Stop your abortion if you’re Jewish
For the last few days, this ad has been displayed prominently on the website of Haaretz, the Hebrew and English-language Israeli newspaper. It reads, “if the Arab population in Israel reaches 40%, the Jewish state will be nullified. For the only solution, click here.” All that above a picture of Benyamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister who is largely responsible for sabotaging the admittedly flawed Oslo peace process.
If you actually click through, it will take you to EFRAT, an Israeli organization dedicated to countering the “demographic bomb” of Arab Israelis by discouraging Jewish Israelis from carrying out abortions. Cue Nigel Parry of the Electronic Intifada:
EFRAT, an organization committed only “to increase the Jewish birthrate in Israel” has no problem using the historical Jewish bogeyman of annihilation, fueled by naked racism, to frighten pregnant women into choosing not to have an abortion.
Lest one think that EFRAT is a marginal organization, its website claims to have “saved 17,000 children” since 1977, boasts 2,900 trained volunteers, and its website offers video testimonials from “VIPs” that include Mr. Moshe Katsav, President of the State of Israel [View: Page | Video], and Rabbi Israel Meir Lau [View: Page | Video], who served as Israel’s Chief Rabbi between 1993-2003, was appointed Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv-Jaffa in 2005, and received the Israel Prize the same year.
While Rabbi Israel Meir Lau’s comments focus on praising EFRAT for offering an alternative to abortion, Moshe Katsav praises Efrat “for fulfilling a national duty of great importance. There was never a period in all the years of Jewish history that such a duty was as essential as it is in this generation.” While it is not clear exactly what Katsav is referring to in the short clip, his invocation of history suggests he is hitting the same message as EFRAT’s advertisement, one of survival of the Jewish people in Israel, in a time of demographic change.
And Ha’aretz, one of the most influential newspapers in a country where one-fifth of the population are Arabs, presumably with many Arab readers, did not think twice about accepting money for an advertisement that portrays Arabs as a force of destruction in Israel, solely on the basis of their birthrate.
Is there really anything left to say?
Hmmm not really.
Categories: Israel/Palestine.
I’d wondered about this ad myself, and why there wasn’t more Arab protest about it. The Weekly Review of the Arab Press in Israel didn’t say anything about it, and it usually does mention thus type of media incitement (especially since Ha’aretz does have a large Arab readership). It seems that the ad was mainly (and possibly only) posted on the English online edition, most likely aimed at foreign donors. Not that this makes its message any better, of course, but it might have enabled the ad to fly under the radar of the Ha’aretz editors and the Arab-Israeli media watchdogs. (It also undermines some of Nigel Parry’s more sweeping generalizations, but that’s neither here nor there.)
For what it’s worth, the ad now appears to be off the Ha’aretz web site. I’m not sure if its initial appearance was due to a failure of Ha’aretz’ editorial standards in accepting ads or simply the absence of any standards. In the meantime, you might want to write to the Ha’aretz editorial board about it - I’m planning to do so.
BTW, one thing more. I’ve already noted my disapproval of the EFRAT ad (in case I wasn’t sufficiently clear, I consider it a poisonous incitement to racism), but I think Nigel Parry is also wrong in some of the things he says.
In particular, I don’t think the fear of being annihilated can be written off as a “Jewish bogeyman,” given the number of serious attempts that have been made to do just that. Also, given (1) the treatment of minority populations in most of the world, and (2) the experience of Jews in particular as a minority during the past twenty centuries, I’d argue that there are reasons other than racism why Israeli Jews might fear becoming a minority within Israel.
As I said, the “demographic threat” rhetoric represented by the EFRAT ad is racist and is the wrong way to approach Jewish-Arab relations; even aside from the moral issues, such prophecies become self-fulfilling very quickly. At the same time, the fear that underlies the rhetoric isn’t necessarily racist, and both Jews and Arabs will have to confront that fear (and all the other fears they have about each other) in order to successfully combat the racism. Dismissing it as some sort of illegitimate “Jewish bogeyman” doesn’t seem the right way to get started.
Thanks for your comments, Jonathan.
While I agree with you that there is plently of historical reasons for Jews to be afraid to being annihilated or at least ethnically cleansed from Israel, this fear was basically built-in the Zionist project from the very beginning, since no matter how Jewish it was Israel would always be surrounded by gentile countries and, in the case of having Israel in the Arab world, hostile countries that would reject it as a Western colonial project. But that also has to do with how Israel was created, with the Arabs of Palestine having little say in their country’s future under a colonial system and, unlike the founding Zionists, having little political influencet over key Western policymakers.
The really key issue here has to do with Palestinians with non-Jewish Israelis, who are being made to feel like there intrinsically represent a threat to their countrymen. The fact that a former and aspiring prime minister like Bibi Netanyahu accepts to endorse EFRAT speaks volumes about what a substantial part of the Jewish majority thinks about the non-Jewish minority.
this fear was basically built-in the Zionist project from the very beginning, since no matter how Jewish it was Israel would always be surrounded by gentile countries and, in the case of having Israel in the Arab world, hostile countries that would reject it as a Western colonial project.
I agree that the post-genocidal mentality (for lack of a better phrase) has affected Israel’s relations not only with its immediate neighbors but with the world. A while back, I wrote a brief survey of post-genocidal states [1, 2] and Israel’s behavior seems typical of other countries in that category.
Nevertheless, the “Zionist project” (has it ceased to be a “project” yet?) was grounded on the fact that international law currently privileges states over other types of entities, including minorities within states. There are certain legal rights - most critically the rights to self-determination, self-defense and protection against invasion - that are unique to nation-states. In contrast, as proven by Rwanda and Darfur among others, national minorities have no meaningful international protection should their own governments decide to annihilate them. The idea of Zionism was therefore that the best guarantee of survival lay in obtaining statehood and establishing peaceful relations with the rest of the world based on mutual strength and legal equality. To some extent it’s worked, and once we can get of that Greater Israel nonsense for good and all, it can become fully workable.
On the other hand, there are things against which statehood cannot protect, and losing one’s majority within the state is one of them. Given Jewish historical experience as a minority - not to mention the experience of other market-dominant minorities in recent history - that’s a traumatic possibility for many Israeli Jews. Most of them could give you a nightmare scenario of what might happen when Jews are a minority in Israel - and it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that the potential majority is composed of Arabs. It would be the same if they were Mongolians or Swiss.
None of this, of course, detracts from the fact that “demographic threat” rhetoric is both racist and self-fulfilling. One of the ways in which such rhetoric is self-fulfilling, in fact, is that it isn’t only used by Jews. There have also been Arab leaders who have described the Arab-Israeli birth rate as a Quebec-style “revenge of the cradles,” and discussions of family planning among Arab citizens of Israel are sometimes rejected as anti-nationalist. I’m not sure whether the Arab or Jewish rhetoric came first - I suspect the latter - but characterizing one’s own group as a demographic threat can be just as poisonous as describing a minority the same way.
The Israeli “ethnic demon” (as Amir Peretz puts it) is something that all sectors will have to play a part in quelling - most of hte responsibility lies with the Jewish side because it is more powerful, but there needs to be some mutual accommodation. The Jews need to make a genuine commitment to equal rights and anti-racism, which includes the elimination of all “demographic threat” rhetoric about ethnic minorities. The Arabs need to understand where Jewish demographic fears are coming from even while opposing their racist manifestations, and to refrain from embracing demographics as part of their own national struggle. You’re absolutely right that no minority should be made to feel like a threat in their own country (or to suffer any of the other kinds of discrimination that Arab-Israelis experience). Untangling that web will require some mutual sensitivity, though, and dismissing Jewish demographic fears as inherently racist, supremacist and/or an insubstantial “bogeyman” is precisely the way to deepen those fears.
That’s the thing about Israel. Nothing’s simple there, not even racism.
(And I’d be a lot more worried if Sharon’s picture were on that ad. Bibi was always a nut, and he’s been moving completely off the map this past year or two. His endorsement at this point isn’t worth much more than Feiglin’s.)
I apologize for going on at such length, but - as you can see - demographics are a deeply ambivalent subject both for me and for most Jews with an awareness of history. I don’t like to see the subject exploited by racist fearmongers (as EFRAT is doing) or discussed in reductionist terms (as Nigel Parry is doing).