Antisemitic incidents in the United States rose by about 400% in slightly over two weeks since war broke out in the Middle East after Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, advocacy group Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said Wednesday. Read more at straitstimes.com.
I’m going to be very blunt here and repeat something that was once said to me regarding the Palestinians: “They breed like animals.”
As racist and dehumanizing as that is, I’m repeating it because it’s an explanation for why a single state solution (absorbing the Palestinian population and granting them Israeli citizenship) is never going to be an option. If Arab citizens outnumber Jews, Israel would cease to be a Jewish state.
That means that any solution acceptable to Israel must require that the Palestinians either eke out a living on their designated reservations and shut the fuck up, or leave. A third option involving partial integration might look like apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, but that probably looks like a ‘slippery slope’ given how that situation in SA turned out.
As long as I’m repeating nasty things people have told me, I’ll repeat something else that seems analogous to me. A coworker who was a Hungarian immigrant to North America once explained to me that in the 1930s Hungary repeatedly asked their Jewish population (nicely) to get the fuck out of their country. By her account, the Hungarians didn’t care where they went. They didn’t even want anything bad to happen to the Jews. They simply didn’t want them there and they gave them ample opportunity to go away on their own. Again, by her account.
It was a terrible dilemma until the Germans came in and solved their problem. She said it was a great thing that the Germans did for her country.
That was the day I learned I was carpooling with a fucking Nazi. In Canada. In 2004. Those were more innocent days for me.
It’s funny you say that the palestinians breed like animals. Yet that’s the same phrase I’ve heard regarding the Jewish. “Be fruitful and multiply” is literally the first command/mitzvah of the Torah. A local Rabbi that I know has 10 children and he’s in his early 30s! To which he believes he’s faithfully upholding the commands.
I think all humans have same desire when it comes to breeding. I don’t think the core instinct that made humans over such long period of time in evolution is going to particularly differ based on last few thousand years of separation. They will make more kids when they feel that the conditions seem favorable to have more kids, combined with the social constructs in which you are surrounded by. For example, during covid, birth rates declined because people were increasingly uncertain about the future. And even within Jewish subset, we can see that orthodox Jewish have nearly double the amount of kids versus non-orthodox. Use and availability of contraception also obviously plays a huge role, and if they were not available in the west, I think the west’s population would be ever increasing as well.
Palestinians likely lack access to contraception, and therefore, will have higher rate of birth rate than Israelis who do have access to contraception.
So I do not quite agree with your original premise of why unification of the states is not a great forecast. But I still do agree that the idea of unification is pretty much screwed. There’s far too much hate and strife between them at this point. I believe every such scenarios of the past ended in one way: extreme violence. If it ever gets to the stage of ethnic cleansing, certainly Israel will win with the overwhelming superiority in military power. But we’re stuck despite that because the world is watching which prevents Israel from doing just that. We’re at a unique impasse with no solutions.