New plan for Judaizing the Galilee stirs controversy

From the day of its creation, the state of Israel has developed a fear of the demographic issue. There’s hardly any discourse on Jewish-Arab relations where demography doesn’t play a central role. There’s hardly a discussion of Jewish settlements in the Galilee and Negev where the genie of demography doesn’t assert itself — how many Jews versus how many Arabs. If it’s found that the margin of Jews is high, a sigh of relief is heard. If the margin of Arabs is high, a warning siren is heard.

One can understand and identify with the reasons that, from its first day, Israel had adopted the policy of “the Jewish majority.” The long history of the Jewish people as a persecuted minority has bred a determination to change this situation, to guarantee Jews security in their new/old country.  Accordingly, the young nation prepared itself to absorb Jews — as many as possible. Its leaders spared no effort and no resources to make sure that a large gap would remain among Jews and Arabs in the country.

During my many years as a journalist, I have written much on the Galilee and the Negev as part of my work on the towns of the periphery. In the periphery are the development towns, the social and economic distress, the other Israel. But this is also where most Arabs live in Israel.

Any time I tried to understand the reason for the decline in status of the periphery as opposed to the center of the country, the question of demography and the fear that the Arab population will overtake Jewish settlement were raised. Everyone warned about Arab demography. The tone of the words gained urgency when the future of the Galilee was discussed. Since the establishment of the state, the number of Jews in the Galilee has been almost the same as the number of Arabs, and there are some who say that the numbers even lean toward Arabs. That’s the reason why Israeli governments, left and right alike, have not spared resources to change the course of the sensitive pendulum.