Long before the Zionist Movement ever began, I’d even say the seeds are from Biblical Times when Moshe Rabanu, our leader Moses, sent the twelve tribal elders to stake out the Land as depicted in the Torah Portion Shlach. Ten out of twelve, the majority, aka democracy, insisted that the Land was populated by giants and they’d swallow us up. For that sin, obeying/believing in the “demographic threat,” we were punished with wandering the wilderness for thirty-nine 39 years, instead of immediately entering after the exodus from Egypt.
Opposition leader Isaac Herzog, named after his esteemed grandfather, who had been Chief Rabbi, is a man of weak faith. He believes in the “demographic threat.”
Israel needs to make a deal with the Palestinian Authority right away, it it wants to survive as a Jewish state, said Zionist Union/Labor Party head Yitzchak Herzog Sunday. Speaking at the Herzliya Conference, Herzog said that Israel faced a “demographic emergency,” and that within a decade there would no longer be a majority of Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. (Arutz 7)
Yes, Herzog is among those who believe in throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Herzog is among those terrified to live with Arabs and want a tiny Jewish only ghetto-like country as the State of Israel.
Ever since the Jewish People began returning in numbers and began to be the majority in portions of the Land of Israel, there have been fearmongers warning that there’s a “demographic threat,” and soon the Arabs will take over.
The truth is that it hasn’t happened and won’t happen as long as we behave as a sovereign independent state. The Arab birthrate has been dropping. I see it among my Arab customers in Yafiz, Sha’ar Binyamin. Many come to get baby and children’s clothes. They tell me that ours are much better than what is available in their shops. I see that the families are small, and the children are often spaced far apart. They are ambitious for their children. That’s a good sign. It reminds me of the famous Golda Meir quotation:
“Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
Golda Meir, 4th Israel Prime Minister,17 March 1969 – 3 June 1974
Statement to the National Press Club in Washington, D. C. in 1957,
as quoted in A Land of Our Own: An Oral Autobiography (1973) edited by Marie Syrkin, p. 242
Experts have been predicting the demise of the State of Israel due to “demographic threat” for as long has it has been in existence. If it was to happen, it would have happened already.