An Israel Equal For All, Jewish Or Not

[Mosby]

3. Bizarre op-ed on Israel by Patricia Marks Greenfield in Friday’s Post

There are a lot of strange things about this op-ed, which tries to paper over the gap between a reasonable call for Israel to treat its minority citizens more fairly and a highly unreasonable call for Israel to integrate the populations of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Palestinian diaspora into one state that by some magic she doesn’t identify will still somehow not only remain culturally Jewish, but with the assent of what would likely be a strong majority Arab population.

To take one example of the oddity of this op-ed, the author argues that rising income and exposure to technology is leading to permanently lower birthrates among Arabs in Israel. A sentence later, she notes that the Jewish birthrate is rising as the Arab birthrate is falling. But wait, don’t Israeli Jews also have rising income and exposure to technology? It’s not often one sees simplistic cause and effect analysis self-rebutted a sentence later. (And by the way, why unlike among almost all other population groups in the world the Israeli Jewish birthrate is rising, including and especially among the non-religious population, is a fascinating question that deserves, but to my knowledge has not received, some serious research attention).

But the really bizarre line in Greenfield’s op-ed is this one: “Many Jewish Israelis subscribe to the unfortunate demographic myth that high birth rates among Arabs and Ethiopians mean that they will soon outnumber Jews of other national and racial origins.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/09/28/bizarre-op-ed-on-israel-by-patricia-marks-greenfield-in-fridays-post/

I think Greenfield is extraordinarily naive to think that that adding 11+ million Muslim Arabs to Israel is going to lead to a western style secular paradise in the middle east and furthermore it's beyond arrogant for her to lecture Israelis about why they won't destroy Israel to create a new country. I wonder what other countries she thinks should be joined? None of course, it's only little Israel that offends her sensibilities.