The dramatic Westernization of Muslim demographics defies conventional wisdom. It requires the re-evaluation of economic, social and national security assumptions and the re-assessment of related policy.
For example, the fertility rate among young Arabs in Judea and Samaria — at an average of three births per woman — has converged with the respective fertility rates of young Israeli Arabs and Jews, while (mostly secular) Jewish fertility rates are currently trending upwards and Arab fertility rates are trending downwards.
[SNIP]
David Goldman (“Spengler”) writes in his book “How Civilizations Die” that “as Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe’s low fertility. … Iranian women in their 20s, who grew up with five or six siblings, will bear only one or two children during their lifetimes. … By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe.”
“Demographers have identified several different factors associated with population decline: urbanization, education and literacy. … Children in traditional societies had an economic value, as agricultural labor and as providers for elderly parents; urbanization and pension systems turned children into a cost rather than a source of income…. Dozens of new studies document the link between religious belief and fertility. … [An] Iranian 25-year-old’s mother married in her teens and had several children by her mid-twenties. Her daughter has postponed family formation, or foregone it altogether, and spent her most fertile years on education and work. … World fertility has fallen by about two children per woman in the past half century — from about 4.5 children per woman to about 2.5. Fertility in the Muslim world has fallen two or three times faster than the world average… Across the entire Muslim world, university-educated Muslim women bear children at the same rate as their infecund European counterparts. … The only Muslim countries where women still give birth to seven or eight children are the poorest and least literate: Mali, Niger, Somalia and Afghanistan. … Iran’s secular government under the late Shah put enormous efforts into education during the 1970s and 1980s. … Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution slowed but could not stop the literacy movement.”
[SNIP]
David Goldman (“Spengler”) states that “the only advanced country [other than the U.S.] to sustain high fertility rates is Israel…”
He criticizes Israeli leaders who based their policy on erroneous demographic assumptions: “Israeli concessions in the first decade of the 21st century [Rabin’s Oslo, Sharon’s uprooting of Jewish communities in Gaza and Olmert’s unprecedented proposed concessions] were motivated by fear that Arab fecundity would swamp Israel’s Jewish population. In actuality, quite the opposite wasoccurring…”
In fact, the Jewish fertility rate in Israel in 2012 — three births per woman — is higher than all Arab countries, other than Sudan, Yemen, Iraq and Jordan, which are trending downward. The average Israeli-born Jewish mother exceeds three births. Moreover, Israel’s robust demography yields uniquely promising economic, social, technological and national security ramifications.
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The demographic, economic, military and diplomatic resources at the disposal of Israel in 2012 are dramatically superior to those available to Herzl in 1900, Ben-Gurion in 1948 and Shamir in 1992. Anyone suggesting that Jews are doomed to become a minority west of the Jordan River, that there is a demographic machete at the throat of the Jewish state and that the Jewish state must concede Jewish geography in order to secure Jewish demography, is either grossly mistaken or outrageously misleading!
The question, especially for Israel, is will they be able to postpone the Iranian nuclear attack long enough for demography to make a difference? A single warhead on Tel Aviv could reduce Israeli Jewish population to levels requiring several generations to recover.
Carried into Europe, where immigrant Muslim birth rates seem to be overwhelming the indigenous populations, the issue of birth rates in the Middle Eastern belt becomes less clear. And, of course, Muslim Mushrooms over the major capitals of the west would support Islaminification of Europe.
Times are….times.
ta
“A single warhead on Tel Aviv could reduce Israeli Jewish population to levels requiring several generations to recover.”
Why would the Iranians do that? They would drop a dirty bomb (if they wanted to, which they don’t) to make the Jews flee before becoming too poisoned, and the refugees would remake Israel somewhere else, waiting a few centuries at minimum for the land to recover. New Israel would be a magnet. A full nuke would be a severe step backwards in power.
Nuclear weapons and Middle Eastern demographics are distractions. The fundamental issue indeed, is the Islamification of Europe. The 21st century must allow for some sort of K-strategy revival, without the pagan baggage. Practice Mandarin.
Q: ‘“A single warhead on Tel Aviv could reduce Israeli Jewish population to levels requiring several generations to recover.” Why would the Iranians do that? They would drop a dirty bomb (if they wanted to, which they don’t)’
A: It shouldn’t be too hard to think of scenarios. For example, when the fascist government of Iran begins, inevitably, to collapse one day, the mullahs and IRGC honchos (descendants of the SS in temperament) decide to toss a nuke at Israel to insure their legacy.
David,
The analysis of Jewish/Arab-Muslim demographics that both you and Ettinger make seems to be correct. This analysis is often used to argue that Israel should not have withdrawn from Gaza. It is also argued that Israel should not withdraw from some/all of the West Bank or recognize a Palestinian state there and perhaps should establish Israeli sovereignty over large parts or all of it. The reasons offered for this are security (military/counter-terrorism/water), space is needed for future Jewish population growth and religious.
Have you articulated a position on this matter?
Shabbat Shalom
No, but I will here and now. The withdrawal from Gaza was a disaster. Ariel Sharon knew in advance that it would be a disaster. I surmise that he withdrew from Gaza because he anticipated the result would be so disastrous as to make it extremely improbable that any future Israeli government would withdraw from the West Bank. He sacrificed Gaza to protect the West Bank, in short. Missiles from Gaza hit Sdrerot and perhaps Beersheva or Ashkelon; missiles from the West Bank could hit Tel Aviv and Haifa. From what I can tell, if that was indeed Sharon’s intent, he succeeded. May Hashem grant him peace.
Shabbat Shalom,
David
OK. Given the threat to Israel, including SSM/SAM, from the West Bank would you support Israeli annexation and applying Israeli law from the Jordan River to the Med?
I thought, “Palestine problem hopeless, but not serious (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH18Ak01.html)” was a good start to presenting new ways to address the problem of the descendants of Palestinian refugees being subsidized to cause problems on the WB.
Before we get overly encouraged by this trend, the general (inverse) correlation is between female education and fertility – that is, the more educated, the lower the fertility. But as noted, not even the entire Arab world is reflecting the radical decline in fertility, and they’re just 25% of the Islamic world. What about the string of failing Muslim states in sub-Saharan Africa? What about Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia and the Muslim states of the Former Soviet Union? Those populations continue to grow. Heck, even Gaza has only seen modest declines in fertility, despite their relatively high levels of literacy – traceable perhaps to the culture of dependency as well as the imbibed notion of the “Palestinian womb” as a demographic weapon.
As to Israel’s healthy demographics, much of that is attributable to the high fertility in the ultra-Orthodox sector. (The Bedouin sector also shows high rates of fertility and an exploding population.) As the OECD reports have noted, haredi males and Arab females have notably low levels of economic participation (translation: they don’t work). More than 60,000 haredi males are exempted from military service – they “study” while their wives work. That’s hardly healthy for Israel’s future.
I can address the commenters’ question about the Muslim states of the former Soviet Union, or for that matter, many Muslim majority republics within the Russian Federation. Kazahkstan’s fertility levels for example are only slightly higher than Russia’s (which Ian Bremmer falsely calls a disaster worthy of expulsion from the BRICs, rather than Russia merely approximating German fertility, horrors!), and this despite an oil boom which has allowed the Nazarbayev government to offer housing subsidies in Astana to encourage young families to move there.
Within the RF, Tartarstan, home to the former Muslim Khanate capital of Kazan that Ivan the Terrible conquered (before marrying a Tatar princess), actually has an average slightly below the RF norm (source: Anatoly Karlin Da Russophile blog). This again despite the dividends from being the home oblast to Tatneft, one of the major Russian state-owned oil companies, so there’s not exactly a huge shortage of jobs by Russian standards in Tatarstan (as compared to the Far East or Siberia, for example). They just don’t pay very well, the average salary might be $800-$900 a month for a petroleum engineer as compared to $1.5k-$2.5k per month in Russia’s oil towns of Western Siberia (Tyumen) or up in Murmansk, Yamal or off the Far Eastern seaboard at Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. In fact, one of the biggest complaints of longtime Western oilmen in Russia who’ve worked on Sakhalin I, II etc is that prices are absurdly high in YS precisely due to the combination of oil salaries and the location’s remoteness. It’s sorta like the housing shortage in western North Dakota but without the possibility of commuting 100-150 miles per day to work.
In conclusion, while fertility levels remain slightly above the Russian average for Tadjiks (many of whom aren’t even Muslims or practicing at any rate) and Uzbeks in their native lands, as with Mexican mass migration to the U.S. so many young people have gone to work in Russia that there aren’t so many youngins left in the home country to make kids. Only in perhaps the deepest parts of the Muslim majority Caucases republics like Dagestan does fertility really act as an outlier, but the population base in those parts is far too small to worry about Muslims swamping non-Muslims in the RF even forty or fifty years hence, barring a nuclear war.
http://darussophile.com/2012/05/05/russias-demography-continues-to-improve-rapidly-in-first-3-months-of-2012/?tw_p=twt
More on improving Russian demographics here, and this before the expected influx of job (and for young men, wife seeking) Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards over the next few years. Moscow’s already got lotsa African, Indian and Chinese faces nowadays.
Have a good weekend Spengler fans!
More Turks and Turkic peoples than anyone else — 11 million foreign workers from Turkey and the Turkic republics according to the numbers I’ve seen.
A good number of the micro Russian community in my neighborhood are Turkic. Two of my daughter’s little friends are named Timur.
Hasn’t Saudi fertility undergone an unexpected rise in the past decade? While UN data (http://esa.un.org/wpp/unpp/p2k0data.asp) would suggest a rapid decline, there seems to be a minor discrepancy between UN and World Bank rates.
From 2007-2010 the World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN/countries) claimed that total fertility per woman declined from 3.0 to 2.8 while the UN rate seemed much lower at the medium variant but the World Bank Estimate was only slightly lower than the high variant.
I grow increasingly curious if co-consanguineous marriages are still remarkably high in urban families. If so, it may speak to a more profound distrust of strangers than expected in a modern society. If not, what is the fertility rate of those families?
Here are the UN data for Saudi total fertility:
Period Total fertility
1950-1955 7.18
1955-1960 7.18
1960-1965 7.26
1965-1970 7.26
1970-1975 7.30
1975-1980 7.28
1980-1985 7.02
1985-1990 6.22
1990-1995 5.45
1995-2000 4.51
2000-2005 3.54
2005-2010 3.03
See
http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/p2k0data.asp
The variant in this case is irrelevant since these are historical data.
Recognizing the various factors of fertility from statistical data may be missing a key component: Parenting as an act of faith. Could raising children be a reflection of confidence into the future, and faith in divine providence? I have no idea how one would process economic data to calculate some kind of “optimism coefficient” attributable to one culture.
Last week in Prague I bought a small piece of art in a Jewish art shop in Josefstadt,
was there as a teacher on a class trip.
First of all I like it and I am convinced that Israel has a glorious future and the right and the duty to defend itself.
I’m for eliminating refugee status for all but those Palestinians who personally were resident in the area defined by the present boundaries of the State of Israel before 1948–just as Daniel Pipes has emphasized. I am for pulling the plug on the whole Palestine Authority refugee scam and letting the West Bank fend for itself without subsidies. And I am for Israel annexing territory with large Jewish populations and a strategic corridor in the Jezreel Valley. If Israel were to annex the whole West Bank it would have to take responsibility for the present population.
“Jezreel Valley (West Bank portion)”, Jordan Valley or both?
Even secular and leftist (but patriotic) Israelis such as PM Rabin, ztl, recognized the necessity of maintaing the Jordan Valley and the highlands to the West as a defensive barrier and strategic transport corridor.
“Layla Tov, Israel” – you would not be the first to think that he’s seeing off the Jews, but your sort has a poor track record.
Although they may seem monolithic from the outside there is diversity w/in the groups referred to as Haredi (Who is ‘haredi’ (http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=268458)). Why would you believe that the descendants of today’s Israeli Haredi will not, in 30 years, have different employment/military service patterns? After all, the Jews of 1967 in Israel hardly resembled those of 1937 in Europe.
I spent a fair amount of time in the Galilee with family and friends in 2010. Jewish life there seemed to be booming, although Israel does encourage more Jewish settlement.
“Layla tov” is a racist nutball who keeps posting under various names. I put him into spam whenever I have a chance.
The unity Likud/kadima government has a unique opportunity to address the social divisions within Israel. They are rewriting Tal law to include military or national service for Haredi and working to eliminate subsidy for those who do not work. They should also work to better integrate the Israeli Arabs as well.
David,
Articulating these trends with G. Heinsohn’s “Youth bulge” – may we expect a decrease in violence in 2 decades?
Three decades, maybe. That’s been my view for some time:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MF07Ak01.html
But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Thanks.
Assorted with measures encouraging emigration (the neighborhood could provide great opportunities for highly skilled brothers and sisters), it seems indeed urgent to wait with that PP/concessions.
Demographers have identified several different factors associated with population decline: urbanization, education and literacy.
Don’t forget the biggest factor of all, economic security, which is caused by the three you name. Of the three, from what I’ve seen we should worry most about is urbanization, in particular here I’m talking about Moslem urbanization in Western cities.
In places like Malmo, northern Virginia, Copenhagen, Eden Prairie, London, Dearborn, Amsterdam and NYC the Moslems attain economic security, mainly in the form of wealth transfers from Infidel taxpayers. When a Moslem has money, he can have fun instead of a houseful of kids.
But, here in MN, the routine in an SBA loan for the cab, heavily subsidized healthcare, subsidized rent, and the welfare for the kids from the one two or three Moslem wives a Somali fellow might add to his County wife. The big cash a Moslem can get for his baby is attractive, and gives a reason to keep their birth rate up. This is their deal with the socialists, who in exchange have deigned the Somalis to owed all this cuz their great great great grandparents slaved for decades in the hot, human fields on a Mississippi cotton plantation.
Infidel money also helps keep a big percentage of Moslem households above water in places like Cairo, Baghdad, Kabul and Islamabad. As the global threat of Jihad war terror has increased the last few decades, so has the amount of money going to Moslem capitals to buy them off. That’s the magic of being a Moslem: being owed.
David,
What about where the growth in Israel is coming from. Already we are seeing clashes among the ultra religious, who do not serve-yet take welfare, and the secular over imposing a religious lifestyle on the secular. I know the ultra-religious are starting to serve at greater numbers, but it’s still small. It seems at some point there will have to be a renegotiation of the social compact in Israel.