WEAPON OF MASS POPULATION OF ISLAM

Date: 9/26/2003

Comment

Weapon of mass population "I want to have many boys, so we have more people and can get the Jews out.

"By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Senior Correspondent

Published September 21, 2003

From:

http://www.sptimes.com/2003/09/21/Worldandnation/Weapon_of_mass_po pula.shtml

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - In the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, Thuraya Eshbear wields a powerful weapon.

Babies.

At 35, this wisp of a woman has 13 children, from 20 years down to 10 months. Though she can't afford to school them all, though she rarely has a minute to herself, she would gladly bear more.

"I have many children so that the Palestinian people will have more than the Israelis," says Eshbear, a $37-a-week cleaner in the maternity ward of Gaza City's biggest hospital. Here, on any given day, dozens of other Palestinian women are doing their part to ensure ultimate victory over Israel.

It is a war fought not just with F-16s and suicide bombers, but with diapers and Similac.

Yet the battle for population supremacy rages on, although Israel at present seems to be lagging. A bleak economy has forced the government to cut once-generous allowances for big families, and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said poor Israelis, Jewish and Arab alike, should stop having such large broods.

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Article:

Subject: Islam: Weapon of mass population

Weapon of mass population "I want to have many boys, so we have more people and can get the Jews out.

"By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Senior Correspondent

Published September 21, 2003

From:

http://www.sptimes.com/2003/09/21/Worldandnation/Weapon_of_mass_popula.shtml

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - In the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, Thuraya Eshbear wields a powerful weapon. Babies.

At 35, this wisp of a woman has 13 children, from 20 years down to 10 months. Though she can't afford to school them all, though she rarely has a minute to herself, she would gladly bear more.

It is a war fought not just with F-16s and suicide bombers, but with diapers and Similac.

Ever since Israel was created in 1948, starting a clash with the Arab world that has no end in sight, Jews have feared what Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat calls his "biological bomb." In Israel and the neighboring territories of Gaza and the West Bank, Arabs are reproducing at a rate double that of Jews.

Israel's 5.4-million Jews make up just more than half of the region's population, but Arabs will become a clear majority within 20 years, Haifa University professor Arnon Soffer says. By 2020, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be home to 8.5-million Arabs and just 6.4-million Jews.

Unless Palestinians get their own state, the soaring Arab population could mean one of two things: Israel would cease to exist as a Jewish nation or it would be forced into an apartheid-like system in which a Jewish minority ruled a Palestinian majority.

Unless something changes, "our country is finished in 17 years and there will be a collapse," Soffer warned Israeli political leaders.

Others say the demographic threat is exaggerated, that studies like Soffer's fail to take into account such important factors as continued Jewish migration to Israel. The Palestinian population figures are meant to scare Israel into giving up land - especially in the West Bank - to which it has an historic right, one expert charges.

"The same thing took place in '48 when Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, was urged by top statisticians to refrain from declaring independence for the same reason," says Yoram Ettinger of Israel's Ariel Center for Policy Research. "They predicted, based on certified figures, that by 1969 there would be an Arab majority. Their predictions were crashed against the rocks of reality."

"A man can and should have a family with as many children as he likes," Netanyahu said, "but he must understand he is primarily responsible for providing for them, educating them, feeding them."

Meanwhile, the women of Gaza keep producing baby after baby. The Gaza Strip, where more than 1-million Palestinians live, has one of the world's highest growth rates - 4.5 percent, enough to double the population every 15 years.

"Many people have been killed in the intifada by Israeli soldiers so they want to reproduce," says Hala Sarraj, a Gaza psychologist, referring to the uprising in which more than 2,400 Palestinians have died since 2000.

That is true of Hanan Himad, whose 21-year-old son, Jawdad, was shot dead two years ago while throwing rocks at the Israelis, she says. He was the oldest of her nine children - Himad was pregnant with her 10th this summer when she tripped and fell while running from an Israeli bomb dropped near her home east of Gaza City.

A few weeks later she miscarried, and on this Thursday morning she was in the hospital, awaiting surgery to remove the dead fetus. But at 39, she is not about to quit.

"I want to have many boys," she says, as other women nod approvingly, "so we have more people and can get the Jews out."

A prize for the 10th baby

Except for the Mediterranean and the Sea of Galilee, there would seem little reason for two groups of people to fight so long and so hard over one New Jersey-size wedge of land.

Arab sheep and camel herders long roamed the desert from which the Israelites were expelled more than two millennia ago. But in the late 1800s, after centuries of persecution, the Zionists announced their goal of resettling as many of the world's Jews as possible in their biblical homeland.

That set the stage for a struggle in which demographics might forever play a role.

By the end of World War I, what was then known as Palestine had 60,000 Jewish inhabitants. Growing Arab hostility toward the newcomers erupted in the 1921 Jaffa riots that killed 47 Jews.

But the huge migration came after World War II, when survivors of the Nazi Holocaust began flocking to the promised land. Some 650,000 Jews were living in Palestine by 1948 when Israel declared independence, and Arab nations immediately launched war against the new Jewish state.

Thus began another major population shift. To this day, there is strong debate over whether Arabs left Israel at their leaders' behest, on the promise they could return soon (as most Jewish historians say) or were forcefully removed by Jewish soldiers (as Arabs say).

Whatever the case, 700,000 Palestinians - as the Arabs began calling themselves - went to neighboring countries or to Gaza, then under Egyptian control, or the West Bank, then under Jordanian rule.

"Contrary to most colonial projects, the Israeli one was intended to substitute one people for another," French researcher Phillipe Fargues said in a 2000 study on the region's demographic battle. "It was not a will to dominate the Arab peoples so much as to dominate the territory. Relative sizes of the two populations were at stake."

As early as 1943, while the British ruled the area, the chief rabbi of Palestine urged Jewish families to have big families: "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth."

Pressure to procreate grew even greater after 1948.

"Being a Jewish state and knowing that we lost 6-million Jews during the Holocaust, it is on the back or front of every Jew's mind that it is our responsibility for the future to make up for that traumatic loss," says Ettinger of the Ariel Center.

"Certainly when we talk about the demographic requirements of a Jewish state, that behooves many among us, either religious or nonreligious, hawks or doves, to have at least two children, three, four or five children."

As an incentive to reproduce, Israel in 1949 instituted the Ben Gurion Award - given to every woman delivering her 10th child. It was discontinued a decade later because so many Arab women qualified.

Israel's natural population growth has been greatly augmented by immigration, including the influx of almost 1-million Jews after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nearly 95 percent of Israel's Jewish population originates from immigrants; without them, there might be fewer than 300,000 Jews now in Israel.

Ettinger thinks immigration will continue, counterbalancing the effects of the Palestinian birth rate.

"We have more than 1-million Jews, probably 2-million, still in the former Soviet Union, there are 6-million Jews in America, and some of them I believe are going to end up in the Jewish state," he says. "We've got a half million Jews in France and a half million in Latin America.

"And who's to say that the Jewish birth rate has to stick to 2-point-something? It certainly could go up to 3-point-something, which would turn the whole thing upside down. When you consider the fact that we are 6-million Jews compared to 600,000 in 1948, you cannot but be highly optimistic about Jewish demographics in this part of the world."

But there is little economic incentive for Jews in America or Western Europe to emigrate to Israel, which has a lower per capita income than where they now live. Moreover, the Jewish population in the United States is shrinking and aging; even if American Jews did move to Israel, they would have only a modest effect on the birth rate.

Ettinger is more optimistic than many Israeli leaders, who have long worried about the Palestinian baby boom.

Soon after taking office in 1969, Prime Minister Golda Meier expressed concern about what would happen if Israel annexed the land it had seized in the 1967 Mideast War:

"We would have to wake up every morning wondering how many Arab babies had been born during the night."

But as the prospect of a complete withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank grew increasingly remote, "both Israeli and Palestinian politicians realized that demographic growth is the Palestinians' most potent weapon," Fargues said.

Paradoxically, he found, the continuing conflict might be partly responsible for the high birth rate that so concerns Israel.

Thanks to huge amounts of humanitarian aid from the United Nations, Islamic charities and other organizations, Palestinians generally enjoy good health and live long lives, assuming they don't die of man-made causes. The aid, which includes money, food and schooling, helps ease the burden of raising children.

And while high unemployment normally discourages large families, the opposite has been true in Gaza.

In the first Palestinian uprising, from 1987 to 1993, incomes dropped 40 percent in a single year yet the birth rate went up. It seems that many fathers lowered the "bride price" to facilitate marrying off their daughters in a time of great insecurity. The result: Many more teenage brides and many more babies. "I hate her"

In her face, Thuraya Eshbear looks older than the 35 years she admits to. But at just 5 feet and 100 or so pounds, she has the petite figure that caught the eye of Majed Eshbear as she returned home from school one day.

Tall, handsome, with a thick shock of hair, Eshbear was divorced from his first wife, by whom he had six children. He married Thuraya, and over the next 20 years, she would have 13 children and three miscarriages.

A few years ago, Eshbear began to look around again. This time he settled on Manal Sultan, 18 years his junior, a pretty woman with a wide perfect smile. Sultan had never seen Eshbear, let alone met him, before her father agreed to give her hand in marriage.

Thuraya was so angry at her husband for taking another wife that she went home to her mother's. But after 15 days she came back.

Now both wives live with Eshbear under the same roof.

"I love her," the younger woman says of Thuraya.

"I hate her," Thuraya says of her rival.

As for Eshbear, he says, wearily, the two women fight and argue all the time. He might consider getting married again, "but not in Gaza."

Under Islamic law, men are allowed to take up to four wives. The original rationale was that in time of war, when so many men are killed in battle, widows would have no one to provide for them unless the surviving men could marry more than once.

But if there is one thing that Eshbear's wives agree on, it is that the practice is anachronistic.

"It's not fair. I think one wife is enough," Thuraya says, her heavily kohled eyes flashing in anger. "As women, we can't leave our children, but as a man he can leave and take a second and a third and a fourth wife."

Both women insist, though, that they love Eshbear and that he loves them.

Thuraya, who favors tight jeans and T-shirts instead of conservative Islamic dress, is the family dynamo. After her husband married Sultan, she decided to get a job and stay out of the house as much as possible. She rises at 6, gives the kids breakfast and takes a taxi to the hospital. There she mops floors and cleans toilets up to 12 hours a day.

Except for two married sons, no one else in the family works.

Sultan, who has a year-old boy, stays home. So does Eshbear, who closed his sweet shop three years ago when the intifada began and Gaza's economy hit bottom.

Now he spends most of the day watching cartoons on TV with his youngest kids and smoking one cigarette after another. He is still thin and handsome, his hair is still thick and black, but he has the tired, resigned look of a man who doesn't expect life to get much better, or even much different.

Eshbear says he is 47 but he struggles to remember names and ages. He thinks Sultan is younger than she says she is. He thinks Thuraya has 15 kids, not 13. He hesitates when asked the name of a particular child.

He never intended to have 20 kids, he says, but "my sisters love children so they say, "Bring, bring, bring."'

He pauses. "I made a mistake. If there were not this number I could teach them better."

Contraceptives are available from public and private clinics in Gaza, but they are used more to space children than to limit the number. And it is almost always the woman, not the man, who takes the responsibility of birth control.

Eshbear might not be as embarrassed about his big family as he sounds, nor should he be, says Sarraj, the psychologist. Children can be a hedge against the future in a place where there are no retirement plans and the government, the Palestinian Authority, is on the verge of collapse.

"Children mean support," Sarraj says. "It is desirable to have children because of the insecurity of our society - you are not guaranteed to live tomorrow but to have children is to give some protection to the family."

And, she says, there is another reason Eshbear might actually be proud of his giant clan.

In Gaza, where the conflict with Israel has thrown 60 percent of adults out of work, fathering children is one sure way an unemployed man can prove his masculinity.

"To be a man in Gaza means providing food and money and clothing," Sarraj notes. "If you can't do this you cannot be a real man - except if you show you are productive by giving lots of babies."

- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com

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DOES IT APPLY TO PARTITIONED INDIA? IT DOES NOT IF YOU CALL IT INDEPENDENCE.

NOR WILL APPLY TO THE INDIANS IF THEY WISH TO KISS THE FOOT OF ABDUL KALAM FOR HIS APPARENT SECULARISM.

BUT IT WILL GIVE YOU NIGHTMARE TO SEE THEM IN AURANGABAD, ALLAHABAD, SECUNDERABAD, FAIZABAD AND MURSHIDABAD, ETC.

IT WILL GIVE YOU NIGHTMARE IF YOU JUST ASKED, WHY DID LAHORE JUMP OUIT OF THE MAP OF INDIA IN 1947.

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