Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: la bufala diplomatica e quella demografica

http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/72679/time-out/
Conventional wisdom says Israel must reach a peace deal quickly,
before population trends and diplomatic isolation overtake the Jewish
state. Demographics and geopolitics tell a different story.
By David P. Goldman | Jul 20, 2011 7:00 AM
The press center at Middle East peace talks, January 2000.
CREDIT: SVEN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images
“Time isn’t on Israel’s side” must be the most-repeated phrase in
Israeli politics, in the Jewish state as well as in the Diaspora. It’s
Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni’s refrain [1], as Simon Schama put it
recently in the Financial Times. Ronald Lauder, the president of the
World Jewish Congress, said so in a Jerusalem speech [2] to Jewish
legislators from various parliamentary democracies June 29. We’ve
heard the same shibboleth this year from Australia’s Foreign Minister
Kevin Rudd [3], Turkish commentator Ömer Taşpinar [4], Rabbi Donniel
Hartman [5] of the Shalom Hartmann Institute, Jewish Week editor Gary
Rosenblatt [6], and many others.
The claim that Israel is fighting the clock has two components:
diplomacy and demographics. Israel’s diplomatic isolation will corner
the Jewish state while fast-breeding Arabs will overwhelm the
population balance between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean,
goes the argument. On both counts, though, the facts speak against the
notion that time is running out for Israel. Time, on the contrary,
seems to be on Israel’s side.
The Palestine Authority’s much-feared march toward a United Nations
vote for statehood has become something of an embarrassment. A vote
for statehood in the General Assembly has no legal implications, and
the United States will always veto the measure in the Security
Council. Some Palestinian leaders think [7] that token support in the
General Assembly will do more harm than good; Palestine Authority
Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki last week offered to withdraw the
U.N. vote if negotiations with Israel restarted before September. And
even the Kingdom of Jordan might vote [8] against Palestinian
statehood, according to the Middle East Research Center’s Alexander
Bligh.
Arab rhetoric in support of Palestinian statehood, moreover, isn’t
matched by real support. Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority’s
prime minister, complained [9] last week that Arab donors have paid
out only a third of their pledges to his government, leaving the
Palestinian Authority without enough cash to pay public employees’
salaries. “The Palestinians cannot count on the friends cheering them
on rhetorically to step up financially if the going gets rough post-
September,” warned [10] Michael Singh, an associate fellow at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in a blog post on Foreign
Policy’s website.
Israel hardly seems as isolated as it did before Greece blocked
another Gaza flotilla earlier this month, and the IHH—the Hamas-linked
Turkish “charity” that sponsored the Mavi Marmara flotilla last year—
dropped out of the exercise. Israeli diplomacy seemed quite effective.
“The decision [for IHH to drop out] was taken for no other reason than
that the Turkish government has made restoring its previously
excellent relationship with Israel a priority,” reported [11] Stephen
Pollard in the Guardian. “The very last thing the Turkish prime
minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wants is another pointless conflict.
Having been re-elected for a third term he no longer needs to play to
the gallery and paint Israel as a pantomime villain—his stock message
since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009. With Syrian
troops on his southern border, Erdogan has been keen to move on from
the Mavi Marmara incident and return to good relations and military co-
operation with Israel.”
Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Muslim countries—including Turkey—have
shifted their rhetoric away from Israel and toward the risk of rising
Iranian influence. Only a few months ago, conventional wisdom stated
that the United States needed a Middle East peace deal to steer the
Arab Spring in a pro-American direction. But as it turned out, the
Arab Spring had little to do with the Palestine issue, and as the
political chaos in the Arab world became less tractable, Israel’s
position improved [12].
Israel is less isolated because Syria is isolated—except for Iran’s
continued sponsorship—and because civil wars in Yemen and Libya and
renewed political unrest [13] in Egypt have validated Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim before the U.S. Congress in May that
“Israel is the one anchor of stability” in “an unstable Middle East.”
Until the Syrian government provoked attacks on the American and
French embassies in Damascus, the U.S. administration and other
Western governments made it clear that they preferred to keep
President Bashar al-Assad in power there, based on the commonplace
notion that no comprehensive peace agreement is possible without Syria
and no partial agreement is likely, given the dependence of Hezbollah
and Hamas on his regime. It is hard to pressure Israel to negotiate a
peace deal when a pivotal player is absent, and the recent meeting of
the Middle East Quartet (the United States, the European Union,
Russia, and the United Nations) in Washington ended without a public
statement.
Total Fertility Rate (Children Per Female)
Even if the Arab revolt and its consequences have eased Israel’s
diplomatic isolation and undercut the pressure for a settlement with
the Palestinians, that does not serve Israel’s interests, according to
President Barack Obama. “The number of Palestinians living west of the
Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the
demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories,”
he told the America-Israel Political Action Committee in May.
Whether the proportion of Arabs in Judea and Samaria as well as in
Israel itself is growing may be the most politicized demographic
question in the world. Yet the Israeli Jewish fertility rate has risen
to three children per female while the Arab fertility rate has fallen
to the point where the two trend lines have converged and perhaps even
crossed. A 2006 study [14] by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic
Studies claims that the West Bank and Gaza population in 2004 was only
2.5 million, rather than the 3.8 million claimed by the Palestinian
authorities. Presumably the numbers were inflated to increase foreign
aid and exaggerate the importance of the Palestinian population.
Most of the phantom population, the report argues, comes from births
that never occurred:
    [The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics] projected that the
number of births in the Territories would total almost 908,000 for the
seven-year period from 1997 to 2003. Yet, the actual number of births
documented by the PA Ministry of Health for the same period was
significantly lower at 699,000, or 238,000 fewer births than had been
forecast by the PCBS. … The size of the discrepancy accelerated over
time. Whereas the PCBS predicted there would be over 143,000 births in
2003, the PA Ministry of Health reported only 102,000 births, which
pointed to a PCBS forecast 40% beyond actual results.
Palestinian fertility on the West Bank has already fallen to the
Israeli fertility rate of three children per woman, if we believe the
Palestine Ministry of Health numbers rather than the highly suspect
Central Bureau of Statistics data. The Begin-Sadat estimates were
disputed by other Israeli demographers, notably Sergio DellaPergola of
the Jewish People Policy Institute [15]. Yet the idea that economic
and cultural modernization leads to falling birthrates is a
commonplace among demographers who study the developing world. In
1963, Israeli Arab women had eight or nine children; today they have
three, about the same as Israeli Jews. Education explains most of the
fertility decline among Arabs, and it is likely that Arab fertility
behind the Green Line as well as in Judea and Samaria will continue to
fall.
More recent data also show that the Israeli Jewish birth rate has
risen faster than predicted. Jewish births rose from 96,000 in the
year 2000 to 125,000 in 2010, while Arab births fell slightly over the
same period—from about 40,781 to 40,750, according to a new study [16]
by Yaakov Faitelson at the Institute for Zionist Strategies. The
proportion of Jewish pupils in Israel’s elementary schools is
increasing, Faitelson reports:
    The percentage of students in the Arab educational system out of
all Israel’s total first grade student body will decrease from 29.1%
in 2007 to only 24.3% in 2016 and 22.5% in 2020. At the same time the
percentage of students in the Jewish educational system out of the
total first grade student body will reach 75.7% by 2016 and 77.5% by
2020.
While Israel’s ultra-Orthodox minority contributes disproportionately
to Jewish population growth,  most of the increase in Jewish births
comes from the secular and non-Orthodox religious categories, which
average 2.6 children per woman. Faitelson notes that the ultra-
Orthodox fertility rate fell over the past decade, while the fertility
of the general Jewish population rose.
If present trends continue, the proportion of Jews in Israel and the
West Bank will remain roughly constant; it may even rise. Muslim
fertility is falling faster than anywhere in the world, with some
Muslim countries—notably Iran, Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia—reaching
levels well below replacement. “In most of the Islamic world it’s
amazing, the decline in fertility that has happened,’’ Hania Zlotnik,
head of the United Nations’ population research branch, told [17] a
2009 conference. Within every Muslim country and across the Muslim
world, one variable explains most of the fertility air-pocket, namely
education. Once Muslim women leave the cocoon of traditional society
for secondary or university education, their fertility drops quickly
to levels below replacement.
If Israel’s total fertility rate holds at three, its population will
reach 24 million by the end of this century, the United Nations’
population model predicts [18]. And if the low fertility rates
prevailing elsewhere hold steady, Israel will have more people under
the age of 25 than Turkey, Iran, or even Germany. It will be able to
field the largest army in the Middle East. And it will have a thriving
high-tech economy, enormous energy resources, and a reliable supply of
desalinated water. Israel has a near-optimal mix of economics and
demographics, while time is running out for Arab countries that have
failed over and over again to rise to the demands of the modern world.
There is just one remaining argument that the clock is ticking against
Israel, namely “linkage” between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
Iran’s strategic threat to Israel. Gen. David Petraeus, the new head
of the Central Intelligence Agency, made this assertion in
congressional testimony in March 2010. “Israeli-Palestinian tensions
often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations,”
Petraeus argued. “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to
a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. The conflict also gives
Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese
Hezbollah and Hamas.” I argued [19] at the time that Petraeus was
outrageously wrong and that Jewish conservatives were misguided to
hail Petraeus as a hero.
Iran’s nuclear program and its support for Hezbollah and Hamas are
significant threats to the Jewish state. Yet it is hard to find a
policy analyst of any stripe today who will defend the idea that an
Israeli-Palestine agreement, even if such a thing were possible in the
present environment, might meaningfully reduce the Iranian threat. In
the uncertain aftermath of Arab revolts, Petraeus’ “linkage” argument
has quietly faded into the inoperative list of embarrassing past
policy statements. The commonplace argument that time is not on
Israel’s side looks like it will be next.
Article printed from Tablet Magazine: 
http://www.tabletmag.com
URL to article: 
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/72679/time-out/
URLs in this post:
[1] refrain: 
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4ef87d6e-6639-11e0-9d40-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Rq3wmYaH
[2] speech:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/top-jewish-leader-and-close-netanyahu-ally-blasts-pm-for-lack-of-diplomatic-plan-1.370134
[3] Kevin Rudd: 
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4037952,00.html
[4] Ömer Taşpinar: 
http://www.todayszaman.com/columnist-240750-time-is-not-on-israels-side.html
[5] Donniel Hartman: 
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4077249,00.html
[6] Gary Rosenblatt: 
http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial_opinion/gary_rosenblatt/time_not_israels_side
[7] think: 
http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=32694
[8] vote: 
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=228719
[9] complained: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/world/middleeast/04palestinians.html
[10] warned: 
http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/07/07/the_cost_of_palestinian_unilateralism
[11] reported: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/08/gaza-flotilla-israel-diplomacy
[12] improved: 
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/69780/spring-break/
[13] unrest:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jaVkt7n3hLFX5AmjpAx_dJHpNfrg?docId=CNG.0ef9723586b4cd768087327cac893ee9.721
[14] study: 
http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/MSPS65.pdf
[15] Jewish People Policy Institute: 
http://jppi.org.il/
[16] study: 
http://www.izs.org.il/eng/?father_id=114&catid=118&itemid=294
[17] told:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/un-sees-big-drop-in-middle-east-fertility-rates/?scp=1&sq=U.N.%20Sees%20Falling%20Middle%20East%20Fertility%20Rates&st=cse
[18] predicts: 
http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm
[19] argued: 
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/29822/silent-right/

 state. Demographics and geopolitics tell a different story.
la demografia continuerà sempre a dire che Israele è circondata da
centinaia di milioni di arabi, se proprio non vuoi contare i
palestinesi. O avete intenzione di nuclearizzare l'intero Mo,
ovviamente per autodifesa?

 centinaia di milioni di arabi,
la popolazione di Israele, in maggioranza ebraica, non ha alcun
problema con questo.

 problema con questo.
Un esempio di universalismo che Persio dovrebbe apprezzare
-- 
Io non gufo l'Inter. Le spacco le corna.