Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a war on demographics

The ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has killed nearly 54,000 Palestinians, along with various plans to expel the remaining survivors, has one primary goal: to safeguard the Jewish settler-colony of Israel by restoring the lost Jewish demographic majority, which had been achieved through mass killings and expulsions since 1948.

Zionists understood early on that the only chance their settler-colonial project had of survival was through the establishment of a Jewish majority by expelling the Palestinians.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, outlined early plans for this in the 1890s, which the Zionist Organisation pursued from the 1920s. Expulsion, however, only became possible after the Zionist military conquest of Palestine.

On the eve of the 1948 war, Palestine had a Jewish population of 608,000 (constituting 30 percent), most of whom had arrived in the country over the previous two decades, alongside 1,364,000 Palestinians.

During the 1948 conquest, Zionist forces killed upwards of 13,000 Palestinians – one percent of the Palestinian population – and expelled around 760,000 Palestinians, or more than 80 percent of those who lived in the area that Israel would later declare a Jewish state. 

It was these killings and acts of ethnic cleansing that established Jewish demographic superiority in Israel between 1948 and 1967.

Expulsion

By November 1948, about 165,000 Palestinians remained in Israel, whose Jewish colonial population had risen to 716,000 people, increasing its percentage from 30 to 81 percent almost overnight.

In 1961, the Jewish population had grown to 1,932,000 out of a total population of 2,179,000, raising the Jewish proportion to 89 percent.

Israel’s territorial expansion in 1967 undermined the Jewish demographic supremacy Zionists had worked to secure since 1948

On the eve of Israel’s 1967 conquest of three Arab countries, its population numbered 2.7 million, 2.4 million of whom were Jewish colonists and their descendants, maintaining their 89 percent share of the total.

The major demographic faux pas committed by the Jewish settler-colony was its 1967 conquest of the remainder of Palestine, along with the Golan Heights and the sparsely populated Egyptian Sinai.

While Israel’s voracious territorial appetite led to a conquest that tripled its geographic size, it also significantly undermined the Jewish demographic supremacy that Zionists had worked so hard to secure since 1948.

Before the 1967 expulsion, the population of the West Bank was estimated to be between 845,000 and 900,000, while the Gaza Strip’s population ranged between 385,000 and 400,000.

Outright expulsion began during the Israeli conquest, with over 200,000 Palestinians forced to cross the River Jordan from the West to the East Bank, many of them 1948 refugees from what had become Israel.

Demographic threat

In Gaza, Israeli forces expelled 75,000 Palestinians by December 1968 and prevented a further 50,000, who had been working, studying, or travelling in Egypt or elsewhere, from returning home.

After the expulsion, the Israeli census of September 1967 recorded the population of the West Bank at 661,700 and of Gaza at 354,700.

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The Palestinian population of East Jerusalem was 68,600. Altogether, this meant the combined Palestinian population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza totalled 1,385,000, reducing the proportion of Jews in all territories controlled by Israel from 89 percent to 56 percent – excluding the few thousand Syrians and Egyptians who remained in the Golan Heights and the Sinai.

In fact, from the Golan Heights, the Israelis expelled between 102,000 and 115,000 Syrians, leaving no more than 15,000 behind. 

While the population of Sinai at the time mostly comprised Bedouin and farmers, 38,000 of them became refugees. Israel also continued to deport Palestinians by the hundreds as the occupation progressed.

This post-1967 demographic earthquake caused then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir many a sleepless night in the 1970s, as she fretted over the number of Palestinians being conceived each night.

The reduction in the Jewish colonial share of the population continued until 1990, amid growing anxiety among the Israelis.

Soviet influx

By 1990, the population of 1948 Israel had reached approximately 4.8 million, including 3.8 million Jews, and one million Palestinians, while the  Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip stood at 622,016 and that of the West Bank at 1,075,531. 

The total number of Palestinians under Israeli control was 2,697,547, making Jews 58 percent of the population – a marginal increase from 56 percent in 1967.

The collapse of the USSR and the ensuing economic crises in the post-Soviet republics led to mass emigration – especially among Jews, who had an easier time relocating, as Israel’s Law of Return offered them an immediate destination without the complications of emigrating to western countries.

This made Israel a very attractive proposition for Soviet Jews and a godsend for the Israeli state, as it helped forestall the feared Palestinian demographic “bomb”, as the crisis came to be understood by the Israelis.  

However, it turned out that the one million Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel between 1990 and 2000 – and significantly altered its demography by increasing both the Jewish and Ashkenazi population – were not all Jewish.

The Jewishness of more than half of them was questioned by both Israel’s rabbis, who insisted that a Jew is someone born to a Jewish mother, and by Zionist groups, including the Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA), as many of the new arrivals had, at best, one Jewish grandparent. They included spouses and other relatives who were not Jewish at all.

Many of the post-Soviet immigrants refused to learn Hebrew and continued to speak Russian, leading to the publication of numerous Russian language newspapers in Israel to accommodate them. Some immigrant youths even formed neo-Nazi and skinhead groups that attacked Jews and synagogues across the country.

This major wave of immigration, however, could not compete with the growth of the Palestinian population.

Demographic panic

By 2000, Israel’s population had reached 6.4 million, including five million Jews and nearly 1.2 million Palestinians, while the population of the West Bank was recorded at 2.012 million and that of Gaza at 1.138 million – reducing the proportion of Jewish colonists and their descendants to no more than 52 percent of the total population.

Realising that the few European settler-colonies to survive the global reversal of settler-colonialism were those with a white demographic majority, the Israeli government panicked

Realising that the few European settler-colonies to survive the global reversal of settler-colonialism since the 1960s –  including, ultimately, South Africa in 1994 – were those that maintained a massive white demographic majority, such as the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the Israeli government panicked.

By the end of that year, the restoration of Jewish demographic superiority had become a veritable obsession.

That December, the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Centre in Israel held the first in a projected series of annual conferences focused on the strength and security of the state, especially with regard to maintaining its Jewish supremacist character.

One of the “Main Points” identified in the 52-page conference report was the concern over the demographic numbers required to preserve Jewish supremacy in Israel:

The high birthrate [of Israeli Arabs] brings into question the future of Israel as a Jewish state…The present demographic trends, should they continue, challenge the future of Israel as a Jewish state. Israel has two alternative strategies: adaptation or containment. The latter requires a long-term energetic Zionist demographic policy whose political, economic, and educational effects would guarantee the Jewish character of Israel.

The report added affirmatively that “those who support the preservation of Israel’s character as…a Jewish state for the Jewish nation…constitute a majority among the Jewish population in Israel.”

Maintaining superiority

The conference was not a lonely effort. None other than Israel’s then President Moshe Katsav welcomed the attendees.

Reflecting the dominant Jewish supremacist views among Israeli Jews and pro-Israeli American Jewish organisations, the conference was co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, The Israeli Defence Ministry, the Jewish Agency, the World Zionist Organization, the National Security Center at Haifa University, and the Israeli National Security Council within the Prime Minister’s Office.

The conference featured 50 speakers: senior government and military officials, including former and future prime ministers, university professors, business and media figures, as well as American Jewish academics and operatives of the US pro-Israel lobby.

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The Herzliya conference has been held annually ever since, where the demographic question is regularly discussed and strategies are proposed to safeguard Jewish demographic superiority.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres – a key figure in the Israeli government since the 1950s – expressed concern in 2002 about the Palestinian demographic “danger”, as the Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank was beginning to “disappear…which may lead to the linking of the futures of West Bank Palestinians with Israeli Arabs”. 

He described the issue as a “demographic bomb” and hoped that the arrival of yet another 100,000 Jews in Israel would postpone this demographic “danger” for 10 more years. He stressed that “demography will defeat geography”.

By 2010, Israel’s population had reached 7.6 million, including 5.75 million Jews and 1.55 million Palestinians, while the population of the West Bank was 2.48 million and that of Gaza was 1.54 million. This rendered the Jewish population a minority of no more than 49 percent for the first time since the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948.

This was intolerable for the apartheid state, and it was against this backdrop that the Israeli parliament passed a new “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People” in July 2018, asserting that “the land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the state of Israel was established” and that “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

The new law, affirmed by Israel’s Supreme Court as constitutional despite its racist character, was a necessary declaration that Israel understood it was losing the demographic “war”.

It thus asserted that regardless of how many Jews remained in Israel or what proportion of the population they constituted, they would continue to hold unique racist and colonial privileges over the indigenous Palestinians.

Supremacy codified

In 2020, the population of Israel numbered 9.2 million, including 6.8 million Jews and 1.9 million Palestinians, while the population of the West Bank was 3.05 million and that of Gaza 2.047 million – further reducing the proportion of Jewish colonists and their descendants to 47 percent of the total population.

The Palestinians, however, do not appear to be the only population viewed as a demographic “bomb” threatening Jewish demographic superiority.

As recently as January 2023, Morton Klein, the national president of ZOA, issued a panicked statement concerning the impending “de-Judaisation” of the Jewish state.

This time, the culprit turned out to be pseudo-Jews, those whom Israel’s notorious and racist “Law of Return” allowed into the country. The law was amended in 1970 to permit anyone worldwide who has one Jewish grandparent – including the non-Jewish spouse, children and grandchildren of such a person, and their spouses – to become colonists in Israel and obtain Israeli citizenship.

The ZOA statement declared with dismay that the 1970 amendment had allowed half a million “non-Jews” from the former Soviet Union (FSU) to settle in the Jewish state.

Its concern was based on Israeli government data that “largely as a result of the grandparent clause, over 50 percent of all immigrants to the Jewish state last year were non-Jews, and 72 percent of immigrants from FSU countries into the Jewish state today are non-Jews”.

The Zionist group warned that “this is causing a significant drop in the percentage of Jews living in Israel, endangering Israel’s continuity as the Jewish state”.

According to the ZOA statement, this appalling situation meant that “non-Jews will have even more influence on determining the Jewish state’s leaders, laws and security decisions,” and that “Diaspora Jews who need or who want to live in the Jewish homeland may be moving to a majority non-Jewish state in the future.”   

The statement demanded the “elimination or modification/reform of the grandparent clause. We must do everything we can to ensure that the Jewish state remains Jewish.”

While it stopped short of explicitly calling for the expulsion of the half a million European “non-Jewish” settlers, as Israel had done with native Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, the implication was clear.

If one accepts the ZOA’s view that these formerly Soviet Jews in Israel today are not at all Jewish, then the proportion of Jews drops further to as low as 42 percent.

Final phase

It was in this context that Israel, its Supreme Court, and its Jewish settlers escalated their campaign to terrorise the Palestinians of East Jerusalem in May 2021, expelling 13 families – totalling 58 people – from their homes in the Shaykh Jarrah neighbourhood.

An additional 1,000 Palestinians were being threatened with eviction by the settlers and the Israeli courts.

The decision was seen internationally as further confirmation that Israel is an apartheid state.

In January 2021, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem had already issued a report identifying the Israeli regime as one of “Jewish supremacy” and describing Israel as an apartheid state.

The desperate Israeli attempt to restore Jewish demographic supremacy is what propels the extermination and planned expulsion of the two million Palestinians in Gaza.

In April, one month before the Supreme Court ruling, Human Rights Watch issued a report declaring Israel an apartheid state within both the 1948 borders and the 1967-occupied territories.

Amnesty International followed suit in February 2022, also declaring Israel an apartheid state.

It is in view of the minority status of Israel’s Jewish colonists that the current genocide in Gaza is proceeding, alongside plans to expel the remaining Palestinian survivors outside the Strip.

The desperate Israeli attempt to restore Jewish demographic supremacy is what propels the extermination and planned expulsion of the two million Palestinians in Gaza. In March 2025, the Israeli cabinet approved the creation of “a body to manage voluntary migration [of Palestinians] from Gaza”.

The US government, which has collaborated with Israel during the administrations of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to find destinations for expelled Palestinian survivors of the genocide, is reported to be brokering yet another deal – this time with Libya’s warlords – to take them in.

With the exodus of anywhere between 100,000 and half a million Israeli Jews from the country since October 2023, continuing an earlier trend of emigration, it seems unlikely that even if Israel succeeds in its extermination and expulsion campaigns in Gaza, it could ever restore Jewish demographic supremacy.

Its only remaining option would be to exterminate all Palestinians – not just those in Gaza.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.