Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict use the old narrative of blood and soil, the demographic race and the obligations of the religious system. What happened on October 7, 2023 and beyond is a tragic yet inevitable consequence of adopting this logic. And the goal - to intimidate the other nation and reduce its population.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
In January 2025, a cease-fire agreement broke more than fourteen months of the most brutal escalation in history of the nearly 70-year-long war between the Palestinian people and the state of Israel. It is estimated that at least 46,000 Palestinian women and men have been killed in Gaza and less than a thousand in the West Bank - figures that do not include missing persons and deaths from indirect causes. The total of Israelis killed, including victims of the October 7 Hamas massacre and members of uniformed formations, was about 2,000.
Many international organizations - including Amnesty International, Humans Rights Watch and Forensic Architecture - recognize that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and that Western governments have alienated themselves from their constituents, more critical than they are of the Israeli army's actions. The world hopes that a ceasefire will lead to a lasting peace. Unfortunately, the realization of this scenario is unlikely because of what lies at the heart of the conflict. And there lie biopolitics and demographics.
Demographic warfare
According to one of the fundamental tenets of Zionism, the cause of antisemitism, taking the form of cyclical pogroms and expulsions of the Jewish minority, was that Jews were guests everywhere, hosts nowhere. A minority at the mercy of other groups. Therefore, the issue of demographics and Jews becoming the majority in the newly formed state was prioritized by its founders. This logic was behind the displacements and pogroms carried out against the Arab population, the so-called Nakba, in the 1940s and in the following decades.
Demographic policy was pursued both through ethnic cleansing and increasing its own population, stimulating fertility rates and using aliyah - the right of return, granting Israeli citizenship to Jewish individuals and converts to Judaism. Israel's demographic growth in the last quarter of the 20th century and early 21st century has been a source of envy for Western countries and the subject of much analysis. According to World Bank data, from the 1960s to 2000, the fertility rate for Israeli women fluctuated between 3.87 and 2.72, never going above 3.0 most of the time.
In the late 20th century and early 21st century, the fertility rate of Israeli women fell below 3.0 children per woman (Palestinian women gave birth to an average of 4.6 to as many as 6 children each, depending on sources). Thanks to a series of government programs, it reached 3.11 in 2016, but for a short time. The fertility rate of Palestinian women, especially those living in the Gaza Strip, was also falling, but more gently and starting from a higher level.
In 2020, 75 percent of Israel's population was Jews (6.87 million), 20 percent (1.9 million) Arabs, including Muslims, Druze and Christians of Arab descent, and 5 percent others (465,000), largely migrants exercising the right of return who did not identify as Jews, and workers from Southeast Asia. Between 2010 and 2020, Jewish population growth was about 18 percent, Israeli Arab population growth was 25 percent.
Significantly, the largest increases in the Jewish population were among the charedim - an ultra-Orthodox community, some of whom challenge the legitimacy of the state of Israel on religious grounds and whose members were, to a certain extent, exempt from military service (this changed only a few months ago). In 2020, there were an average of 6.6 children per Charedim mother, while secular Israeli women had just 2.2.
A dire moment of balance
The declining (though still significantly higher than the average of developed countries) birth rate among Israel's Jewish citizens and the strong population growth of Gaza residents - up 100 percent over the past 20 years - predicted a moment of population equilibrium. More than 2.5 million Palestinians living in all zones of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with 2 million Gazans and a similar number of Arab Israelis (as Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are referred to in Israel) adding up to about 7 million in 2022.
At the time, there were about 7.5 million Jews living in the State of Occupied Palestinian Territories and the administrative borders of the State of Israel. It was estimated that in the next few years the Palestinian population - split between a number of disparately administered administrative areas, despite the actions of the occupiers remaining in constant contact and having a sense of community - would be larger than the Jewish population. And on top of that, it will be younger - due to historically higher fertility rates and large differences in quality of life (especially access to medical care), residents of the occupied Palestinian territories live on average a decade shorter than those in Israel.
Grass cutting
One attempt to deflect the specter of losing the demographic war has been the expansion of Israeli settlements in Zone C of the West Bank, which accounts for about 60 percent of the territories, set aside under the 1995 Cairo Accords. It's an area full of smaller Palestinian settlements, Israeli settlements and military bases, under Israeli civilian and military administration, but part of the occupied territories. The construction of more illegal Israeli settlements was supposed to change the ethnic proportions of the West Bank and allow its full annexation.
The term "mowing the grass," fondly used by the Israeli and US militaries to refer to brutal operations in the occupied territories, officially refers to the destruction of the live force and infrastructure of Palestinian independence organizations (considered terrorist by many countries). However, the enormity of civilian casualties, as well as the destruction of civilian infrastructure - with which these operations have been linked each time - makes one wonder if their purpose was not to limit the growth of the Palestinian population as such: through physical elimination, maiming or creating a state of fear and insecurity.
A report by UN OCHA indicates that from January 1, 2008 to October 6, 2023, 6343 Palestinians were killed and 153,610 wounded at the hands of the IDF and other formations identified with Israel. The balance of Palestinian operations during the same period is 314 Israelis killed and 6,412 wounded. This means that for every Israeli killed during this period, more than 20 Palestinians were murdered.
The Palestinians saw demographics as their opportunity. A report published in 2016, Palestine 2030: Demographic Change, Opportunity for development -prepared by UN agencies in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority government-estimated that 6.9 million people would live in the occupied territories alone by 2030, not including another 2.5 or even 3 million so-called Israeli Arabs.
The publication expressed the belief of the then-Palestinian Authority Minister that such a significant increase in population would not only improve economic conditions, but would also force the need for a free Palestinian State. However, many analysts - both those working for the UN and independent entities - warned that such a rapidly expanding population of young people without rights and prospects, confined to "the world's largest open-air prison," exposed to violence from Israeli soldiers and settlers, subjected to the religious and nationalist propaganda of Hamas and its affiliated organizations, could lead to an outbreak of aggression.
In vitro and abortion
In the early 2000s, a boom in IVF began among the Palestinian community. In 2003, there were three clinics dealing with it in the West Bank, and two in Gaza. According to a report by the United Nations Population Found, in 2019 there were already eleven and nine, respectively. Palestinian media data I was able to find indicates that two more were established before the war escalated in October 2023.
This may sound absurd to a European whose set of associations links Gaza with poverty and IVF with high costs. Indeed, in successive UN reports, the Gaza Strip was considered a place with extremely unfavorable living conditions - with low food security, unemployment of more than 45 percent, limited access to water or a difficult housing situation (this was before the Israeli military razed the area, destroying half the schools, most of the hospitals and condemning most Palestinians to homelessness). But with the support of NGOs such as the Palestinian Center for Human Preservation, grants from the Palestinian Authority government or loans from family and years of savings, Palestinians have found themselves among the leaders in IVF in the Middle East.
In the Palestinian community, procreation is one form of resistance to the occupation. The most spectacular expression of this approach is the smuggling of semen from Israeli prisons. It is used in IVF procedures at clinics in Gaza and the West Bank, allowing those sentenced to years in prison to become fathers. An estimated 120 children have been conceived this way since 2012.
The public was surprised by the media's reported collection of semen from Israelis killed on October 7, 2023. However, this is a consequence of regulations that have been in place in Israel for more than two decades, allowing the biological material of the deceased to be disposed of by their relatives (as a rule - wives and partners, in exceptional cases parents). This is the so-called biological will, an aftermath of, among other things, a state-subsidized program to store the sperm of IDF soldiers. Israel is also one of the few countries (along with the UK, some US states and Spain) that permits the creation of embryos after the death of a parent.
Israel is also one of the few countries where - in a number of cases - it is possible to legally terminate a pregnancy up to the 24th week without much obstruction, and, after obtaining the opinion of the relevant committee - up to the actual delivery. Access to abortion, surrogacy and IVF, often co-funded by the state, creates one of the most progressive reproductive policies in the world.
This is diametrically opposed to the situation of Palestinian women living in the Gaza Strip, where pregnancy termination laws contained in the Palestinian Public Health Law No. 20 of 2004 are in force. Abortion is almost completely prohibited, including in cases where conception occurred as a result of rape, the fetus is permanently damaged or the mother's life is at risk - the exception being when the life of the pregnant person is at risk. Performing the procedure requires the written consent of both the pregnant woman and her husband or male legal guardian, usually the father.
Openness to LGBT+ people as part of reproductive policy
LGBT+ people of Israeli descent may be viewed by Israeli conservatives as sinful, but nevertheless "their own." This is because they are Israelis in the first place - potential soldiers, carriers of Jewish genes and identity. They serve a minimum of 32 months of military service (men) or 24 (women), the same as heteronormative male and female citizens. Same-sex couples, trans people in relationships, and single people - regardless of gender - have for years been able, under government programs, to benefit from adoption, in vitro or surrogacy (the latter from 2021, thanks to a Supreme Court decision).
Many of these solutions - which in Europe or the U.S. today are regarded as leftist and "woke" - were pushed through during the governments of the hard right (as the five successive cabinets formed after 2009, when the center-right Kadima lost power, can be described). There is no shortage of homophobic politicians in the current government, such as Benzael Smotrich and Ben Gvir, but Benjamin Netanyahu himself has expressed support for LGBT+ people, stressing that they play an important role in the state.
In Gaza and the West Bank, it's hard to draw a parallel - LGBT+ people there are victims of violence and persecution. At the same time, it is worth noting that in most of the cases of killings or executions whose victims were accused of homosexuality - as in the case of Mahmoud Ishtiwi or Zuhair al-Ghaleeth - this was an additional charge, accompanying the charge of treason through collaboration with Israel. Recruitment of non-heterosexuals using blackmail by Israel's civilian and military intelligence services is well documented. Palestinian gays are coerced into collaboration by services under a government that facially supports LGBT+ people in Israel, threatened with expulsion by Arab neighbors or family.
We need to stop the demographic race, not pause it
Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict use the old narrative of blood and soil, the demographic race and the obligations of the religious system. What happened on October 7, 2023 and beyond is a tragic yet inevitable consequence of adopting this logic. And the goal - to intimidate the other nation and reduce its population.
The prospect of a demographic race is callous and frightening: in this view, the bodies of Israelis and Palestinians are indirectly owned by the nation. Women become little more than incubators, men (and in Israel, though much less frequently, women as well) - cannon fodder in an endless war.
Leaving the conflict between Israel and Palestine without decisive international intervention, defusing the ticking bomb of the demographic race, has led to too many atrocities - including the practices and laws described above, resulting from a permanent state of war.
It will only cease when both nations have independent and self-sustaining states - or when one of them annihilates the other. If we agree that the second scenario is not an option, we are left with a two-state solution, in which the international community can exert pressure to abandon human rights-violating practices and mitigate mutual acts of aggression, and states, without a permanent sense of threat and need to fight for their own existence, are more likely to abandon these acts.
