One-state, two-state, three-state, or however else amateur final status negotiators envision the future political geography of Israel-Palestine, one pivotal element that few think to mention is that any arrangement will, by necessity, be extraordinarily high-density. On the eve of World War I, the Massachusetts-sized territory housed a modest population of 700,000 souls; by partition, that figure had risen to nearly two million. A few generations later, the population of Israel teeters at the cusp of eight million; remarkably, some four million Palestinians are packed into the combined territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
But as the combined population of the two societies approaches double that of their geographical equivalent in Massachusetts (a comparison exacerbated by the fact that nearly half of Israel is limited to low-density settlement by desert), population growth remains an object of nationalistic zeal, not a trace of Malthusian concern in sight. Despite the worrisome internal demographic shifts entailed by its policies, Israel’s pro-natalism is regarded as a weapon in the zero-sum war over who will hold a majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. On the Palestinian side, the persistence of traditional social structures and the absence of a strong, independent state have kept birth rates yet higher, with the once-sparsely populated Gaza Strip spiraling into Dhaka-level rates of high-poverty urban density.
The unique political salience of population growth in the fate of the Israel-Palestine problem has kept the two cramped societies insulated from a wave of demographic transition, one that has radically transformed the traditionally hyper-fertile societies of the Middle East into bastions of low-to-medium urban population growth. In 1960, your average Syrian woman could expect to give birth to 7.47 live children; your average Egyptian woman, 6.65. By virtue of the breakdown of traditional rural life in favor of mass urbanization and the aggressive intervention of secular socialist governments, comparable figures for half a century later stood at 2.93 and 2.73, respectively. Following similar patterns, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Tunisia stand in the same range at present; starting from a comparably high position in the 1960s, Turkey, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Iran have seen even more precipitous declines.
Despite the preponderance of this demographic trend, which reached its inflection point during the 1990s, Israel and the Palestinian territories stand apart among the exceptions to the rule, flanked by Yemen, Iraq, and Jordan. Within this rubric, Israel’s case is exceptional: measured by the IMF at a per capita GDP of some $31,467, its fertility rate of 3.03 stands far above those of such similarly-wealthy societies as Japan, Spain, and Italy. Five to six times wealthier than Egypt or Syria, Israel has relied on an elaborate system of policy instruments and cultural nudges to outbreed the poor neighboring states with which it once clashed on the open battlefield.
More interesting, however, is the comparing of like to like in trying to appreciate what sets Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, and Palestine apart from their middle-income, non-oil Middle Eastern peers. The common factor for all, sans Jordan, is remarkably clear if not perfectly explanatory—Iraq, Palestine, and Yemen are the poorest three countries in the Middle East, “lower-middle income” exceptions to the region’s “upper-middle income” rule.
Its late-twentieth century patterns of political economy shattered by the American invasion in 2003, Iraq is considerably poorer and less stable (if freer) than it was at its 1999 peak, as measured by per capita GDP. Buffeted against nearly a decade and a half of crippling sanctions by a top-flight supply of petroleum resources, the Mesopotamian state was within recent memory wealthier than either Syria, Egypt, Jordan or Morocco. Nevertheless, Baghdad has seen far less of a decline in total fertility over the last two decades than any of the other major Arab states did over the course of the nineties alone—suggesting the possibility that its rentier-fueled society, like those of the rich Gulf sheikhdoms, was under no pressure to modernize demographically under the reign of Saddam. The collapse of the efficient, if brutal Iraqi political economy of yore has seen fertility remain high, a pattern likely to persist as the wrecked state struggles to recoup past levels of modest wealth and development.
The Palestinian situation runs deeper; four and a half decades of Israeli occupation, two previous decades of statelessness and displacement, and a wave of self-destructive terror in the early 2000s have prevented the crystallization of a well-centered, economically self-sufficient Palestinian polity from emerging. Despite recent surges in West Bank urban economic growth and two decades of post-Oslo international largesse, the Palestinian territories have been unable to break the Malthusian trap—a problem exacerbated by the scarcity of land available to Palestinians for settlement and self-government. The ironic reality is that for Israel’s impressive feats of demographic turnaround, the Jewish state is losing its zero-sum demographic struggle to its own policies of military occupation of the West Bank and blockade of the Gaza Strip, which have hampered the emergence of strong indigenous institutions and prevented the Palestinians from properly reaping the fruits of economic growth. Contra Mitt Romney, the Palestinian cycle of high fertility and poor economic performance is a matter of institutions, not of culture—one that must be broken for the sake of a sustainable Palestine and a secure Israel.
I won’t delve too deeply into the intractable structural factors that leave Yemen at a regionally record-holding fertility rate of 5.09 children per woman or place it among African rather than other Arab states in developmental terms. Suffice it to say that the same factors that have prevented effective political centralization or modernization in the Arabian Peninsula’s far southwest—a rugged landscape, recent political unification, a history of civil wars and tribal insurrections, and a shallow history of integration into the global economy—have a lot to do with the failure of Yemen to come close to demographic transition. For this constellation of unfortunate reasons, the way forward for Sana’a is much harder to project than those for Baghdad and Ramallah, where the root causes are plain to see and international involvement has been deep and sustained.
In the wake of the first revolutionary movements of the Arab Spring, Western commentators the world over realized just how ardently the Middle East’s motley map of polities and societies defy generalization. On deeper questions of demography and economic development, the same holds true. As the world community struggles to craft an approach to the post-revolutionary Arab states, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Sunni-Shiite fault, it would be wise to understand what Middle Eastern populations look like, beyond the typical maps drawn in different shades of green.
Photo credit: arabglot.com