Changing the dial on get the most out of the demographic mile

US President Obama in his infamous ‘reset’ on the Middle East speech from last week alluded to the idea that time is not on the Israeli side …Skippy Stalin took up the mantle where Obama left off in this post and used a very old school demographics argument to suggest the Palestinian fertility is something for the Israelis to fear. All of which is my long winded way of pointing out this article from the Asia Times Online on the power poised by the Israeli demographic. Here’s a snippet.

At constant fertility, Israel will have more young people by the end of this century than either Turkey or Iran, and more than German, Italy or Spain. With a total fertility rate of three children per woman, Israel's total population will rise to 24 million by the end of the present century. Iran's fertility is around 1.7 and falling, while the fertility for ethnic Turks is only 1.5 (the Kurdish minority has a fertility rate of around 4.5).

Not that the size of land armies matters much in an era of high-tech warfare, but if present trends continue, Israel will be able to field the largest land army in the Middle East. That startling data point, though, should alert analysts to a more relevant problem: among the military powers in the Middle East, Israel will be the only one with a viable population structure by the middle of this century.

That is why it is in America's interest to keep Israel as an ally. Israel is not only the strongest power in the region; in a generation or two it will be the only power in the region, the last man standing among ruined neighbors. The demographic time bomb in the region is not the Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank, as the Israeli peace party wrongly believed, but rather Israel itself.

Read the entire article, and then speculate on the possibility of a thing called – (dare I say it publicly?) ‘Israeli hegemony’.


x/p: The Last Exile