Jerusalem, February 25: Harvard fellow calls for genocidal measure to curb Palestinian births. Is this genocide that Prof. Martin Kramer of Harvard, the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, and president of Israel’s Shalem Center is advocating here? I think it may be as the international genocide treaty specifically bans “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
But here, Kramer argues that a good way to stifle Palestinian radicalism is by preventing Palestinian males from growing up by stopping either their conception or their survival. The way to do that is to cut off international aid that engenders procreation. He also suggests that the Israeli blockade is having that effect.
Arab citizens of Israel comprise just over 20% of the country’s total population. The majority of these identify themselves as Arab or Palestinian by nationality and Israeli by citizenship. Many have family ties to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as to Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Negev Bedouins tend to identify more as Israelis than other Arab citizens of Israel. Unlike other Arabs, the Druze are drafted into the Israel Defense Forces, just like Jews.
The Israeli fear that demographic changes well underway in Israel and the West Bank may mean the Jewish nation could end up with an Arab majority.
This is the danger of an ideology as illogical and as far removed from reality as Zionism; rather than understand the obvious effects its policies of displacement, subjugation, ethnic cleansing and continuous, traumatizing violence have on its victims, Israel and its supporters will use insane rationalizations for the anger it breeds. This time it’s ‘overpopulation’, and the answer to that is to cut off any humanitarian aid from the Palestinians until they starve.
But there is a phenomenon occurring that has some Jewish leaders worried. Israel’s non-Jewish minority, consisting of more than 75 percent Arab Muslims, is growing at nearly 6 percent a year, faster than Israel’s Jewish population at 3 percent annually.
“The Arabs of 1948 could become a majority in Israel in the year 2035, and they will certainly be a majority by 2048, a century after their ‘Nakbah’ [tragedy of the 1948 war] and their first defeat,” Dr. Wahid Abd Al-Magid, wrote in a report.
During past 15 years 40,000 Ethiopian Jews have left their homes to resettle in predominantly white Israel, but they being called as Black Jews. Many of the Jews settelled in Isreal from Afghanisthan and India. This book examines the past of Ethiopian Jews, the only group of Africans practicing Judaism, in order to understand their present life in Israel.
In the speech Kramer rejected common views that Islamist “radicalization” is caused by US policies such as support for Israel, or propping up despotic dictatorships, and stated that it was inherent in the demography of Muslim societies such as Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Too many children, he argued, lead to too many “superfluous young men” who then become violent radicals.
Kramer proposed that the number of Palestinian children born in the Gaza Strip should be deliberately curbed, and alleged that this would “happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies to Palestinians with refugee status.”
Due to the Israeli blockade, the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are now dependent on UN food aid. Neither the UN, nor any other agencies, provide Palestinians with specifically “pro-natal subsidies.”
Kramer appeared to be equating any humanitarian assistance at all with inducement for Palestinians to reproduce.
He added, “Israel’s present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim — undermine the Hamas regime — but if they also break Gaza’s runaway population growth, and there is some evidence that they have, that might begin to crack the culture of martyrdom which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men.” This, he claimed, would be treating the issue of radicalization “at its root.”
The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, created in the wake of the Nazi holocaust, defines genocide to include measures “intended to prevent births within” a specific “national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
The Weatherhead Center at Harvard describes itself as “the largest international research center within Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.” In addition to his positions at Harvard and WINEP, Kramer is “president-designate” of Shalem College in Jerusalem, a far-right Zionist institution that aspires to be the “College of the Jewish People.”
Pro-Israel speakers from the United States often participate in the Herzliya conference, an influential annual gathering of Israel’s political and military establishment. This year’s conference was also addressed by The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and, in a first for a Palestinian official, by Salam Fayyad, appointed prime minister of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.
Kramer’s call to prevent Palestinian births reflects a long-standing Israeli and Zionist concern about a so-called “demographic threat” to Israel, as Palestinians are on the verge of outnumbering Israeli Jews within Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories combined.
Such extreme racist views have been aired at the Herzliya conference in the past. In 2003, for example, Dr. Yitzhak Ravid, an Israeli government armaments expert, called on Israel to “implement a stringent policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population,” a reference to the 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.