Apartheid

colonies within and around the city have become constant elements of
Israel’s demographic engineering through ethnic cleansing. 334
169
These words by the Palestinian legislator, Hanan Ashrawi, sum up the situation as
‘unique’. There is no question that this has been done before, as can also be seen in the title of
the entire text, presented at the World Conference against Racism in August- September 2001,
from which the quote above was lifted – ‘World Should Intervene to End the Israeli
Apartheid’ – but in today’s world, Ashrawi is correct: Israel definitely stands alone in its
blatant practice of apartheid.
Repopulation in Israel also takes forms similar to both South Africa under white rule
and to even more sinister oppression in the Third Reich, namely in the form of the ‘population
management’ to which Ashrawi refers. This is a further dimension to the demographic war
referred to in the previous section. Next to ethnicist depopulation, immigration and
fertilization measures, there is a wide range of additional efforts by the Israeli elites to make
Israel and Palestine more Jewish and less Arab.
The Israel Council for Demography (ICD), which comprises top Israeli gynecologists,
public figures, lawyers, scientists and physicians, met in the summer of 2002 to ‘encourage
the Jewish women of Israel – and only them – to increase their child bearing, a project which,
if we judge from the activity of the previous council, will also attempt to stop abortions’
according to Gideon Levy. ‘[M]ethods to increase the Jewish fertility rate and prevent
abortions’, and ‘techniques to encourage abortions and reduce the birthrate among Arab
women’, were both to be ‘at the center of the committee’s discussions’. 335
Another commentator, Will Youmans, remarks that ‘[t]his obsession is binary and
inverse: they want more Jews and less Palestinians.’ A state policy which aims to outlaw
abortion for Jewish women and encourage abortion for Arab women needs to emphasize the
differences between these two kinds of women, preferably by considering them as belonging
to different races or even different species (see Chapter II.9.3, below). Moreover, the ICD
encourages all-Jewish pregnancies by offering tax breaks, ‘housing benefits and other
government grants’, as well as further discouraging mixed marriages, (as if they were not
already enough discouraged, i.e. made practically impossible, except for some people who
marry abroad). The ICD is first and foremost one of the numerous examples in which Israel
remains an ethnicist state. But it is also a sexist state: almost all of the ICD participants, like
the dominant political, military, religious, and economic elites in Israel, are male. 336
A remarkable parallel among many between apartheid South Africa and Israel is the
following: Just as South Africa had twice as many family planning clinics as health clinics for
Blacks in 1991, the state of Israel, within which the oppressive ethnic group is a large
majority, had more fertility clinics per capita than any other country in the world ten years
later. Israel also has the world’s highest per capita rate of in-vitro fertilization procedures.
Fertility treatments are fully subsidized by Israeli national health insurance. It is crucial to
realize here that these phenomena are not the result of unusually high rates of infertility in
Israel. Israelis are in fact no less fertile than other people. 337
For non-Jews, especially Arabs, Israeli immigration policies prior to the outbreak of
the Second Intifada became ‘increasingly restrictive. Many immigrants are unable to marry,
334 Ashrawi August 28, 2001
335 Levy: Wombs in the Service of State, 2002, quoted in Barghouti, O. 2002.
336 Youmans: Understanding the Existential Threat: Israel’s Demographic Obsession, 2002. See also Foa
December 2, 2002. Similar to the ICD in goals is EFRAT (www.efrat.org.il/en/), an organization calling for an
end to abortions for Jewish women, and Jewish women alone, in Israel. It is an organization endorsed and
supported by the Israeli president, Moshe Katzav, as well as by the former prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu.
See Parry: Haaretz.com Runs Ad Discouraging Jewish Abortions as “Only Solution” to Arab Population Growth,
2005.
337 Kahn 2000; Vromen no date