BREEDING INSECURITY
By Peter Berkowitz
The Weekly Standard, June 14, 2004
ISRAELI JEWS prefer not to talk about the so-called demographic problem--the
challenge of maintaining a Jewish majority in their country while honoring the
rights of its large and growing Arab minority. Which is
understandable. The very term conjures up illiberal images of a
government classifying people by ethnicity, race, or religion. Yet in a state
that by self-definition is both democratic and Jewish--but almost 20 percent of
whose population are Israeli Arabs whose relation to
the majority and to the state is troubled--demography matters. Indeed, national
security in the broadest sense--including all threats, nonmilitary as well as
military, to a state's political sovereignty and territorial
integrity--increasingly compels Israelis to overcome their aversion and face
some very sobering facts.
Last December, at the fourth annual Herzliya
Conference on national security, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became the
first cabinet-level official to discuss the demographic problem directly in a
major public address. He began by stressing that it does not pertain to
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza: "We don't have
any interest in ruling the Palestinians," he said, "and therefore the
demographic problem will not exist in the territories when the Palestinian
population switches to Palestinian rule." Inside Israel,
however, the problem is one of numbers as well as the quality of civic
relations:
If Arab inhabitants are wonderfully integrated and their
numbers increase to 35-40 percent of the total inhabitants of the state, then
the Jewish state will have been abolished, and it will have turned into a binational state. If their numbers remain at about 20
percent, as they are today, or fall, but relations are stiff, contentious, and
violent, this too will hurt our democratic character. Therefore, we need a
policy that balances these two needs. First of all, it is necessary to assure a
Jewish majority in Israel.
I say this as a liberal, as a democrat, and as a Jewish and Zionist patriot.
The simplicity of Netanyahu's reasoning should not be allowed to obscure the
gravity of the implications. This is particularly so at a moment when Arab
intellectuals and Arab Knesset members openly contend that the democratic
minimum Israel
owes its Arab minority is to cease to be a Jewish state. Clearly, both the
numerical growth of the Arab minority in Israel and its mounting
estrangement from the Jewish majority imperil Israel's very existence as a state
that is both democratic and Jewish.
"YOU HAVE TO LOOK at the Jews in the Middle East
as a suburb of the West within the third world." This anomaly--that Israel belongs
both to the developed Western world and to the developing, non-Western
world--is the first lesson Itzhak Ravid
drives home in a wide-ranging informal tutorial on the demographic question in
Tel Aviv recently. A gruff, no nonsense retired military analyst and former
head of the Branch for Operations Research of the Israeli Air Force, Ravid was director of the national security team under
prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin in
1992-1993. He stresses the impossibility of understanding Israel's
population problem without placing it first in a regional--even a
global--context.
Consider the West. With its individualist ethic, egalitarian mores, welfare
systems, and high-tech health care, the modern West has low birthrates and low
infant mortality rates. This results in low rates of natural growth--beneath
replacement levels in many parts of Europe.
Non-Western nations, meanwhile, have relatively high population growth,
correlated with low rates of economic productivity. Some of these countries,
aspiring to economic prosperity, have slowed growth through social policy--China for one.
Elsewhere, social policy has failed to lower birthrates--as in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet that region has nothing like the fastest
growth in the world, largely because poor health care leaves infant mortality
high.
What about the Middle East? The land from Iran in the east
to Egypt
in the west is home to some of the highest natural rates of population growth
anywhere. Part of the explanation is the high value placed on having many
children in Muslim teaching and tradition. Yet these very high rates of growth
are not evenly distributed across the region. The three biggest countries--Turkey, Iran, and Egypt, which
comprise almost 75 percent of its inhabitants--have relatively slow growth. Turkey's
population of 68 million is growing at about 1.2 percent. Iran, with 68
million people, is growing at 1.1 percent. And Egypt, with 75 million, is growing
at 1.9 percent. These rates of natural growth are much higher than in Europe (Germany
is at .04 percent, Italy
.1 percent, France .4 percent) or the United States (.9 percent) but far lower
than elsewhere in the Middle East. The annual
natural growth rate in Syria
is 2.5 percent, in Jordan
2.8 percent, in Iraq
2.8 percent, in Saudi Arabia
3.3 percent--and in the Gaza Strip it is among the very highest on Earth, 3.9
percent.
Which brings us to Israel. Among Arab Muslims
in Israel,
the natural growth rate of 3.5 percent is nearly identical to that of Saudi Arabia.
By contrast, the natural growth rate of the dominant majority, Israel's
non-ultra-orthodox Jewish citizens, is around 1 percent. These numbers are
roughly reversed when it comes to two distinctive minorities. Among the
fraction of Israeli Arabs who are Christians, the natural rate of growth is 1.4
percent (and literacy rates and standards of living are high). And among the fraction
of Jewish Israelis who are ultra-orthodox, the natural rate of growth is 3.5
percent.
Social policies, Ravid argues, partly account for
the dramatic differences. Turkey,
Iran,
and Egypt
have energetic government programs, supported by the United Nations, to reduce
the population growth. In Iran,
the religious leadership has cooperated with the government, which has
presented family size reduction as part of the struggle against American
imperialism. The Iranian government has established birth control offices
throughout the country, and sends hundreds of mobile centers to rural areas. In
cooperation with international organizations, Egypt has undertaken a three-year
plan to lower the natural growth rate, and before that, President Mubarak was
making the case to Egyptians that to safeguard their children's opportunities
for education and health, parents must take their income into account when
planning their families. By contrast, until recently, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan have
seen no government campaign to slow the growth of population.
BUT SLOWING GROWTH is not always the goal of national population policies.
Even in the high-growth Middle East, according
to Ravid, two governments actually encourage large
families, the governments of Saudi
Arabia and--Israel.
They do this through government subsidies that make the marginal cost of
another child zero, or even a net gain, to relatively poor families with five
children or more. Odd though it may seem, in natural-resource poor Israel as in
oil rich Saudi Arabia,
the state rewards parents of large families for having larger ones.
In Israel,
this policy--which gives parents welfare payments for the fifth child five
times greater than the payments they receive for the first child--has had an
uneven effect, partly reflecting its peculiar history. Sponsored by
ultra-orthodox members of parliament, the subsidies benefit ultra-orthodox
families who for religious reasons have large families. It has no direct effect
at all on the 70 percent of the Israeli population that is Jewish but not
ultra-orthodox, who usually have Western-sized families. But the policy also
promotes the very high birthrate of Israeli Arabs, who at the same time enjoy
developed-world health care services and thus low infant mortality.
This takes a minute to sink in. "You're telling me that Arab citizens
of Israel
have sky-high natural rates of growth because of their high developing-world
fertility rates, combined with low developed-world infant mortality
rates," I ask, "and then the Israeli government pays large families
to have more children?"
The tutor's smile tells me I am catching on. He proceeds to explain a
curious economic-productivity gap related to these demographics.
Consider GDP per capita. In Israel,
it is about $17,000, whereas in Germany,
France,
and Italy
it is a third again as high, and in the United States it is nearly double.
Why the discrepancy? In significant measure, Ravid
continues, because of the lower per capita productivity among Arab Muslim
citizens, who make up some 16 percent of Israel's population, and among
ultra-orthodox Jews, another 8 percent of the population. In addition to the
high proportion of children in these groups, few Muslim women participate in
the labor force, and many ultra-orthodox Jewish men choose long years of
religious study rather than productive labor. In short, in Israel almost
75 percent of the population works and produces as in the West, and almost 25
percent of the population works and produces as in the non-Western world. The
resulting relatively low overall productivity is perfectly consistent with Israel's perch
between the West and the Middle East.
"You don't need politics to explain that," Ravid
notes in conclusion. "You don't need the Arab-Jewish conflict. It's quite
simple: In Israel
you have a heavy burden of communities from the economic point of view who
don't participate in the labor force."
HIS DIAGNOSIS COMPLETE, Ravid offers no solution
to Israel's
demographic predicament. Certainly, no substantial new wave of Jewish
immigration is in the offing. And inducing the sort of Westernized men and
women who make up the bulk of Israel's
Jewish majority to have more children is something no modern liberal democracy
has found a way to do.
Ravid's analysis does invite the conclusion,
however, that curbing the subsidies to very large families would usefully relink family size and cost. Perhaps in combination with
policies comparable to those in Israel's
largest Muslim neighbors, and with appropriate support for families caught in
the transition, this might encourage a family size among Arab citizens more
consistent with the developed-world social and economic life available in Israel. In
turn, that would increase productivity among Arab citizens, thereby raising
family income and further reducing the dependence of Arab citizens on the
government. The positive effects on Israel's ultra-orthodox community
might be similar. Of course, the extent to which either community would respond
to economic incentives in matters that touch the family and religion remains to
be seen.
This policy change is not merely an aspiration. In 2003 Netanyahu initiated
a reform that severely cut Israel's
child allowances starting with the fifth child. Interestingly, these cuts would
not have been possible but for a courageous decision made early in 2001 by
newly elected Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: By forging a center-right coalition
government not dependent on the ultra-orthodox parties (and consequently no
longer able to call on them in times of trouble), Sharon broke the decades-old ultra-orthodox
veto on social policy. Whether his government's reform will prove enough to cut
the Gordian knot of Israel's demographic problem is far from clear, for as
Netanyahu pointed out in his Herzliya address, the
problem is not only one of numbers, but also of the quality of relations
between citizens.
Peter Berkowitz teaches at George Mason
University School
of Law and is a fellow at Stanford's Hoover
Institution.