By Larry Derfner
For a while, I thought the “demographic threat” was seeping into Israelis’ consciousness, and would scare them into getting rid of the territories no matter what the cost in domestic tranquility. But I’ve changed my mind.
The demographic threat – i.e., the soon-to-be Arab majority in Israel and the territories, and what it will mean for this country’s Jewish and democratic character — is only a problem if you dwell on it. Israeli Jews not only don’t dwell on it, they don’t even notice it.
When I first visited Johannesburg in 1990, I asked somebody – a Jewish liberal – how many people lived there. He smiled a little uncomfortably and said, “Do you mean everybody or just the whites?”
He wasn’t used to counting blacks among his city’s population because they lived separate from his people, the dominant people. While blacks worked in the white areas, they blended into the background – subservient, quiet, keeping their heads down, invisible.
So it is with the Palestinians and the Arab citizens of Israel. There are nearly 5 million of them, but they are invisible to us 5-million-plus Jews.
So those big words – demography, democracy, majority, minority – are abstractions. In the real life of Israel’s Jews, those terms are irrelevant because the people they refer to are irrelevant.
With rare exceptions, Jews don’t have Arabs for neighbors or friends. Arabs don’t come to their homes and they don’t go to Arabs’ homes. Their children don’t go to school with Arabs or play with them after school.
Jews seldom work with Arabs, and in the unusual cases where they do, it’s almost never as equals. Here and there, they see Arab janitors, bakers or dishwashers – staying quiet, keeping their heads down.
Out of sight and mind
Jews not only avoid driving through the West Bank and (certainly) Gaza, many don’t even like to drive through the Arab Triangle in Galilee anymore. If they can, they stay off the highway that goes past Umm el-Fahm. Why take chances?
(Settlers do drive through the territories, but whenever possible on roads that are, by Israeli regulation, off-limits to Arabs.)
At home, around the neighborhood, in the shopping mall, in the park, at school, downtown, even on the road, the world of all but a tiny minority of Israel’s Jews is totally Jewish, utterly non-Arab. Even the Russian immigrant gentiles in this country count as sort of half-Jews because whatever anybody says about them, they’re not Arabs; and in a war between the Jews and Arabs they’ll be on our side.
So the demographic problem is strictly a matter of “out of sight, out of mind.” On my morning walks past the Modi’in police station, I used to see the arrested Palestinian construction workers standing behind the fence, waiting to be taken to jail or sent home.
Now the police have put up sheets of gray siding along the fence, so we can’t see the Palestinians nor they us.
So where is this demographic threat I keep hearing about, and how can it hurt us? By deleting the “Jewish” from our Jewish country? Please.
What’s the difference if the Central Bureau of Statistics says there are 51 percent Jews and 49 percent Arabs, or 49 percent Jews and 51 percent Arabs – or 39 percent Jews and 61 percent Arabs, for that matter.
As far as my crowd can see, it’s about 99 percent Jews and 1 percent Arabs. If that’s not a Jewish country, what is?
As far as democracy goes, everybody I know can vote. Nobody I know has to go through an army checkpoint and get humiliated or worse just to get home. Everybody in my world has full democratic rights and always will. So what’s the problem?
The only real-life problem connected with the demographic threat, as far as Jews are concerned, is terror — and the army seems to be getting a handle on that, if not perfectly then tolerably. Between the wall and the constant military pressure on the Palestinians, Israelis are now living a fair approximation of what they consider normal life.
Except for Sderot, the settlements are the only places where it’s still really dangerous; and most Israelis figure that nobody forced those people to go live there.
As to the soldiers killing and dying in the territories, that’s nothing new. Israeli boys have always had to fight Arabs, and their parents have gotten used to the idea that they always will.
Regarding how the boys let off steam at the checkpoints and on patrol, they don’t talk about that when home on leave, and their parents don’t ask.
So what is the big deal about the demographic threat? We’ve coped with it brilliantly so far, and there’s no reason why we can’t continue indefinitely.
Is something important going to happen when the baby is born who gives the Arabs a 50 percent-plus-one majority west of the Jordan? Will we Jews here feel any different than we did however many minutes before, when we had the 50 percent-plus-one?
During that brief interval, will Israel go from being a Jewish, democratic country to being an Arab, undemocratic one?
In real life, of course, nothing will change; and if anything changes in theory, I’m sure it won’t be noticed.
Larry Derfner writes about Israeli society for U.S. Jewish newspapers and the Jerusalem Post.
Loading ...