A point of an earlier chapter, that the more religious the community the larger the families and the more secular and agnostic a people the fewer the children, is underscored by Eric Kaufmann in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? According to Kaufmann, “Ultra-Orthodox Jews, whether in Israel, Europe or North America, have a two or threefold fertility advantage over their liberal-Jewish counterparts. Their eventual achievement of majority status within worldwide Jewry in the twenty-first century seems certain.”50
An Israeli blogger writes that in Israel nearly 30 percent of all children one to four years old are Arab. And many Israelis, adds John Mearsheimer, now choose to live outside the country.
There are somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million Israeli Jews living outside the country, many of whom are unlikely to return. Since 2007, emigration has been outpacing immigration in Israel. According to scholars John Mueller and Ian Lustick, “a recent survey indicates that only 69 percent of Jewish Israelis say they want to stay in the country, and a 2007 poll finds that one-quarter of Israelis are considering leaving, including almost half of all young people.”51
Housing minister Ariel Atias warns of a migration of the growing Arab population into Jewish sectors of Israel:
I see [it] as a national duty to prevent the spread of a population that, to say the least, does not love the state of Israel.… If we go on like we have until now, we will lose the Galilee. Populations that should not mix are spreading there. I don’t think it is appropriate [for them] to live together.52
“The mayor of Acre visited me yesterday for three hours and asked me how his town could be saved,” Atias said, “He told me that Arabs are living in Jewish buildings and running them out.” Atias urged that land be sold to Jews and Arabs separately, “to create segregation … between Jews and Arabs but also between other sectors, such as ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews.”53
Not any Iranian weapon of mass destruction but demography is the existential crisis of the Jewish nation. According to UN figures, Israel’s population will exceed 10 million by 2050. But the Arab share will be almost 30 percent. Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, 4.4 million today, will then number more than 10 million. Jordan’s population, 60 percent of which is Palestinian, will also double to 10 million.
By midcentury, then, Palestinians west of the Jordan River will outnumber Jews two to one. Add Palestinians in Jordan, it is three to one. And that does not count Palestinians in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the Gulf states, whose numbers will also double by 2050. Palestinians today have one of the highest fertility rates on earth, 5 children per woman, though an Israeli source says that in Israel it has fallen to 3.9 and, without the Bedouins of the Negev, 3.2 children per woman.54 Only Orthodox Jews in Israel, of whom there are some 800,000, exceed that.
If Israel is to remain a Jewish state, a Palestinian state seems a national imperative. Yitzhak Rabin came to recognize this, but was assassinated. Ehud Barak came to recognize this and sought to bring it about. In his last days in office, Ehud Olmert warned, “if the two-state solution collapses,” Israel will “face a South African-style struggle.”55
Three months before he launched the Gaza war, Olmert told two journalists that peace would require a return of the Golan Heights to Syria, the surrender of almost the entire West Bank, and the return of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians.
In the end, we will have to withdraw from the lion’s share of the territories, and for the territories we leave in our hands, we will have to give compensation in the form of territories within the State of Israel at a ratio that is more or less 1:1.… Whoever wants to hold on to all of [Jerusalem] will have to bring 270,000 Arabs inside the fences of sovereign Israel. It won’t work.56
Absent a Palestinian state, Israel has three options. First, annex the West Bank, the one-state solution. This would bring 2.4 million Palestinians into Israel, giving her a population 40 percent Arab. With their birth rate, the Palestinians would soon outnumber the Jews and vote to abolish the Jewish state—the end of the Zionist dream. Second is the Kahane solution. The late Rabbi Meir Kahane, assassinated in New York, urged the expulsion of all Palestinians from Judea and Samaria. But such ethnic cleansing would mean war with the Arabs, the isolation of Israel, and the alienation of the United States. The third option is no annexation, no Palestinian state, no expulsions—but permanent Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza. This would entail making Gaza a penal colony of 1.5 million with no way out by land, sea, or air, save by leave of the Israeli Defense Force. On the West Bank, it would mean confinement of a burgeoning population of millions in enclaves wedged between the Israeli wall and the Jordan River, dotted by checkpoints and bisected by roads set aside for the exclusive use of Israelis. Travel in and out of the West Bank would be by sufferance of the IDF.
In January 2010, Defense Minister Barak implied that Prime Minister Netanyahu was leading Israel toward such a future, and that the Jewish people could not live with it.
The lack of defined boundaries within Israel, and not an Iranian bomb, is the greatest threat to our future.… It must be understood that if between the Jordan and the [Mediterranean] sea there is only one political entity, called Israel, it will by necessity either not be Jewish or not democratic and we will turn into an apartheid state.57
Olmert echoed Barak: “As soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”58
THE NEIGHBORS
This is not the only demographic crisis Israel faces. According to UN population projections, by 2050, Syria’s population of 22 million will increase to 37 million. Saudi Arabia’s 26 million will increase to 44 million. Egypt will grow by 46 million to 130 million. The Islamic Republic of Iran, with a population of 75 million today, is expected to grow to 97 million by midcentury. And from Hamas in the south to Hezbollah in the north to the Muslim Brotherhood in the west, the Islamic faith of Israel’s neighbors grows in militancy. If the threat within comes from a surging Palestinian population, the external threat comes from Israel’s neighbors. To assess the magnitude of the problem, compare the population of Israel and the nations with which she went to war in 1967—to their projected populations in 2050.
Populations
Nation
1967 (Millions)
2050 (Millions)
Israel
2.7
10.5
Jordan
1.3
10.1
Syria
5.6
37.0
Saudi Arabia
5.0
44.0
Egypt
33.0
130.0
To this correlation of forces, add again this fact: Palestinians west of the Jordan today almost equal in number the Jewish population of Israel.
The Israeli right, led by Netanyahu’s Likud Party and the Israel Our Home Party of Avigdor Lieberman, says it will never permit a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, never negotiate with Hamas, and never accept a Palestinian state led by Hamas. Nor will it agree to a Palestinian state that does not give up the right of return, recognize Israel as a Jewish state forever, and accept severe limitations on its sovereignty. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz adds that any acceptance of a right of return for Palestinian Arabs to the lands from which their fathers and grandfathers were driven or fled, “would achieve demographically what the Arab nations have been unable to achieve militarily—destruction of the Jewish state.” Israelis, says Dershowitz, need to “protect Israel against demographic annihilation.”59
This means no Palestinian state. For no Arab leader could recognize a Palestine that gave up the right of return and agreed to cede all of Jerusalem to Israel forever, and survive. Behind Israel’s stand lies an assumption not self-evidently true: time is on Israel’s side. If demography is destiny, it transparently is not, for the Islamic world is exploding with new life.
Consider. In 1950, Goldstone writes, the populations of Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and
Turkey added up to 242 million. Last year, these six most populous Muslim nations had a combined population of 885 million. The six are expected to add 475 million people by 2050 for a total of 1.36 billion, almost all of whom will be Muslim and poor. “Worldwide,” writes Goldstone, “of the 48 fastest growing countries today—those with annual population growth of 2 percent or more—28 are majority Muslim or have Muslim minorities of 33 percent or more.”60
OLD MOTHER RUSSIA
With the collapse of the empire and breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia seems to have lost the will to live. In an historic development, Russia’s population has fallen from 148 million in 1991 to 140 million today and is projected to plunge to 116 million by 2050, a loss of 32 million Russians in six decades.61 If these projections hold, six decades of freedom will have resulted in the disappearance of more Russians than seventy years of Bolshevism, from the October Revolution through the civil war of 1919–1920, to the starvation of the Kulaks, the Great Terror of the 1930s, the gulag, and all the dead of the Great Patriotic War with Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945.
Of all the numbers in UN world population projections, the figures on Russia are the most depressing. Her fertility rate is two-thirds of what is needed to replace her people. Every year, for every thousand Russians, there are 11 births and 15 deaths. In 2007, the UN projected that Russia’s population shrinkage would average 750,000 annually for the next forty years. And no end is in sight.
The revised figures of 2008 offered a more optimistic assessment. The fertility rate of Russian women will rise to three-fourths of what is needed to maintain zero population growth. However, the OECD, as of 2009, projects a Russian population under 108 million in 2050.62 Martin Walker graphically describes what is happening to the late superpower and largest country on earth:
In Russia, the effects of declining fertility are amplified by a phenomenon so extreme that it has given rise to an ominous new term—hypermortality. As a result of the rampant spread of maladies such as HIV/AIDS and alcoholism and the deterioration of the Russian health care system, says a 2008 report by the UN Development Program, “mortality in Russia is 3–5 times higher for men and twice as high for women” than in other countries at a comparable stage of development. The report … predicts that within little more than a decade the working-age population will be shrinking by up to one million people annually. Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war.63
In “Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb,” Nicholas Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, writes:
A specter is haunting Russia today. It is not the specter of Communism—that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past—but rather of depopulation—a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation.… as Russians practice what amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing.64
Marxist theory famously envisioned the “withering away” of the state. But, writes Eberstadt, “Russia has seen a pervasive and profound change in childbearing patterns and living arrangements—what might be described as a ‘withering away’ of the family itself.”65
The death rate in Russia, especially among men, is now at levels found only in less-developed countries of the Third World. “History,” writes Eberstadt, “offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline.”66
One effect of Russia’s vanishing population will be a constrained foreign policy. As former ambassador Richard Fairbanks wrote in the aftermath of the Russia-Georgia clash of 2008:
Russia’s incursion into Georgia understandably evokes Cold War–era fears of a resurgent post-Soviet imperialism. But such concerns overlook a fundamental constraint. Russia is fast running out of young men.
Between 2010 and 2025, Russia’s pool of potential military recruits, aged 20–29, will decline by 44 percent, according to the United Nations. This forecast is not subject to meaningful revision; it has been “written in stone” by births that have already occurred.67
Defense consultant William Hawkins echoes Fairbanks. Citing the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025, Hawkins writes, “The loss of the Near Abroad and demographic declines within Russia itself have reduced its population base. By 2017, the NIC notes, ‘Russia is likely to have only 650,000 18-year-old males from which to maintain an army that today relies on 750,000 recruits.’”68
Like the Aral Sea, the fourth largest lake in the world in 1960, which has lost 60 percent of its acreage and 80 percent of its volume, Russia’s evaporating pool of young men will constrain Moscow’s military. And there will be deficiencies across the Russian economy as the number of workers entering the labor force declines year after year. Ex-CIA director Michael Hayden believes Russia will have to import workers from the Caucasus, Central Asia, and China, exacerbating ethnic and religious tensions in a country with a history of xenophobia.69
Russia confronts yet another crisis in the rapid growth in her Muslim population, especially in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia in the North Caucasus, where secessionist sentiment is strong. Grozny, capital of Chechnya, was leveled in the second Chechen war when Vladimir Putin restored the rebellious province at a heavy cost in blood.
Since 1989, Russia’s Muslim population has risen 40 percent to 25 million, as Muslims, with high birth rates, pour in from the former Soviet republics. By 2020, Muslims are expected to be one-fifth of the nation. Arab news network Al Jazeera is projecting that, by 2040, half the people living in Russia will be followers of the Prophet. Adds Foreign Policy, “Throw into the mix anger about the ongoing Muslim insurgency in Chechnya and smoldering resentment about the demise of the Soviet Union, and you have a potent recipe for an ugly nationalist movement—or something worse.”70
Mother Russia is dying and the geostrategic consequences will be earth-shaking. By 2050, Russia may still control twice the landmass of China, but with less than a tenth of China’s population. In the Far East, six million Russians are outnumbered two hundred to one by Chinese.71 These aging Russians sit on Earth’s last great storehouse of oil, gas, timber, gold, coal, furs, and natural resources, which a huge and hungry China needs. In “Rivalries of the Bear and Dragon,” the Financial Times writes that Russia is “paranoid about the thinly populated eastern third of its landmass.”72 And understandably so. Arnon Gutfeld of Tel Aviv University “predicts that by 2050 Russia will have insufficient human resources to control the territory it occupies.”73 Russia faces, says Putin, “the serious threat of turning into a decaying nation.”74
Although Moscow is aligned with Beijing in the Shanghai Cooperation Committee, created to push the United States out of Central Asia, America is no threat to Mother Russia. Americans prefer to buy what the Chinese may one day be prepared to take.
With the populations aging and dying in Eastern and Southern Europe, there has been no shortage of ideas for dealing with the existential crisis of the West. Yet some environmentalists are imploring Europe not to interfere, not to grant incentives for families to have more than two children. “Women bearing children in an industrialized world … have an enormous impact on global warming,” writes John Feffer, of Foreign Policy in Focus. “American women having babies generate seven times the carbon output of Chinese women having babies.”75 Feffer believes Western nations should not seek to raise birth rates but should open their doors to the people the Third World produces in abundance, who have tiny carbon footprints. In what is surely an understatement, Feffer argues, “It won’t be easy to persuade Russians to welcome large numbers of Chinese into Siberia or Italy to embrace more Nigerians.”76 His solution—a world migration summit.
President Obama, the son of an immigrant, should spearhead the initiative. By pushing for a migration summit he can demonstrate that the United States is finally ready to play well with others. Such a Statue of Liberty play would be a fitting way for the president to spend the political capital of the Nobel Prize and secure hi
s legacy as a global leader.77
It would also be a fitting way to expedite Obama’s early return to Illinois.
SECOND THOUGHTS IN SHANGHAI
In December 2009, the Washington Post reported on a population crisis in a country where few would expect it—the world’s most populous nation, China, with 1.3 billion people.
“More than 30 years after China’s one-child policy was introduced, creating two generations of notoriously chubby, spoiled only children affectionately nicknamed ‘little emperors,’” wrote Ariana Eunjung Cha from Shanghai, “a population crisis is looming in the country.”78
The average birthrate has plummeted to 1.8 children per couple as compared with six when the policy went into effect, according to the UN Population Division, while the number of residents 60 and older is predicted to explode from 16.7 percent of the population in 2020 to 31.1 percent by 2050.79
Using UN projections of a Chinese population of 1.4 billion by 2050, this translates into 440 million people in China over age sixty, an immense burden of retired, elderly, and aging for the labor force to carry and the country to care for. Shanghai is already approaching that point, with more than 20 percent of its population over sixty, while the birthrate is below one child per couple, one of the lowest anywhere on earth. Due to Beijing’s one-couple, one-child policy, which has led to tens of millions of aborted baby girls, 12 to 15 percent of young Chinese men will be unable to find wives. As single males are responsible for most of society’s violence, the presence of tens of millions of young single Chinese men portends a time of trouble in the Middle Kingdom. Peter Hitchens toured China to assess the impact of the draconian policy he calls “gendercide” for its systematic extermination of baby girls.
By the year 2020, there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in the giant empire.… Nothing like this has ever happened to any civilization before.… [S]peculation is now seething about what might happen: a war to cull the surplus males, a rise in crime, a huge expansion in the prostitution that is already a major industry in every Chinese city, a rise in homosexuality.80
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 19
