When I first began to talk about Israel’s overpopulation problem, friends and colleagues took umbrage or simply scratched their heads: How can we be talking about policies to reduce Israel’s fertility levels so soon after the Holocaust? And what about keeping up with the burgeoning numbers in hostile neighboring lands — or among Israel’s own Arab population?
My response is that Zionism has always been nimble and practical, committed to adjusting to the evolving realities and challenges facing the Jewish people. Over the past 70 years, world Jewry has largely replaced the 6 million Jews who were murdered during World War II. At the same time, Arab-Israeli birth rates have plummeted and are no longer higher than Jewish fertility levels. Things have changed, and that requires new policies and ideologies.
By many criteria, Israel is already the most crowded Western nation in the world. And its population of 8.5 million is set to double over the next 35 years. It is time we rethink the demographic objectives of the Third Jewish Commonwealth. More and more Israelis are coming to realize that “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron, and that the quality of life in our country will not get better with a larger population. Indeed, it is quickly growing worse.
There is an environmental adage that says that there is no problem that is easier to solve with more people — or harder to solve with fewer. Israel constitutes an extreme example. Every year Israel must build at least 60,000 new housing units if it wants to provide homes to a growing population that is justifiably frustrated at the extraordinarily expensive housing market. We are losing this race and prices keep going up. At the same time, housing starts frequently take place at the expense of Israel’s open spaces. And so over the past two decades we’ve seen almost 200 square kilometers of the country’s heartland and critical habitat get paved over. It is little wonder that a third of Israel’s diverse mammal population, and almost all the large species, are threatened with local extinction.
Prime Minister Netanyahu went to the climate summit in Paris last fall and promised the world that Israel would do its part to address the crisis of global warming by reducing per capita emissions of greenhouse gases 26 percent by 2030. It is not clear that we’ll meet that target. But even if we do, with population growing at more than 2 percent a year there will be 35 percent more people in Israel by then, and our total emissions will increase by some 10 percent.
Israel’s social crises are largely a function of demographic proliferation. Israel’s hospitals are among the most crowded in the developed world, as are its classrooms. The courts are backed up. And anyone who has visited Israel recently experienced the excruciating morning and evening traffic jams. All of these are a result of infrastructure being overwhelmed by ever growing numbers of people. Trying to address our problems with present population trends is like trying to stay in place on a treadmill that is spinning faster and faster.
The unprecedented rate of growth did not happen by itself. It is a result of Israel’s public policies which incentivize large families, do not include contraception among subsidized pharmaceuticals, make access to abortions difficult, and do far too little to empower women professionally, especially in the Arab and ultra-Orthodox sectors. These policies need to be reformed. Jewish law only requires families to have two children; it is perfectly fine for a Jewish state to encourage sustainable demographic dynamics and seek to maintain fertility at replacement levels.
One policy that doesn’t need to change is the Law of Return. With roughly 20,000 Jews coming to Israel each year on average over the past decade and a comparable number leaving, we have reached a healthy equilibrium. When Zionism set out to create a revolution in the Jewish world, it advocated an axiomatic approach to “aliyah”, calling on all Jews, everywhere, to move to the land of Israel. At the time, it was a desperate appeal: without greater numbers, there was no way a Jewish State could survive. But Israel’s military does not need millions more soldiers any more. And the land of Israel does not need more people.
The time has come to embrace the legitimacy, indeed the synergistic benefits, of twin centers of Jewish life in the U.S. and Israel. That balance worked well 2,000 years ago with the academies in Babylon and Jerusalem. Jewish culture has always been about quality over quantity. This simple truth must begin to inform our vision of Israel’s future.
Alon Tal is a veteran Israeli environmental leader and a professor of environmental policy at Ben-Gurion University. He is giving three free lectures in the Bay Area this week about his new book, “The Land Is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel.” See calendar for details.