Israel's Demographic Miracle
RA'ANAN, URI
By Uri Ra'anan Israel's Demographic Miracle Its million refugees since 1948 maintained urban-rural balance Jerusalem One thing stands out as Israel busily prepares to welcome its 10th...
...Indeed, many children of wealthy families have gone off to live with and guide immigrants in new settlements...
...In the ten years since Israel's emergence as a state, therefore, the Jewish population will have increased four-fold in the north and forty-fold in the south...
...And after Sinai, just as after 1948, the country is concentrating on consolidating the fruits of victory...
...They provide Israel with a defensive perimeter and, equally important, insure a healthy occupational structure for the country's economy...
...Rural population, consequently, could be expected to decline sharply in relation to the total population...
...The loan is being sought to finance a four-year agricultural development project that will bring large areas of barren land under cultivation by means of a nationwide irrigation network...
...The number of people participating in cooperatives has risen from 30,000 in 1948 to almost 120,000 today...
...The people in Elath and the Sodom potash territory enjoy a Negev work bonus, and Elath has also been exempt from income tax...
...In the U.S., he concluded successful negotiations in several fields connected with housing programs...
...Despite this and other difficulties, Israel's achievements as it nears the end of its first decade of statehood are impressive...
...Among Jews there has been a marked increase in births, which is interesting when one remembers their traditionally low birthrate in the Diaspora...
...A settlement vacuum anywhere along Israeli's winding and elongated frontiers would invite aggression and dismemberment...
...Moreover, it cost five to ten times more to settle an immigrant family on land needing development than in a well-established city...
...On the other hand, the south had fewer than 3,000 inhabitants (less than 0.5 per cent of the total) in 1948, while next spring well over 110,000 inhabitants (6 per cent of the total) will be living there...
...By Uri Ra'anan Israel's Demographic Miracle Its million refugees since 1948 maintained urban-rural balance Jerusalem One thing stands out as Israel busily prepares to welcome its 10th anniversary next spring: After a breathing spell of several years, the people have recaptured much of the intoxication and feverishness that marked the months immediately following Israel's Declaration of Independence...
...The figure includes some young Sabras, but consists mostly of new immigrants...
...It is also true that inexpensive or free housing for immigrants has, as far as possible, been constructed in areas needing development...
...It has also enabled the Government to accomplish by persuasion what other governments probably could not accomplish by force: the demographic redistribution of a whole nation, irrespective of comfort, but in line witli geo-political, defensive and economic needs...
...Admittedly, so far this has involved mainly the less arid northwestern Negev...
...Often countries experiencing such rapid growth are faced with serious economic problems and must resort to encouraging emigration...
...True, some economic incentives are offered to those in difficult climates or inaccessible locations...
...Invariably, they quickly become attached to their new dwellings and localities...
...by its 10th anniversary, Israel is expected to have over 2 million inhabitants—1.8 million Jews and 210,000 non-Jews...
...Israel is not financially capable of carrying out the project alone, and it is the only remaining way to make the land in question productive...
...First of all, the more advanced sections of the population (old settlers and immigrants alike, and especially the youth) are still filled with the idealism of pioneering...
...The Israeli Government does not have the power to tell its citizens, new or old, where they may live...
...Ten years ago, 16 per cent of the Jewish population could be classified as rural...
...Paradoxically, though, probably the strongest factor in Israel's favor is the belligerent attitude of its Arab neighbors...
...As for the other immigrants, the Government has learned that, instead of welcoming them in dreary transit camps located near the cities, it is best to offer them homes and a chance to work in development regions immediately...
...That the bulk of the new immigrants have settled in rural regions rather than established urban centers is important for Israeli security...
...When founded, the state consisted of a little more than 600,000 Jews and some 160,000 non-Jews (Moslem and Christian Arabs, Druses, etc...
...in the barren southern Negev, only isolated points like Elath have been settled...
...Even more important, he got the U.S...
...moral commitments to Israel following the Suez war and the Eisenhower Doctrine), and the new nations of Asia and Africa...
...Moshavim (cooperative settlements), which have shown themselves better suited to the frequently highly individualistic nature of the new immigrants than the communal kibbutzim, have been particularly successful...
...Before statehood, it was sparsely populated and there were large areas without any Jews at all near the Samarian foothills, around the Lydda-Ramle section and near the Judean foothills...
...Arab opposition to the Johnston Plan, or any use of the Jordan's waters that would benefit Arabs and Jews alike, has made it impossible for Israel to quench the thirst of the Negev and other dry regions...
...At home, the renewal of mass immigration has resulted in a redoubling of efforts to swiftly execute large-scale settlement plans...
...When they announce several times daily that they want to wipe it off the map and drive its citizens into the sea, and when on occasion they turn their words into bloody action, then a course which under other circumstances might seem less attractive to some Israelis suddenly becomes a desperate necessity...
...Unlike Galilee, the Jordan Valley and the Negev, where many hundreds of thousands of immigrants can still be absorbed with the help of irrigation and industrial expansion, it is almost completely settled...
...by next spring it will have about 200,000 (over 11 per cent of the total...
...The achievement is all the more impressive in view of the fact that this stony area already has a resident population of 130,000 Arabs and Druses...
...These predictions were not altogether unreasonable, considering previous tendencies among Diaspora Jewry...
...This is particularly true in the Negev capital, Beersheba, which now has nearly 20,000 inhabitants...
...Agricultural settlements have doubled in number from 400 to 800...
...No agency exists to direct labor or manipulate economic conditions in a manner that would force the wage or salary earner to shift from one place to another...
...To be sure, the main urban areas have grown, but they have not kept pace with the country's total growth and their proportion of the population has dropped 20 per cent...
...Roughly 90,000 people then occupied the rural regions of the coastal plain, while next spring at least 450,000 Jews will be living there...
...On the international scene, it is attempting to forge new links of friendship with France, the United States (in the light of U.S...
...Any survey of settlement patterns must also include the coastal plain— except, of course, for Haifa and Tel Aviv...
...Close to a million immigrants will have arrived, and births will have accounted for an addition of approximately 250,000 Jews and 50,000 non-Jews...
...to reconsider Israel's request for a $75-million Export-Import Bank loan...
...Thus the state would not be viable economically because it would lack a large agricultural and industrial working population...
...Yet Israel—which except for the Negev is more densely populated than most of Italy—has brought in two immigrants for each original inhabitant without encountering insuperable employment problems...
...How did a free democratic country bring about such a population distribution...
...But this is the picture that emerges today: In 1948, more than 60 per cent of the Jewish population lived within the municipal boundaries of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem (the figure rises to 80 per cent if their industrial suburbs are taken into account) . By next spring, according to present statistics, these cities will contain considerably less than 40 per cent of the Jewish population (or less than 60 per cent, counting the suburbs...
...In France, he secured a $45-million credit grant which will be used mostly for improving and expanding transportation facilities...
...This idealism makes it unfashionable to prefer an easy city life to the hardships of developing some difficult regions...
...by next spring the figure will top 24 per cent...
...At the outset, the pessimists claimed that, even if immigrants came and were absorbed, they would not settle the stony regions of Galilee in the north or the Negev desert in the south, but would stream into the large cities like Tel Aviv, Haifa and possibly Jerusalem and set themselves up as petty traders or artisans...
...communal settlements have registered a slower increase, from 50,000 to almost 90,000...
...In line with the latter, Finance Minister Levi Eshkol visited Paris and Washington this summer...
...It can be safely said that 10 per cent of the new arrivals have gone into the Negev...
...Italy is a classic example...
...Then, as now, the Israelis faced the morrow of a victorious war, which revealed their military superiority over a numerically stronger enemy...
...The answer to how the excellent population distribution was accomplished is not simple...
...Every Israeli knows this and it has created an atmosphere all its own...
...There is nothing, however, to prevent a new immigrant from taking temporary quarters in a far more comfortable place like Tel Aviv, finding work there and eventually acquiring an apartment...
...Israel's Arab minority has increased 31 per cent since statehood, as higher medical standards have steadily reduced Arab infant mortality...
...The region to the north and east of Haifa, Galilee and the northern valleys, had fewer than 50,000 Jewish inhabitants (some 7 per cent of the total) in 1948...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 39
