DEMOGRAPHICS DRIVE:

Demographics Drive Likud's Shifting Agenda (ORI NIR, DECEMBER 26, 2003, The Forward)

Driving the Likud's metamorphosis from "Greater Israel" dogmatism to separation pragmatism are not constraints of geography but of demography.

"Above all hovers the cloud of demographics," Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea of Yediot Aharonot last week, explaining his dramatic decision to come out in favor of unilateral Israeli withdrawal from most of the territories. "It will come down on us not in the end of days, but in just another few years," Olmert said, explaining that if Israel does not disengage from the West Bank and Gaza, the growth rate of Arabs in the territories and inside Israel — which is much higher than that of Jews — will sooner rather than later force Israel to choose between being a Jewish state and being a democratic one.

Olmert, the most outspoken of Likud's leaders on the need for separation, said: "We are approaching a point where more and more Palestinians will say: 'There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All we want is the right to vote.' The day they get it, we will lose everything." He added: "I shudder to think that liberal Jewish organizations that shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa will lead the struggle against us."

The demographic forecasts that Olmert alluded to are not new. Israeli demographers have been warning for years that by 2020, Jews will no longer be a majority of the population living in the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which includes the state of Israel proper as well as the disputed West Bank and Gaza. Israel's political left has been using these forecasts to advocate speeding up the peace process to bring an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.

But only recently have demographics come to fully reverberate in Israel's political echo-chamber and begun pushing the political agenda of the ruling party.

Folk are found of saying that demographics just show trends, which are entirely plastic in their view and need not be forecasts of the future. But no matter how deep in the sand you bury your head, those numbers change the future, don't they?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 29, 2003 9:26 PM