Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: natalità in Israele

Haretz fa un reality check - brutte notizie per gli allarmisti in nome
della demografia
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1084014.html
Defusing the demographic scare, by Paul Morland
Demography has been used in Israel for decades by both left and right
to advance and justify policies in the territories and regarding
borders. Early advocates of a withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank,
for example, cited, in addition to moral arguments, the fear that
Arabs would eventually outnumber Jews in the land under Israeli
control. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has called for
the state's borders to be re-drawn so as to exclude as many Arab
citizens as possible, in order to reduce what he perceives as a
demographic threat to the Jewish state.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of these proposals, they should be
argued on their merits and not on the basis of false assumptions and
fears. Hence, it is important that the public at least have some idea
of what the demographic reality actually is. There may be disputes
about numbers in the territories, but within Israel itself the facts
are clear, and they deserve to be more widely known.
In the early days of the state, the Arab minority underwent a
"demographic transition," something that often occurs when traditional
societies confront modernity. Health care and living standards
improved rapidly, life expectancy rose and infant mortality fell, but,
initially, family size remained large. As a result, Israel's Arab
population expanded fast, and maintained or even increased its
proportion of the population, despite the massive Jewish immigration
to the state. In the 1960s, Israeli Muslim women were still having on
average nine children.
However, after the first stage of demographic transition - a falling
death rate, a persistently high birthrate and thus rapid population
growth - invariably comes a second stage, in which birthrates fall.
This is now happening within Israeli Arab society, and has been for
some time. The average Israeli Arab woman is now having fewer than
half the children she had in the 1960s, while the Jewish birthrate has
recently stabilized and even risen. This is seen in the number of
children actually born each year. In 2001, there were around 95,000
Jewish births in Israel and 41,000 Arab births. Just seven years
later, in 2008, Jewish births had risen to over 117,000, but Arab
births had declined to less than 40,000. In a period that constitutes
barely a quarter of a generation, Arab births had fallen from around
30 percent of the total to around 25 percent. This has been a steady
trend and, should it continue, it will only be a very short time
before Jewish and Arab births each year are broadly proportionate to
the overall balance of Jews and Arabs in the population as whole -
that is, 4:1, or 80 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
This should not come as any surprise, for although the relatively high
Jewish birthrate in Israel bucks the trend for developed societies,
the decline in the Arab birthrate within Israel accords with recent
trends in the Islamic world. Today Israeli women as a whole have more
children (2.77) than women in Iran (1.71), Bahrain (2.53), Algeria
(1.82), Morocco (2.57), Indonesia (2.34) or Turkey (1.87). Latest
figures suggest that Israeli women now have more children than women
in Egypt (2.72), Jordan (2.47) or Lebanon (1.87). As recently as 2003,
Syrian women had a fertility rate 50 percent higher than that of
Israeli women. By 2008, it was only 16 percent higher.
None of the above takes account of the Arab population beyond the
Green Line. Here the data are less reliable, but two things seem
clear: Birthrates remain high, but they are falling fast. The number
of births in the West Bank in 2003 suggested that Palestinian women
there were having on average five children. Last year, that number was
not much higher than three children, an astonishing transformation for
so short a period of time.
Whatever the situation in the territories, within sovereign Israel,
the message is fairly straightforward: Jewish and Arab birthrates are
converging. What politicians and the public should concern themselves
with is not how large a minority the Arab population will be - on the
basis of recent trends and projections, it is unlikely to grow much
beyond its current 20 percent - but rather what kind of minority it
will be. Will it be an integrated part of society, upwardly mobile,
both socially and economically, enjoying and contributing to the
fruits of Israeli society, a potential bridge to the region and an
advertisement for Israel's inclusiveness and tolerance? Or will it
become marginalized, alienated and increasingly hostile? That depends
very much on the Jewish majority's attitudes and the government's
policies. It also depends on a pragmatic and realistic Arab leadership
looking out for the interests of its constituency and basing its
strategy on a sober understanding of its own demographic prospects.
For a favorable outcome, it would be prudent to concentrate on
defusing not the "demographic time bomb," but the time bomb of ill-
informed and misleading demographic scare-mongering.

 Defusing the demographic scare, by Paul Morland
Ormai sono anni che si sa.
Mi sorprendo che passi ancora come una notizia
Tb
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-- 
Tb

 Mi sorprendo che passi ancora come una notizia
Per molti lettori di Haaretz, soprattutto non israeliani, è una
notizia del tutto inedita. Altri danno la colpa alle maledizioni
ebraiche, che rinsecchiscono il pisello di chi si oppone al sominio
sionista.

 notizia del tutto inedita
palle