Israel’s stalemate continues
Israel keeps having elections, but they keep having more or less the same result. That includes the latest one:
We still don’t have the final results of Tuesday’s election. It may take till Friday or even next week until the final vote count is official.
Only then will Israelis learn whether either political camp managed to eke out a narrow victory after three maddeningly inconclusive election cycles.
The exit poll numbers were so astonishingly close — and, in the fundamental divide between the Netanyahu camp and its anti-Netanyahu rivals, so unchanged from the last three elections — that the slightest shifts in numbers for small, marginal parties may yet tilt the entire political system one way or the other…
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu achieved one major success on Tuesday: Right-wing rebels Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett, who just two months ago could have combined their slates’ showing in the polls to form a party larger than Likud, had fallen so steeply by election day that their combined strength is now less than half of Likud’s…
According to exit polls, every member party in the outgoing government except Shas shrank in size. Likud dropped from 36 seats to 30 or 31. Netanyahu pulled out all the stops in his voter outreach and mobilization efforts, campaigning ferociously for three long months — but ended up right where he started.
Much more at the link.
My eyes tend to glaze over when trying to understand Israeli politics and elections. Apparently I’m not alone in this.
What’s bedeviling Israeli politics is refractory behavior among the right-nationalist parties, most conspicuously Avigdor Liberman’s outfit. The right-nationalist parties and the religious parties in sum won ~68 seats out of 120, so there’s no alternative to a starboard government. (The religious parties have a long history of cutting deals with the Israel Labor Party. Problem is that it’s almost evaporated, winning just two seats this time. The larger of the social liberal parties is Yesh Atid, which is constitutionally hostile to the religious parties. The larger left party is Meretz, which has in its pedigree Shulamit Aloni’s outfit, even more hostile to the religious parties).
Gotta watch out for the Arabs who are about 30% of Israel’s population and growing fast, most being Jew-haters. Israeli Jews have the Western Disease: sex is ONLY for pleasure; prevent conception at all costs.
Cicero:
Arabs are now about 20% of Israel’s population.
As for Israeli Jews, they have one of the highest birthrates in the developed countries. As of 2019:
Yes but the problem is that it’s the wrong Israeli Jews who are reproducing. Spotted any Haredi heads popping out of Merkava hatches of late? No, me neither.
It’s not just that they don’t fight and are a huge drain on public resources since they don’t work either, they’re just plain dysgenic for a whole bunch of reasons and most definitely are not getting smarter. Selection pressures and incentives which applied in the Pale no longer do and the Haredi are going to drag Israel down.
How many children per women are they having in Tel Aviv where all the big brains live? Oh… I forgot… that’s Gay Town.
It’s not good enough to say ‘Jewish Birthrate yadda yada’ — it really matters *which* Jews are being born. Haredi are not going to do a damn thing to invent the next drone or bio weapon to keep the Fellaheen at bay.
Meanwhile Arabs are going at it like rabbits.
Now I don’t have a dog in the fight… but it’s interesting for a whole bunch of reasons given that I have a bee in my bonnet about demographics and also like to keep an eye on Singapore which also has issues with smart fraction birthrate and maintaining racial balances and keeping the dominant race dominant in the face of demographic challenges.
BTW, anyone like to take a guess who Lee Kuan Yew selected to train up the initial cadre of his conscript military after the split with Malaysia in the 60s? He was a very smart fellow.
Israeli Jews have the Western Disease: sex is ONLY for pleasure; prevent conception at all costs.
Demographic statistics say otherwise.
https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2013/02/28/israel-demographic-miracle/
Thought you’d never ask….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitzvah_tank
Zaphod:
Incorrect. How many non-religious Israelis do you know? I know tons of them, and they have big families. Yes, the ultra-religious have bigger families. But it is the norm to have quite a few children in Israel and it’s not confined to the religious, much less the Haredi.
Here is the breakdown:
And the breakdown for each group’s percentage of the population of Israel is here:
From you can see that about 80% of Israel isn’t even especially religious and yet have significantly higher birthrates than most other women in developed countries. And there are the Orthodox 10% and the Haredi 10%. Not all Haredi children stay in the Haredi sects, although overall that population is growing. For various reasons, it’s difficult to predict future growth (the linked article goes into that in some detail).
However, the original point had to do with whether non-religious Israeli woman are having few children. It’s clear that they’re having significantly more children than women in other Western countries.
@Barry Meislin:
If there isn’t a secret plan to defeat the Arab Hordes with Mikveh Tanks, there sure as hell ought to be.
@Neo:
Fair enough. But it still matters who is having the children. For example you do not want to be getting all your population growth from Mizrahis or Ethiopian Jews (simply not smart enough)… Ideally you want West Bank Settlers popping out large families because one committed ethno-nationalist is worth 100 Haredi ‘Scholars’ and 10 Tel Aviv Pot Smokers in the survival stakes.
Would also be interested in the birth rate of secular Israeli Jews who are now more than 3rd generation — this in order to get some idea of just how organic the growth and stability is.
Anyway nothing like a good old fashioned war to bring everyone together.
Not sure that there’s even such a thing as a good old fashioned war these days.
We’ll find out sooner or later.
Meanwhile Arabs are going at it like rabbits.
[drums fingers]
The World Bank is tracking the total fertility rates of 32 countries in the Near East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Israel’s total fertility rate during the years running from 2011 through 2018 bounced around 3.09 children per woman per lifetime. There were 11 countries which had higher rates:
5.07: Afghanistan
4.77: Mauritania
4.63: Sudan
4.16: Yemen, Rep.
4.02: Iraq
4.01: West Bank and Gaza
3.68: Pakistan
3.61: Tajikistan
3.39: Egypt, Arab Rep.
3.15: Kyrgyz Republic
3.13: Jordan
Four of these are not Arab countries (and are thousands of miles from Israel and dirt poor to boot), two are Arab in a qualified way (of which one is thousands of miles from Israel and of which both are dirt poor), one is an Arab country no doubt (it’s also thousands of miles away and dirt poor), and two have fertility rates within 10% of Israel’s. The remaining two (Iraq and the West Bank and Gaza) have since 1990 seen their TFR fall by 33% and 40% respectively.
@art+deco:
Have you ever considered a profitable career in sports betting? Only half joking.
Given long enough time frame, I suspect just about any human population of any race or creed faced with modernity and The Poz will end up with TFR < 2. There might even be the odd dead cat bounce or spike along the way from A to B.
But in much the same way as the old saw about the market being able to remain irrational longer than one can remain solvent, what matters is who gets to the finishing line. In other words, all populations may eventually end up TFR < 2 but your or my population may well have been demographically swamped and driven to extinction by another population before they reach the end of their road.
“But in much the same way as the old saw about the market being able to remain irrational longer than one can remain solvent, what matters is who gets to the finishing line. ” – Zaphod
Despite the hand-wringing over the Chinese Threat, Gordon Chang is optimistic for this reason.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/coming-demographic-collapse-china-180960
“China this century is on track to experience history’s most dramatic demographic collapse in the absence of war or disease.”
His theory only works because he doesn’t accept official Chinese population statistics, but way should anyone assumer that the CCP tells the truth about anything?
We have a couple of testable hypotheses floating around now, assuming there are any scholars left after the Apocalypse.
AesopFan:
A book on everything Gordon Chang has ever gotten right would be a very short book indeed.
Gordon Chang is a kind of Court Jester who makes a tolerably good living telling the Cathedral what it wishes to hear. He might as well given that he can’t go back. But that’s no reason to take him very seriously.
I’m no fan of the CCP, believe me. But wishing don’t make things so.
I do think China faces some significant demographic issues. But essentially they’re monoracial issues, and therefore an order of magnitude simpler to weather and deal with than those in the West. Also, the CCP for all its myriad evils is not dedicated to the erasure of Han Chinese Males and eventually their race. How backward of them.
Given long enough time frame, I suspect just about any human population
It doesn’t matter how much chaff you toss in everyone’s face. You still don’t know what you’re talking about.
@Art+Deco:
Go tell it to the Hottentots.
If you tell me what wavelength you transmit on, I’ll trim my chaff to half that. Full service shytepoasting here.
Go tell it to the Hottentots.
Why?
The Khoisan Peoples were having a perfectly wonderful life in Southern Africa until the Bantu and Dutch showed up and swamped them. But doubtless they don’t mind eking out a marginal existence in the Kalahari Desert these days. I’m sure they’d be interested in any figures you can provide from your bookshelf of almanacs to prove to them that they’ve never had it so good 🙂
Demographics is Destiny.
Well it is settled, Art Deco has said that Zaphod doesn’t know what he is talking about. Argument from “authority.” 🙂
Art Deco’s opinions are 101% correct 110% of the time. Trust him, he has the stats.
“How many non-religious Israelis do you know”
My guess is zero. Not the first time spouting off with no knowledge.
Opinions are like that. Sometimes incorrect, that is other people’s opinions.
The key grafs to the Chang article:
________________________________________
The Chinese take great pride in being part of the world’s most populous state. Beijing reported China’s population in 2019 hit 1.4 billion in 2019, up from 1.39 billion the previous year.
Chinese authorities will undoubtedly report an increase for last year as well. They are on record as believing the country’s population will continue to grow for more than a half decade.
Some are skeptical of China’s total population figures, however. Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison told The National Interest that China in 2020 likely had a population of 1.26 billion. The noted demographer does not believe the number could have exceeded 1.28 billion.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/coming-demographic-collapse-china-180960
________________________________________
So the article hinges on Yi Fuxian’s estimates. Which sound plausible. Like AesopFan, I don’t trust the CCP’s numbers on anything might reflect poorly. However, the matter is outside my range.
I don’t understand how the China elephant keeps dancing, but so far it manages. Of course I wonder about the American and EU elephants as well.
Sometimes it seems to me the whole world has already gone over the cliff and the only question is who hits bottom last.
Well it is settled, Art Deco has said that Zaphod doesn’t know what he is talking about. Argument from “authority.
The term ‘argument from authority’ doesn’t mean what you fancy it means. He made a wildly false statement and has been corrected with data scrounged by two separate participants. You can see his response to that.
Art Deco:
I know you aren’t an authority in argumentation, except in your own mind. Self own, or own goal to Art. 🙂
Actually, a Mikveh Tank isn’t a half-bad idea….
May even be brilliant.
A few issues to iron out first, of course, but if you make a half-decent pitch to 770, then the sky’s the limit; in fact, you may find yourself right up there with the Immortals snorting pickled herring and slurping vishniac. (At the very least they’ll likely put your tetragrammaton—well, in Hebrew, at least—on the side of each vehicle.)
As for the military uses of Mitzva tanks, um, it can only be said that discretion is the better part of squalor…
(There was, to be sure, a pretty decent run with “TNT” but that was mostly due to the likes of Saddam Hussein…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tehillim_neged_Tilim.jpg