How does demographics explain the long war of extermination on Gaza?

By Karem Yahya

Prior to the “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack and during the first half of 2023, developments in demographic geography brought bad news to Tel Aviv, even though most of it had been expected for years, and we take two of them:

First: The numbers of the Palestinian people in all of historic Palestine exceed the numbers of Jews there. Thus, for the first time since the founding of Israel in 1948 as a “Jewish state,” the people of Palestine return to a majority over their entire occupied land. According to the results of the census announced by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics from Ramallah on December 30, 2022, the total number of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza reached about 5.5 million people, and in Palestine occupied in 1948, about 1.7 million, with a total of 7.2 million people, and these constitute slightly less than half of the Palestinian people who have the right to return to their land, homes and property in accordance with international resolutions.

On the other hand, at the same time, the Central Bureau of Statistics in Israel announced that the number of Jews had reached 7.1 million people, including 700,000 in 151 colonies/settlements in the West Bank, and this after it had increased 29 times during the 30 years of the American “Oslo peace,” and the repeated, boring, and unintelligible talk. The product is about the “two-state solution.”

Multiple annoyances

Tel Aviv is worried

As for the second worrying development for Tel Aviv, it came with the sharp decline in the numbers of Zionist immigration, called in Hebrew “aliyah,” and translated into Arabic “ascension,” in the first half of 2023, by 20% compared to the same period in the previous year, according to data from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Israeli immigration and assimilation.

In the summer of this year, multiple opinion polls published in the Hebrew press reported an increase in the percentages of those considering reverse migration, “lereda,” the Hebrew word meaning “descending or descending” in Arabic. For example, it was stated in a poll published by “TV Channel 13” that 28% of adults in Israel (over the age of 18) are considering leaving it permanently, that is, joining what is estimated at between 700 and 800 thousand who have practiced reverse immigration since 1948. All of this is added to Estimates have begun to appear since 2016 that half of the Jews in Israel also hold non-Israeli passports.

There are other additional problems for Israel as it is a project to attract immigrants and colonialism/settlement that works to preserve the “Jewishness of the state” with the help of its allies, especially successive American administrations, along with those Arab governments and elites who accept Zionism and ignore it, who signed “peace” agreements and recognized Israel as a “natural state.” Contrary to her reality, so I became accustomed to it.

Among these annoyances are facts that continue to be confirmed regarding the youthful nature of Palestinian society on its land, with a rate of 65% under the age of 29 years, while the percentage of the elderly over the age of sixty-five does not exceed only 4%, compared to 13% among Israeli Jews. According to the latest data from the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, the fertility rate in the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, is 3.8 and 3.9%, compared to 3.1% for Jews in occupied Palestine.

What does it mean “Al-Aqsa Flood” demographically?

The October 7 attack, unprecedented in the history of popular resistance, Palestinian and Arab, and even throughout the history of modern-day colonialism with the region, had repercussions that occurred immediately and with potential repercussions on the demographic front of the conflict with the replacement Zionist settler colonialism.

The Zionist “state” had a more specific and historical problem with the Gaza Strip, from which the attack was launched. It is no secret to anyone who follows the famous phrase of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin when he wished that the sea would swallow Gaza. The sector has an important role in armed resistance in various forms of legitimate violence in the face of the occupation, the episodes of which continued throughout the conflict, and before Hamas. He also had an influential contribution to what is called the “Palestinian demographic bomb” that Israel fears. This is in terms of the highest fertility and fertility rates, until the population of the Gaza Strip reached about 2.3 million Palestinians, and with the highest percentage of forcibly displaced refugees from occupied Palestine 48 among its population (about two-thirds). Also, because it has the highest rates of unemployment and poverty, and the lowest in services, including health, and all of this even compared to the Palestinians in the West Bank.

The situation did not change much regarding the demographic/resistance dialectic after the occupation maneuver to withdraw its forces from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005 while continuing its siege. Gaza remained a threat to Israel on these two open fronts: demographics and resistance. Anyone who follows the ideas of the Zionist elites between the left and the right since the first intifada (1987-1990) notices the “Labor” Party’s promotion of the “separation” solution between the Jewish and Arab populations and the “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip. Then the right, led by former Prime Minister Sharon, adopted these ideas and developed them with the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, leading to the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2006 with its siege and suffocation.

Always emerging in the background and consistent with these racist ideas with dimensions and motives derived from racist demographics are the claims of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement, “transfer,” which initially targeted the Palestinians of the Galilee and Negev, north and south, within the occupied territory in 1948, as well as what was called even by Israeli historians and analysts, “creeping transfer.” “In the West Bank, through the settlement blocs, the separation wall, and the security barriers that turn the lives of the Palestinians into an unbearable hell, and for Israel to replace them with new Zionist immigrants brought from abroad.

A major blow to Aman

Settlement, settlers and migration

But the “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack came to deal the most intense blow, in the shortest period of time, not exceeding half a day, to the security and safety of the settlement and the settlers. This is in light of the history of the Zionist project’s targeting of Palestine from the beginnings of this settlement: the colonies of “Rishon Lezion,” “Rosh Pinah,” “Zakhrof Yaakov,” and “Petah Tikva,” and with the first wave of Zionist immigration between 1882 and 1919. The October 7 attack simply struck the motivators and living motives driving this migration with a devastating blow to the level of safety and well-being. For the first time, there were Zionist Jewish immigrants in Israel who were forced to leave the places of settler colonialism (the colonies), with everything that was distinct and superior in terms of construction, services, and luxury to the overall livelihood of Palestinians on their occupied land, especially in the Gaza Strip.

In this context, a lot can be said about the comparison between the engineering, architecture, and services of the Zionist colony/settlement and the Palestinian refugee camp. Here there is fertile material suitable for scientific studies that reveal tangible racial/class/cultural discrimination. Originally in his book “The Jewish State,” published in 1896 in German, “Theodor Herzl” elaborates on how the Zionist immigration of nineteenth-century European Jews represented a social movement toward the better and more secure, and why it included economic recovery and the opening of attractive new markets for products. This Zionist immigration, in the book’s words, is “a rise in the class ladder,” which is consistent with the moral significance of the word “ascension.”

Migration crisis

Zionism is deepening

Tracking annual statistical data on Zionist immigration from its primary sources (the Jewish Agency and the Israel Yearbook in addition to the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption) indicates that the curve of this immigration is linked up and down to the seriousness of the resistance challenge and to the economic conditions inside Israel, which is what is extracted as a governing law, documented and analyzed in detail by the book. “The Seventh Million Bet: Jews and Zionist Immigration until 2020,” issued by the author of this article from Cairo 2002 and Damascus 2006. It is also clear that the first factor (resistance, especially armed resistance) has an impact on the second, no matter how much global colonialism and its components provide support for Israel. The first factor confirms the importance of voluntary action, not fatal surrender, while the second reveals the falsity of the ideological doctrinal aspect of Zionism and its migration.

Based on this, the latest data from the Jewish Agency confirms the decrease in Zionist immigration for the entirety of October 2023, the month of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack, to 700 immigrants, while it was 5773 for the same month of the year 2022, which indicates a downward trend in the curve, according to the law. The previously mentioned ruler.

Despite the absence of statistical data to date on the effect of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” on the reverse migration “Yerida,” the results can be expected in light of the rule that a decline in the Zionist immigration curve is accompanied by an increase in the number of Jews leaving for Israel, according to the conclusion of the book “The Seventh Million Bet” itself, Likewise, by comparison with Israeli data after the 2006 to 2009 Lebanon War, which documented a reverse migration of about 120,000, and shortly after the 2015 Gaza War, which lasted 52 days, when these sources recorded the departure of 16,700, of whom only 8,500 returned in subsequent years.

Of course, the October 1973 war had caused a shift in Zionist immigration from an increase since the 1967 war to a decline, and plunged it into a crisis extending for about 15 years, which was exacerbated by the first Palestinian Intifada. This is until the collapse of the Soviet Union brought the opportunity for massive Russian immigration starting in 1989, which was immediately followed by the transition to the “settlement path” of the 1990 Madrid Conference and the 1993 Oslo Accords, and the abandonment of the armed resistance by the Palestine Liberation Organization - and rather its leadership and its main factions - from armed resistance. No less dangerous and influential is the acceptance of Zionism and coexistence with it among its victims, and more precisely those who represent them politically and nationally.

I believe that identifying the previous demographic dimensions and their developments puts into doubt the claim that the great, exceptional act of resistance on October 7, 2023 alone necessitated the war of extermination, ethnic cleansing, and mass displacement, “transfer,” and brought all this calamity and destruction upon the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza. Clearly, reading this demographic indicates that these racist, Zionist, terrorist solutions were and are still in place and ready to be translated on the ground, regardless of the pretexts and justifications, the gravity of the events, and the order of their sequence. Therefore, it seems illogical or scientific to practice “flagellation of the armed resistance” or attempt to push it into “self-flagellation,” and hold it responsible for fueling and provoking Zionist aggression.

It is true to say that the October 7 attack came to deepen the contradictions of demographics and its crisis in Israel, but it did not summon this Zionist terrorism out of nowhere, or cause its invention. Rather, it can be assumed that this exaggeration in terrorism and its madness goes beyond the mere response to the resistance attack and its current and potential repercussions to the fact that it is essentially latent. It is at the heart of the demographic dilemma, and the racist Zionist responses proposed and practiced to address it, and it is usual for it to be called upon from time to time.

Source: Al Jazeera Live