Steve Sailer writes: Perhaps the most important foreign policy difference between Israel’s two major political wings has been one of tone: the Israeli right expresses its reasons of state using language that American Jewish liberals find needlessly offensive, while the Israeli left traditionally attempts to assuage their American cousins’ troubled consciences with more diplomatic-sounding verbiage.
But the policies haven’t differed much, as the first Likud Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, pointed out in a frank 1982 speech rationalizing the war he and Ariel Sharon had chosen to launch by invading Lebanon. Begin observed that Labor governments had similarly started wars of choice in 1956 and 1967. Begin observed:
In November 1956 we had a choice. The reason for going to war then was the need to destroy the fedayeen, who did not represent a danger to the existence of the state.
The 1956 Suez Crisis was an elaborate conspiracy among Israel, Britain, and France. First, Israel invaded Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Then the old colonial powers invaded, ostensibly to separate the combatants, but actually to seize the Suez Canal. The misadventure ended in shame when President Eisenhower reacted with distaste to the transparent ruse.
The famous Six-Day War began with Israel launching a Pearl Harbor-like surprise attack on the Egyptian air force. Begin admitted:
In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.
Although Israel’s foreign policies have been endlessly hashed over in America, Israel’s domestic policies, such as immigration, are quite interesting. Americans don’t really understand Israel because our public discourse is so much more constrained by mental no-go zones than in the freer Jewish State.
For example, a major issue in the Israeli campaign has been the high cost of housing, which is tied by simple supply and demand economics into Israel’s spectacularly successful population policy of encouraging Jewish births while discouraging births among Muslims (and Ethiopian Jews).
In the late 20th century, it was a truism that Israel’s long-term survival as a Jewish democracy was impossible due to Muslim fertility being so much higher. Either Israel would cease to be Jewish or it would cease to be majority-ruled, because, of course, it was unimaginable that anything could be done to drive down Arab fertility and drive up Jewish fertility.
But the Israeli majority didn’t agree that it must become the minority in its own country, and the Israeli government tends to be adroit at devising policies to implement the majority’s wishes. Hence, births to Muslim mothers have fallen slightly, from 36,000 in 2000 to 35,000 in 2013. Meanwhile, births to Jewish mothers have exploded from 92,000 in 2000 to 127,000 in 2013. The total fertility rate (expected number of births per woman per lifetime) of Muslim women has fallen to 3.35 in 2013, while the TFR of Jewish women continues to climb, reaching 3.05, an extraordinary level for a population as prosperous as Israel’s Jews.
Of course, this rapid expansion of the supply of Israeli Jews increases their demand for housing. Real estate agents will tell you that land naturally goes up in price because they aren’t making any more of it (although Israelis have been making more territory for themselves in the West Bank since 1967).
In Israel, even secular Jewish women average more than two babies apiece. But one reason for Israel having such high Jewish fertility is because of the maintenance of the ultra-Orthodox population as, in effect, a reserve breeding stock in which fathers are subsidized by the government to study during the day and procreate during the night. It’s as if the U.S. government paid the Amish to breed more white people.
With the haredi now comprising eleven percent of the population, the tradition of excusing them from working for a living or serving in the Army is getting expensive to the state. One ultra-Orthodox leader has been willing to share with the Army his young men in the bottom 20 percent of their IQ range:
Bar Chaim in 1999 established the Nahal Haredi unit with the help of Yehuda Duvdevani, a retired brigadier general. The battalion has since recruited more than 6,000 soldiers from the roughly 20 percent of ultra-Orthodox men who Bar Chaim says aren’t interested in a life of study. For these people, he says, the army is a far more suitable place than an unskilled job such as delivering pizza.
Historically, ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations could turn into highly educated secular Jews fairly rapidly. For example, linguist Noam Chomsky’s four grandparents were ultra-Orthodox.
