Ian S. Lustick examines the history of territorial and demographic questions in an article in Middle East Policy’s Gaza War issue.
The new year has brought about new developments in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, as the state signals to the international community an altered approach to its campaign with troop drawdowns and more targeted operations. It has also brought fresh hardliner rhetoric from Israeli government officials about the future of the Strip.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said this week that Palestinian emigration from and renewed Israeli settlements in Gaza are the “order of the hour.” In the days following, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a strong advocate of West Bank settlement, called for resettling Gaza to reduce potential threats from the enclave.
An effort to repopulate Gaza with Israeli civilians, as Tel Aviv has sought to do in the West Bank, would signal a new direction for the state, given that Israel withdrew thousands of troops and civilians from the Strip in 2005, the year before Hamas was elected to power. The discussion of settlements and expansion, ongoing for decades, is driven by a fundamental pursuit over territory and demographics.
This pursuit for “demographic predominance in Palestine” is what Ian S. Lustick identifies as “Zionism’s categorical imperative.” In an article in Middle East Policy’s special Gaza War issue, he examines how Israel’s leaders have navigated the balance between the movement’s aim of territorial expansion and the preservation of a Jewish majority within its borders.
Following the UN Partition Plan of 1947, Israel forcefully and “systematically reduce[d] the Arab population of the areas the state came to control.” The state stopped, however, at the West Bank, as David Ben-Gurion “feared the demographic implications of its large Arab population.” Questions over West Bank annexation would divide Israeli politics for decades, until 1977 under the Begin government.
Initially proposing a plan to offer citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank, which was quickly rejected, Begin redirected and used the cover of the Camp David process to start a process of de facto annexation. The prospect of suddenly incorporating millions of Palestinians into the state and citizenry “was too direct and dangerous a contradiction” to the demographic imperative, Lustick explains.
The annexation process was “a slow and unofficial incorporation of the territories that would not entail change in the political status of their Arab inhabitants.” The idea of forced expulsion reminiscent of 1948 gained popularity in the 1980s, but successive governments would not commit to such a radical concept.
And yet, expulsion has resurfaced in political circles in recent years. Surveys by the Pew Foundation conducted in 2014 and 2015 show that 48 percent of Jewish Israelis agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.” Government ministers and elected officials echo that sentiment today.
The question of demography, Lustick writes, “has run like a red thread through the history of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel: from partition, to transfer, to mass immigration of non-Jews, to disengagement from Gaza…” As Israel’s efforts in Gaza and the West Bank continue, “signs of a new approach to the problem are emerging,” with an “increasing readiness of Israelis and Israeli politicians to discuss and embrace the legal incorporation of the West Bank on terms that would ensure that the masses of Arabs living there would never become equal citizens,” he concludes.
“Apartheid…is most probably the next attempt to exorcise the demographic demon.”
Among the major takeaways readers can find in Ian S. Lustick’s Middle East Policy article, “The Red Thread of Israel’s ‘Demographic Problem’”:
- Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians is reflective of a deep-seated fear that the state will fail to secure the Jewish demographic majority in Israel that Zionism has aspired to.
- “Demographic predominance” in the territory became Zionism’s primary aim early.
- Early leaders questioned whether they should continue to expand the territory and risk losing the demographic majority or preserve its strength in the existing land without expansion.
- When the 1947 UN Partition Plan did not meet David Ben-Gurion’s goals, he directed the Haganah to begin reducing the Arab population in the territories, particularly the West Bank, through expulsion.
- Prime Minister Menachem Begin considered offering a citizenship option to the millions of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, but it was quickly deemed too dangerous to Zionism’s demographic aims and revoked.
- Instead, Israel began a process of de facto annexation, expanding its settlements to establish control over areas without their official incorporation into the State of Israel.
- In the 1980s, the idea of outright expulsion of Arabs from Israel gained popularity, but was rejected by the government establishment.
- In recent years, however, the idea has returned: in 2014 and 2015 surveys by the Pew Foundation, 48 percent of Jewish Israelis agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.”
- In the 1990s, immigation laws were changed to promote the arrival of Jews from around the world, most notably from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia.
- One further idea in the early 2000s to preserve favorable demography was to extricate Israel from the Gaza Strip and its growing Arab population.
- Through this withdrawal of its military forces in 2005, Israel subtracted nearly two million Arabs from the land it claimed as sovereign territory.
- Fears about demography faded for a few years, but returned in the 2010s: a 2013 survey from Uriel Abulof showed that nearly 40 percent of articles written about threats to the state’s survival were focused on demography.
You can read “The Red Thread of Israel’s ‘Demographic Problem’” by Ian S. Lustick in the special Gaza War issue of Middle East Policy.