaving Israelis” that are presumably jeopardizing “the basic Jewish character and integrity of Israel”—as Chamie and Mirkin suggested—can only possibly refer to leaving Jewish Israelis. When Israeli Arabs leave the country, they don’t undermine the Zionist dream and in fact contribute some to the preserving of Israel’s “Jewish character.” That is quite obvious, isn’t it? But Chamie and Mirkin include the leaving Arab Israelis in all of their calculations…leading their readers to assume that all those leaving are in fact Jewish. But according to Israel’s Bureau of Statistics, some 100,000 leaving Israelis were Arab Israelis.

All told, of the 674,000 Israeli emigrants from 1948 to 2008 (children born abroad not included), about 100,000 were Arabs and about 300,000 [including the approximately 100,000 Russian olim who later left Israel] were not born in Israel. That’s important, because all serious measures of emigration must (and do) take into account whether one is native-born or foreign-born, as foreign-born tend to leave more easily and are less attached to the country in which they reside. It turns out that the number of native-born Jewish Israelis leaving is pretty low—less than 300,000. This is not analogous to the numbers from “Mexico, Morocco, and Sri Lanka,” but it is rather similar to those of Australia, Canada, Finland, or Germany. Native-born Greeks, Irish, Swiss, and New Zealanders all leave their respective countries in higher percentages than do Israeli-born [Jewish] Israelis.…

We don’t deny that Israel has problems. Keeping Israelis in Israel and bringing back Israelis who live abroad has always been a concern for the Israeli government, and is still very much on the minds of policymakers. But that is not because Israel suffers from emigration notably more than other countries. Israelis worry so much about their emigrants because of the high value they put on every fellow citizen, because of the close-knit….nature of Israeli society. Yes, it’s also because they see every person’s escape as a blow to Zionism. But the fact of the matter is this: The overall percentage of leaving native-born Israelis is comparable to that of many other OECD countries. And that is no small achievement for a country living under constant security threat and having to survive in a hostile and volatile neighborhood.

 

DISTORTING DEMOCRACY
Martin Sherman
Jerusalem Post, July 28, 2011

A great hue and cry has erupted recently in the wake of a number of parliamentary initiatives undertaken by what is usually characterized—pejoratively—as the “right-wing.” The purpose of these initiatives was to place mildly onerous constraints on the hitherto unrestricted operational freedom of organizations usually characterized—favorably—as “left-wing.” Grave concerns have been expressed as to what these initiatives herald for the future of liberal democracy in the country.

Echoes of these fears were reflected far and wide, finding expression in such influential outlets as The New York Times, whose editorial proclaimed that such initiatives were “not befitting a democracy”—although, curiously, they are not altogether dissimilar from measures that exist in the US.

However, there is indeed much room for concern.

Israel’s democracy is under assault. But this threat does not emanate from parliamentary inquiries into whether funds from official foreign sources are being channeled to domestic organizations to coerce the government to adopt policies it was elected to resist; or from decisions to restrict the unimpeded capacity to wage economic warfare against the country through boycotts, sanctions and divestment; or from moves to ensure transparency regarding the financing of groups endeavoring to mobilize international pressure against the country; or from legislation to preclude tax revenues being allotted to promote the public commemoration of the founding of the state as a regrettable—and it is hoped, reversible—“catastrophe.”

By any criterion of fair minded common sense, these initiatives would be considered no more than the fulfillment of a basic parliamentary duty of elected representatives to their voting public to deal with attempts—often flagrantly undisguised—to impair the sovereignty of the nation and to harm its citizens and institutions. And while certain aspects of these measures may not be unblemished, and may be open to criticism, they in themselves comprise no serious menace to the viability of Israeli democracy.

Quite the opposite. The real threat to the nation’s democracy is from those who oppose these initiatives—not from those who support them.

The real threat to Israeli democracy arises from those who aspire to put themselves above it—a tyrannical clique of self-ordained “philosopher princes” which considers itself unbound by the results of the democratic process. It is a threat that flows from an arrogant class of an unelected—but empowered—few, whose self-perceived moral and intellectual superiority instills in them the belief that they have the right—indeed the duty—to subvert the choice of the “unwashed” electorate.…

The shrill protests at the latest parliamentary initiatives have nothing to do with genuine devotion to democratic principles. Indeed, no call for similar largess and tolerance regarding the propagation of the views of political adversaries has ever been voiced by these self-proclaimed custodians of liberal democracy. Their feigned concern for freedom of expression merely masks a categorical demand for unfettered ideological license to pursue, by extra-parliamentary means, a failed policy of political appeasement and territorial concessions—a policy consistently disproven, but somehow never discredited, and certainly never discarded.

The real ideological divide in Israel is not between those who cherish liberty and those who do not. Rather is over conflicting positions on the “Palestinian issue.”

All the howls of indignation over supposed infringements of freedom of expression are all somehow tethered to measures which impinge on the capacity to advance the Palestinian narrative: the financing of pro- Palestinian pressure groups; the public commemoration of the “Nakba”; and the boycott of Israel for its policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

Perversely, over the past two decades, support for Palestinian statehood has become the accepted badge of “liberal enlightenment.”

Endorsement of the establishment of an additional Arab autocracy—whether a tyrannical theocracy run by Islamist extremists, or a corrupt kleptocracy run by “sticky-fingered” thugs—became the litmus test of liberal-democratic credentials. It matters not that the putative Palestinian state will in all likelihood be the embodiment of a value system utterly antithetical to that invoked for its establishment—an entity where suppression of women, the oppression of gays and the repression of political dissidents are the order of the day. Any expression of doubt as to the prudence of its establishment is scornfully dismissed as merely one of a long array of derogatory “isms”: right-wing extremism, racism, or fascism—no matter how compelling the arguments produced demonstrating how despotic, destabilizing and dangerous the outcome would be.

Regrettably, the perversion of the democratic process—largely by its self-anointed champions—has been afoot for two decades.

Since the early ‘90s, the voters have consistently been confronted with situation in which the elected government has adopted the very policies rejected at the polls—policies that the winning party/candidate urged voters to oppose. Thus the hawkish Yitzhak Rabin adopted the dovish, and disastrous, Oslo-ian formula of the electorally unsuccessful far-left; Ariel Sharon implemented the unilateral disengagement he beseeched voters to reject when proposed by his Labor party rival, and even Binyamin Netanyahu accepted, albeit with great reluctance and reservation, the notion of Palestinian state he had vowed to oppose.

This phenomenon has nearly emptied the Israeli democratic process of any significance.

True, no one realistically expects any elected government to implement everything included its election manifesto, or to eschew all that is not. However, when elected parties/candidates regularly renege on a central plank of their platforms, on an issue that comprises the focal point of the election, and execute not only what they explicitly pledged to avoid, but precisely what their rivals proposed to implement, what is the point in voting at all?

What, and who, was behind these dramatic post-election policy reversals? Neither international pressure, nor coalition pressure—the usually proffered explanations—can persuasively account for them. There was little international—and no US—pressure on Israel to enter into negotiations with the PLO, still defined as a terror organization deep into the Oslo process; there was certainly no international pressure to undertake unilateral measures to withdraw from Gaza; and absolutely no political pressure from inside the incumbent coalitions to implement them. Indeed, the ruling coalitions of the time had to garner support for their new policies by an unsavory assortment of political “inducements,” from contrived ministerial portfolios to government-issued Mitsubishis.

No, what induced these reversals was a brutal, unrestrained assault on those elected to office, along with a coordinated common front embracing legal, media and academic related components, designed to subvert the will of the people as expressed at the polls. It was an assault that distorted the facts, suppressed the truth, silenced dissent and ridiculed dissenters. It was an assault mounted by the same civil-society circles that now would strip the elected legislature of any ability to resist the propagation of their ideological agenda.

These are circles that do not sanctify liberal democratic principles, but rather Palestinian statehood, as a supreme value. For them, that is the overriding objective to which all can—and must—be subordinated, including the democratic process.

It is this unscrupulous minority that would strip democratic Israel of any defenses, that would de-fang its military and debilitate its diplomacy. They are the real threat to democracy in the land. Their conduct is creating powerful disincentives for participation in the electoral process, and grave disenchantment with the democratic system.

They must be foiled at all costs. Otherwise the future for Israeli democracy may indeed be bleak. For once the electorate loses faith in democratic process, what is there to prevent the onset of alternative forms of governance…and what is there to stop the distance between governance by ballot and governance by bullet from becoming perilously close?