Abstract
Israel is a semi-Western country […] but, it would be difficult to transform Israel into a Western country as long as Zionism as an ethnic ideology dictates the order of life in the country (Smocha 1999, p. 253).
For me Zionism died (Ruth Dayan, the ninety-seven year old divorced widow of Moshe Dayan, on an Israeli TV program, December 24, 2014).
Although Israel is the realization of political-Zionist longing and is considered a modern Western country, its demographic future is notably directed by far-reaching, traditional, conservative policies. Childbirth, which has been encouraged since early on by its leaders and is reinforced by various state regulations, reflects the strong impact of the traditional, religious, even orthodox Jewish lifestyle on the heterodox, humanist-liberal notions of the early Western Zionists. As noted by Susan Martha Kahn, there were many justifications for Israelis to desire large families in addition to honoring the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis I: 28). For Israeli Jews, the imperative to reproduce has deep political and historical roots. Some feel they must have children to counterbalance what they believe to be a demographic threat represented by Palestinian and Arab birthrates. Others believe they must produce soldiers to defend the fledgling state. Some feel pressure to have children in order to ‘replace’ the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Many Jews simply have traditional notions of family life that are very child-centered (Kahn 2000, p. 3).
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Notes
- 1.
In the 1950s, Ben-Gurion gave monetary awards to families with ten or more children. In 1967, the Israeli demographic center was established “to act systematically to realize a demographic policy directed at creating an atmosphere and conditions that encourage a high birth rate, which is so vital to the future of the Jewish people” (see Kahn 2000, p. 4).
- 2.
See Jeff Wheelwright’s story of Dor Yesharim in “Cancer’s Wandering Gene” (Discover, Vol. 32, December, 10, 2011).
- 3.
“Tay-Sachs disease has been eliminated among Jews – is cystic-fibrosis next in line?” Tamara Trautman, Haaretz, January, 18, 2005. Among the respondents to this news, several made the point that not the disease but rather the frequency of affected newborns was suppressed. The prevalence of the factor for the disease may even increase; suppose that a family that might have produced an affected child over-compensates for the aborted child by having more healthy children, some of whom may be heterozygous for the relevant allele, thus, inadvertently increasing the frequency of that allele in the population.
- 4.
The issue of the costs to the State for treatment of handicapped persons was used extensively by the Nazi proponents of eugenics, or as they called it, Rassenhygiene. This further emphasizes that it is not the medical problem that should be suppressed, but the methods taken to solve it, or as expressed by Francis Galton, “eugenics is not immoral but unmoral” (see Chap. 3).
- 5.
Marxists accuse Jews even today of the sin of accepting anti-Semitism as a fact in a world of nationalism, instead of fighting both. See, e.g., Brenner (1983).
- 6.
On an Israeli news broadcast on May 5, 2007, a couple of days after he won the presidential election in France, Nicolas Sárközy was presented as Jewish, like two previous French prime ministers, Leon Bloom and Pierre Mendès-France. At once, Prof. Joshua Ben-Porat, of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem responded: Sárközy is not Jewish; only one of four of his grandparents was Jewish – as the racist Le Pen was happy to recite. Sárközy is not Jewish in his blood, or his culture, or in his identity.
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Falk, R. (2017). Coda: Zionism and the Biology of the Jews Tomorrow. In: Zionism and the Biology of Jews. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57345-8_10
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