Apartheid

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demographic war thus overlaps with what I here refer to as the ‘conventional armed conflict’
between Israel and Arabs, a conflict in which male Palestinians are the main victims. 268
3.) Israel has the highest relative in-vitro fertilization rate in the world, the largest number of
fertilization clinics per capita in the world, and it is the only state in the world that fully
subsidizes fertilization treatment. 269
4.) Palestinians exhibit the probably highest population growth rate of any nation in the world;
in Gaza it is reportedly 3.77 per cent every year. During her lifetime the average Palestinian
Gaza woman gives birth to 5.91 children. Gaza is already one of the most densely populated
areas in the world. In the West Bank, the rate of growth is also very high – 3.13 per cent per
year. The average Palestinian West Bank woman gives birth to 4.4 children. The growth of
the ‘Israeli Arab’ population, i.e. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, is 3.4 per cent on
average per year – also one of the highest in the world. Israel’s growth rate as a whole,
excluding Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories, but including the 420,000 illegal
Israeli settlers in the same territories, is only 1.29 per cent, the lowest in the entire Middle
East. 270 (Entirely unrepresented in these statistics are of course the high premature death rates
of Palestinians and their low average life expectancy compared to Israelis.)
A fifth peculiarity, and fourth distinguishing mark of Israel’s, that could have been
added to the list is the following: No other country allows wives or life partners to have sperm
removed from a deceased man without prior written consent. 271 This circumstance, along with
268 See Davis, U.: Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, 2003: 62f, 91-108; Landy: 90 Inca
Israeli-Jews: Recruiting for the Demographic War, 2003. See also Chapter II.2.3, below, on Israel’s immigration
policies. Yossi Alpher, the Israeli intellectual and former adviser to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime
minister, has pointed out that most Israelis now prefer ‘demographic solutions’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
– including forced expulsions of Palestinians and the creation of isolated Palestinian ‘Bantustans’ – to
‘geographic solutions’, i.e. to continued Israeli territorial expansion. This marks a departure from earlier
predominant modes of strategic thinking in Israel, in which the two kinds of ‘solutions’ were more often seen as
mutually reinforcing each other. It also means that the demographic aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
gaining in importance and urgency, even in comparison with the conventional armed conflict. See Alpher:
Demography Tops Territory in New Strategic Calculus, 2005. On ethnic cleansing, see also Levy: Erasing the
Past in Israel, 2005. On the power of Zionist lobby groups, especially the American Israel Public Action
Committee (AIPAC), see Alam: Israel’s Proxy War? 2003
269 Kahn: Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel, 2000. (Incidentally, the
preferred sperm donors in Israel are Aryan-looking or Ashkenazy, blue-eyed men.) In a thoughtful review of this
book, the reviewer, Galina Vromen, describes four factors commonly held responsible for Israel leading the
world statistics in these matters: ‘...the belief held by rabbis that children born to unmarried women are
considered legitimate and full Jews; the common perception among both religious and secular Jews in Israel that
it is worse to be childless than to be a single mother; the social and financial support the country gives to singleparent
families; and – least discussed but certainly not the least important – the fear that the Jews will be vastly
outnumbered by Arabs as reflected in demographic trends.’ One could easily draw the conclusions that the last
factor is in fact the most important one, and, moreover, that the reviewer would agree with this judgment.
Vromen, Galina: Pro-Natal, Par Excellence, no date.
270 Central Intelligence Agency (USA): The World Factbook, 2005; Central Bureau of Statistics, Center for
Statistical Information, State of Israel, Prime Minister’s Office: The Arab Population in Israel, 2002. Both of
these sources should be read with caution as they may mix ulterior motives into their numbers. For a stark
example of Palestinian population numbers manipulated by the Israeli/Jewish far right, apparently unsuccessfully
devised to dissuade Sharon from carrying out his impending Gaza ‘disengagement’, see N.N.: Arab Population
in the West Bank & Gaza, January 10, 2005. See also Barkat: For First Time, Jews Are No Longer a Majority
between the Jordan and the Sea, 2005. It is important to point out, however, that the latter ‘leftist’ Israeli
approach falsifies history already in its headline, with remarkably selective amnesia, which obfuscates the fact
that less than one-third of Palestine’s population was Jewish when the state of Israel was founded on a part of the
territory that is Israel today, not to mention most of the rest of Palestinian history, during which Jews were not a
majority between the Jordan and the Sea. On the latter issue, see Whitelam: The Invention of Ancient Israel: The
Silencing of Palestinian History, 1996. On Israel having the lowest birth rate in the Middle East, see Abi-Aad &
Grenon 1997: 151, which also states that Israel only allows sterilization for health reasons.
271 N.N.: Israel to Let Wives Harvest Dead Husbands’ Sperm, November 13, 2003