Harvard Professor's Shocking Proposal: Starve the

Palestinians in Gaza into Having Fewer Babies

By Juan Cole, JuanCole.com
Posted on February 26, 2010, Printed on March 1, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145831/

Martin Kramer revealed his true colors at the Herzliya Conference, wherein he
blamed political violence in the Muslim world on population growth, called for that
growth to be restrained, and praised the illegal and unconscionable Israeli blockade
of civilian Gazans for its effect on reducing the number of Gazans.

[Commentator] M. J. Rosenberg argued that Kramer's speech is equivalent to a call

for genocide. It certainly is a call for eugenics.

It is shocking that Kramer, who has made a decade-long career of attacking social
science understanding of the Middle East and demonizing anyone who departs even
slightly from his rightwing Israeli-nationalist political line, should be given a cushy
office at Harvard as a 'fellow' while spewing the most vile justifications for war
crimes like the collective punishment of Gazan children.

Kramer is after all not nobody. He was an adviser to the Giuliani presidential
campaign. He is listed as an associate of the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, the influential think tank in Washington of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee. He is associated with Daniel Pipe's 'Middle East Forum,' a
neo-McCarthyite organization dedicated to harassing American academics who do
not toe the political line of Israel's ruling Likud Party.

Kramer's remarks are wrong, offensive and racist by implication. He is driven to

them by his nationalist ideology, which cannot recognize the ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians by Israelis in 1948, cannot see that most Palestinians have been
deprived by Israeli policies of citizenship rights (what Warren Burger called 'the right
to have rights', as Margaret Somers pointed out), and that Palestinians are even at
this moment being deprived of basic property and other rights by Israeli occupation.
To admit that any of these actions produces a backlash is to acknowledge the
Palestinian movements as forms of national liberation activism, and to legitimize
Palestinian aspirations. Rightwing Zionism is all about erasing the Palestinians from
history. And now Kramer wants to make it about erasing future Palestinian children!

Where have we seen the picture Kramer draws before? It is just a recycled form of
Malthusianism, where the population growth rates of "some people" is seen as
dangerous to society. Barbara Brown wrote of Apartheid South Africa:

' [White] South Africans who express a [concern with Black population
growth] perceive a close relationship between population growth rates
and political instability. There are two variants of this approach. The
first holds that a growing black and unemployed population will mean
increased poverty which will in turn lead to a black revolt. . .
 In an opening address to a major private sector conference on
'population dynamics' in South Africa, the president of the 1820
Foundation argued that 'Rapid population growth translates into a
steadily worsening employment future, massive city growth . . . and an
increase in the number of poor and disadvantaged. All are rightly
viewed as threats to social stability and orderly change.'

A second, but smaller, group believes the black threat arises simply out
of the changing ratio of white to black. This group sees that 'THE
WHITES ARE A DWINDLING MINORITY IN THE COUNTRY' and
argues that this situation will lead to a 'similar reduction of white
political authority'.

Some argue for birth control on even more overtly racist grounds, but
few people in leadership positions do so, at least publicly. Debates in the
House of Assembly have included remarks to the effect that blacks are
unable to make a contribution to South African society and so should be
encouraged to limit their numbers. The organiser of a 'Population
Explosion' conference, a medical doctor who is deputy director of the
Verwoerd Hospital, argued that whites must organise a family planning
programme for blacks because the latter group is biologically incapable
of exercising foresight.'

- Barbara B. Brown, "Facing the 'Black Peril': The Politics of Population Control in
South Africa," Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2(Jan., 1987), pp.
256-273, this quote pp. 263-64.

There are other notorious examples of this sort of argument, including eugenics
theorist Madison Grant, who warned in the early 20th century that white Americans
were being swamped by inferior eastern and southern Europeans such as Poles,
Italians, and Jews.

How ironic, that Kramer should now resort to the very kind of arguments Grant used
to condemn Martin Kramer's ancestors being allowed to come to the United States.

As usual, Kramer, a notorious anti-intellectual opposed to the mainstream academic

study of the Middle East, is wrong as a matter of social science.

Population growth in and of itself explains nothing, and certainly not terrorism.
Between 1800 and 1900, Great Britain's population tripled, whereas France
underwent a demographic transition and grew very slowly. Yet Britain experienced
no revolution, no great social upheavals in that period. France, in contrast, lurched
from war to war, from empire to monarchy to empire to Republic, and saw the rise
of a plethora of radical social movements, including the Paris Commune.

High population growth can be a problem for development, and can contribute to
internal conflict over resources, but it is only one factor. If economic growth
outstrips population growth (say the economy grows 7 percent and population grows
3 per year), then on a per capita basis that is the same as 4 percent economic growth
per capita per annum, which would be good for most countries. Or if a place is thinly
populated and rich in resources, population growth may not be socially disruptive.
Most countries in the world have grown enormously in population during the past
century, yet they display vastly different rates of social violence.
Although under some circumstances, rapid population growth can contribute to
internal social instability, it is irrelevant to international terrorism as a political tactic.
The deployment of terror, which the US Federal Code defines as the use of violence
against civilians for political purposes by a non-state actor, is always a form of
politics. The Zionist terrorists who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in
1946, which killed 91 persons and wounded 46, did not act because Jewish Irgun
members had too many brothers and sisters. (And if you think about who exactly
might have made an argument of that form in the 1940s, it becomes clear how smelly
Kramer's is.) Irgun blew the hotel up because British Mandate intelligence had
offices there, and because these Zionist activists did not care if they killed dozens of
civilians.

Studies of groups that deploy violence against civilians for political purposes show
that [pdf link] they are characterized by higher than average education and income,
which correlate with smaller family size.

Political violence is about grievances, land, resources and politics. Palestinians were
no more violent than any other group in the Middle East until they were ethnically
cleansed and their property was stolen by Jewish colonists in their homeland, for
which they never received compensation. As Robert Pape has shown, suicide
bombings cluster in the area in and around Israel, in Iraq and Afghanistan/ Northern
Pakistan, places where people feel militarily occupied. But there are none in Mali or
Benin, countries with among the highest population growth rates in the world.

Kramer's argument is implicitly racist because he applies the population-growth

calculus mainly to Arabs, whose family size he minds in ways that he does not
others. Belize and the Cameroons have higher population growth rates than Libya. Is
Kramer afraid of those two countries? Why is it only Arab children he marks as a
danger?

If population growth rates were the independent variable in predicting a turn to

terrorism, moreover, the fast-growing ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jewish population of
Israel would be a concern. But in fact they refuse to serve in the Israeli army and so
are the least violent part of the population (though there have been occasional
Haredi attacks on Palestinians.)

Kramer will find, in his new role as the Madison Grant of the twenty-first century,
that his arguments are a double-edged sword that even more unsavory persons than
he will gleefully wield against groups other than Arabs.

Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and maintains the
popular blog Informed Comment.

© 2010 JuanCole.com All rights reserved.

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