Apartheid

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the state of Israel’s in-vitro fertilization policy, means a new stage in demographic warfare
technology has been reached. New biological ‘weapons’ are being produced and used.
In contrast, as late as 1986, the ‘demographic war’ between Israeli Jews and
Palestinian Arabs was still accurately described by Abu-Lughod as follows:
The weapon par excellence adopted by the Jewish community to enhance its
claim to Palestine was migration; the weapon of the Palestinian Arab
population to maintain its legitimate claim to the country has been natural
increase. 272
Today, the Palestinian weapon remains the same, and it is a formidable one, the
perhaps highest ‘natural’ birth rate in the world. But the Israeli one has now changed:
migration remains the main weapon, yet new ones have been developed and devised, at a high
financial cost, and with dire long-term indirect human costs. Bio-war has gone hi-tech.
On the face of it, new state interventions such as the globally unique corpse sperm
removal policy – or the globally unique, entirely state-subsidized fertilization treatment, the
most utilized one in the world – are not ethnicist provisions per se, but the vast majority of
Jewish citizens of Israel make these peculiarities (or world records) that Israel holds function
as institutionalized ethnicism. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship only make up around 20 per
cent of the total population, and they do not use the fertilization and insemination treatments
provided by the state to the extent that Jews do, neither in absolute nor in relative terms. They
hardly use it at all since they have children at a much younger age, and have a much higher
birth rate than the Israeli Jews anyway.
Israeli Jews are (still) mainly fighting the demographic war with an unparalleled
ethnicist immigration policy 273 , which takes much of the heat off younger Jewish women,
enabling them to get pregnant later than other women elsewhere in the world. There is no
counterpart at all to the Israeli immigration policy among Palestinians. The state of Israel
controls all Palestinian borders with plenty of military and paramilitary personnel, firearms,
steel, concrete, razor wire, and sophisticated electronics and software, including a maze of
oppressive legislation, to ensure that immigration to Palestine (outside the illegal Jewish
settlements) is practically non-existent, despite international law, e.g. the right of return of
Palestinian refugees, i.e. of the majority of Palestinians, who are not allowed to go home by
Israel. Palestinians in general are simply not allowed to be as ethnicist as the Israelis are, (and
neither is anyone else, except perhaps the Americans).
And therefore, the main losers in this war are Palestinian women. Palestine’s high
birth rate, however, also has many other determinants that lie outside the causal factors behind
the demographic war. Gaza does not only have one of the highest birth rates in the world, it
also has one of the highest unnatural premature death rates. The birth rate therefore represents
a kind of ‘pre-emptive’ replacement of children. We will look at further factors influencing
the Palestinian birth rate in Section II.2.
The lack of Palestinian immigration and the Israeli prohibition of Palestinian
repatriation, the forbidden return of Palestinian refugees, are producing all kinds of pressures
and expectations on Palestinian women to handle most if not all of the demographic warfare
against Israel, against overwhelming odds, including Jewish and other non-Arab immigration,
Israeli anti-refugee policy, and hyper-modern fertilization and insemination aid. And still,
Palestinians are prevailing, but at a terrible cost.
Palestinian men also suffer tremendously in the demographic war, as well as being the
main losers by body-count in the war of conventional armed conflict. They have to provide
for rapidly growing families in a shattered economy that exhibits an extremely high
272 Abu-Lughod 1986
273 Mikhail: How to Create a State: Israel’s Settlement and Immigration Policy, 2005