„Critics of Israel love to exploit Jewish fears and anxieties. The most extreme resort to Holocaust inversion, boycotts, blacklists, and other singling-out methods reminiscent of Europe’s anti-Semitic past. Secretary of State John Kerry likes to wave around the threat of Israel’s demographic extinction. (…) For Israel to remain both a democratic and a Jewish state, according to the conventional wisdom, it would have to give the territories up. ‚The womb of the Arab woman,‘ the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat famously said, was his ‚best weapon.‘ (…)
In his drive to wrest Israeli concessions he believes will break the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic logjam, Secretary Kerry has repeatedly warned of a demographic doomsday for Israel. ‚How does Israel possibly maintain its character as a Jewish and democratic state when from the river to the sea, there would not even be a Jewish majority?‘ he warned last December. Time is ‚running out‘ for Israel, Kerry maintains, insinuating that Arabs will be even less likely to accept a Jewish state as part of the former Palestine mandate once they become an overall majority, instead returning to their demand for a ‚one-state‘ solution.
But time is not running out, at least not for Israel. There are three big problems with the demographic doomsday argument. (…)
When John Kerry declares again and again that Israel is ‚out of time,‘ what he’s really doing is communicating to Palestinians that the much dreaded Jewish state next door will cease to exist if they simply continue their refusal to compromise. If the next secretary of state wants to bring about peace between Israelis and Palestinians, he should try appealing to their hopes, not their fears.“ (Gregg Roman: „The Myth of Israel‘s Demographic Doomsday“)