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The birth rate in Israel is the highest in the developing world. If the country continues to encourage this – in 2059 we will reach the density of Bangladesh
25/9/2015 15:15 | News agencies
The Reuters news agency on Friday published an extensive report announcing a population explosion in the distant future of Israel and suggested ways to prevent high birth rates. Today, Israel is the country with the average number of children per mother, the highest among the developed countries, and currently stands at three times that of the rest of the industrialized countries of the OECD.
Because of the massive immigration from the Soviet Union and the encouragement of the national birth, the number of Jews in Israel has doubled over the last 25 years. In the future, they warn, the Israeli population could reach 15.6 million by 2059, and 20.6 in the most extreme case. In this situation, the place in the country may simply end.
“Israel is on the way to ecological and social disaster, and a severe deterioration in the quality of life, because the population density is becoming more violent, compressed, and the comfort of life is declining – there is no room for animals other than humans,” said Prof. Alon Tal of the Institute for Desert Research At Ben Gurion University, and one of the leaders of the environmental struggle.
The current data point to 352 people per kilometer – when in 1990 there were 215, according to CBS.
The numbers will reach 501-880 in 2059. “Our job is not to predict the disaster but to see the edge of the cliff to which we are going, and there is definitely is one if we do not change our behavior, says demographer Ari Paltiel of the CBS.
The most serious problem, according to social activists, is that there is no national recognition of the problem. On the contrary, government policy encourages increased birth rates. The reasons range from the Divine commandment to “proverb” to the trauma of the Holocaust, and of course, Israel’s demographic fear of becoming a Jewish minority among an Arab majority.
“Historically, Israel’s birth policy has been shaped by hysteria stemming from the fear of changing demographics vis-à-vis the Arabs, fueled by the statements of politicians,” Tal said.
In the territories of Israel and Palestine, the number of Jews and Palestinians is equal to about 6.3 million. In the case of the Palestinians, it includes 1.75 million citizens of Israel and 4.55 million in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. There are half a million Jews in the occupied West Bank.