Yesterday at J Street, Dennis Ross, the Obama Middle East envoy who knows a lot about demographics given his last job as chairman of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute in Jerusalem, added a new and distasteful component to the discourse of Israel and Palestine– “the biological clock” that is ticking away against the prospects for peace. We are used to the racist “demographic clock,” which you will see Ross mentions– the fear that because Palestinians tend to have more children than Jews, there will soon be a Palestinian majority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean that will endanger the Jewish state (a majority that by some counts is already here).
But Ross adds to this the fear of the Arab youth bulge– the fact that within the Arab population there are so many more young Arabs than older ones. In Egypt and Tunisia the Arab youth bulge is talked about as a good or neutral thing; these young people have modern attitudes, but they are denied opportunity in their economies. But you will see that in the Israel/Palestine situation, Dennis Ross sees the replacement of old attitudes by young ones as a scary Palestinian prospect. And why? Apparently because the old ones are used to submission while the young ones won’t take occupation lying down. Mr. Ross:
[T]here are a number clocks that are ticking. The longer it takes to forge an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, the harder it will be to forge a two-state solution that meets the needs of both sides. For example, the demographic clock is ticking and it is only a matter of time before it challenges the very foundations of the Zionist dream of a Jewish and democratic state. The biological clock is ticking, and as a younger generation grows up with conflict and occupation and fading prospects for peace, the less likely we will be to see new leaders emerge who believe in coexistence. And as the struggle between rejectionists and pragmatists continues across the region, there is a technological clock that will empower those committed to violence with increasingly deadly and indiscriminate weapons of terror that can spoil peace at any moment.
