I am potentially dooming myself here. I am going to write something about Israel-Palestine. I very much wish for people of any description to stop dying (I shouldn’t need to say that but here we are). I am not going to comment on who are the Goodies and who are the Baddies. Instead I want to look at some data.
How many people live in Israel-Palestine and who are they?
Well, it breaks down like this:
There are 7 million Jews in Israel-Palestine of which about 500k live in the West Bank.
There are 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.
There are 2 million Gazan Palestinians.
There are 3 million West Bank Palestinians
There are about 500k “others”.
And about 8.5 million Jews live outside Israel (mostly in the USA).
And about 7 million Palestinians live outside Israel-Palestine
So right now, the number of Jews vs Arabs is about equally matched in Israel-Palestine.
But what happens in the future?
Population growth rates are declining over time for all populations.
Jewish population growth in the 90s was boosted by immigration (esp. from the former USSR). That has now slowed to a trickle.
Jewish population growth is 1.8% per year.
Palestinian citizens of Israel population growth is 2.2%.
The median age of Israeli Jews is 31.6. For Israeli Arabs it is 21.1
Palestinian population growth is about 2.2% in Gaza and 1.8% in the West Bank.
Obviously none of this takes into account large-scale voluntary or involuntary population movements.
Twenty years ago, Netanyahu described Arab population growth as a “demographic bomb”. Currently the Arab population is growing at a faster rate than the Jewish population - but not by a huge amount. These changes will play out over decades (rather than years). If this is a bomb then it has very long fuse.
Religiously moderate Jews in particular are caught between the demographic river and the sea. The Ultra Orthodox (or Haredim) are growing at double the rate of the rest of the Jewish population. They currently make up 14% of the Israeli population but they are having a lot of children. As the men folk tend to devote themselves to religious study, they have far higher rates of poverty and unemployment and far lower rates of military participation than the rest of the Israeli Jewish population. Exactly how sustainable that is remains to be seen.
In my ideal world, every one would stop fighting and get on with living next to each other. However we do not live in my ideal world. What is both noteworthy and depressing is that attitudes on both sides are mirror images of each other: believing that the goal of the other side is to commit genocide against them, that they are the real victims, and that the other side are inhuman monsters. A plurality of Palestinians want a two state solution. A plurality of Israeli Jews support annexation of the West Bank without equal rights for Palestinians.
Perhaps the only bright spot is: “Over 60 percent on both sides prefer a regional peace based on a two-state solution and normalization if the alternative is a regional, multi-front war.”
If the ultra-orthodox are growing at a much faster population rate, and have higher rates of poverty and unemployment, that suggests a growing proportion of the Jewish population of Israel will be drawn to populist, authoritarian, scapegoating politics, yes? Which decreases the likelihood of a peaceful resolution?
Can't access this but it looks relevant: Genocidal Mirroring in Israel/Palestine - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623528.2024.2361978