Weapon of mass population
"I want to have many boys, so we have more people and can get
the Jews out."
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Thuraya Eshbear, 35, has 13 children - from 20 years to 10
months - nine of whom are in this photograph. Her husband, Majed
Eshbear, back left, is the father of 20 children, including all
13 here. Majed's other wife, back left, is Manal Sultan.
Members of the Abbas family of Gaza stroll to the beach for
sunset, where they will make coffee and talk for several hours
as a way to pass the time.
Friends toss Mohammed Abuzaya into the air as they celebrate the
night before his wedding.
Mohammed Basheer, 3, clings to his brother through the fence at
his preschool in Deir el Balah.
AML preschool in Deir el Balah is home to 120 students.
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[Times art: Amanda Raymond]
The fertility rates of Palestinians living in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip are skyrocketing past those of Jews throughout
Israel. Total fertility is the average number of children a
woman of child-bearing years (assumed to be between 15 and 49)
is expected to bear during her lifetime, according to the
specific birth rates of women in the population in a given year.
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GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - In the struggle between Israelis and
Palestinians, Thuraya Eshbear wields a powerful weapon.
Babies.
At 35, this wisp of a woman has 13 children, from 20 years down
to 10 months. Though she can't afford to school them all, though
she rarely has a minute to herself, she would gladly bear more.
"I have many children so that the Palestinian people will have
more than the Israelis," says Eshbear, a $37-a-week cleaner in
the maternity ward of Gaza City's biggest hospital. Here, on any
given day, dozens of other Palestinian women are doing their
part to ensure ultimate victory over Israel.
It is a war fought not just with F-16s and suicide bombers, but
with diapers and Similac.
Ever since Israel was created in 1948, starting a clash with the
Arab world that has no end in sight, Jews have feared what
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat calls his "biological bomb." In
Israel and the neighboring territories of Gaza and the West
Bank, Arabs are reproducing at a rate double that of Jews.
Israel's 5.4-million Jews make up just more than half of the
region's population, but Arabs will become a clear majority
within 20 years, Haifa University professor Arnon Soffer says.
By 2020, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean
Sea will be home to 8.5-million Arabs and just 6.4-million Jews.
Unless Palestinians get their own state, the soaring Arab
population could mean one of two things: Israel would cease to
exist as a Jewish nation or it would be forced into an apartheid-
like system in which a Jewish minority ruled a Palestinian
majority.
Unless something changes, "our country is finished in 17 years
and there will be a collapse," Soffer warned Israeli political
leaders.
Others say the demographic threat is exaggerated, that studies
like Soffer's fail to take into account such important factors
as continued Jewish migration to Israel. The Palestinian
population figures are meant to scare Israel into giving up
land - especially in the West Bank - to which it has an historic
right, one expert charges.
"The same thing took place in '48 when Ben Gurion, the first
prime minister, was urged by top statisticians to refrain from
declaring independence for the same reason," says Yoram Ettinger
of Israel's Ariel Center for Policy Research. "They predicted,
based on certified figures, that by 1969 there would be an Arab
majority. Their predictions were crashed against the rocks of
reality."
Yet the battle for population supremacy rages on, although
Israel at present seems to be lagging. A bleak economy has
forced the government to cut once-generous allowances for big
families, and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said
poor Israelis, Jewish and Arab alike, should stop having such
large broods.
"A man can and should have a family with as many children as he
likes," Netanyahu said, "but he must understand he is primarily
responsible for providing for them, educating them, feeding
them."
Meanwhile, the women of Gaza keep producing baby after baby. The
Gaza Strip, where more than 1-million Palestinians live, has one
of the world's highest growth rates - 4.5 percent, enough to
double the population every 15 years.
"Many people have been killed in the intifada by Israeli
soldiers so they want to reproduce," says Hala Sarraj, a Gaza
psychologist, referring to the uprising in which more than 2,400
Palestinians have died since 2000.
That is true of Hanan Himad, whose 21-year-old son, Jawdad, was
shot dead two years ago while throwing rocks at the Israelis,
she says. He was the oldest of her nine children - Himad was
pregnant with her 10th this summer when she tripped and fell
while running from an Israeli bomb dropped near her home east of
Gaza City.
A few weeks later she miscarried, and on this Thursday morning
she was in the hospital, awaiting surgery to remove the dead
fetus. But at 39, she is not about to quit.
"I want to have many boys," she says, as other women nod
approvingly, "so we have more people and can get the Jews out."
A prize for the 10th baby
Except for the Mediterranean and the Sea of Galilee, there would
seem little reason for two groups of people to fight so long and
so hard over one New Jersey-size wedge of land.
Arab sheep and camel herders long roamed the desert from which
the Israelites were expelled more than two millennia ago. But in
the late 1800s, after centuries of persecution, the Zionists
announced their goal of resettling as many of the world's Jews
as possible in their biblical homeland.
That set the stage for a struggle in which demographics might
forever play a role.
By the end of World War I, what was then known as Palestine had
60,000 Jewish inhabitants. Growing Arab hostility toward the
newcomers erupted in the 1921 Jaffa riots that killed 47 Jews.
But the huge migration came after World War II, when survivors
of the Nazi Holocaust began flocking to the promised land. Some
650,000 Jews were living in Palestine by 1948 when Israel
declared independence, and Arab nations immediately launched war
against the new Jewish state.
Thus began another major population shift. To this day, there is
strong debate over whether Arabs left Israel at their leaders'
behest, on the promise they could return soon (as most Jewish
historians say) or were forcefully removed by Jewish soldiers
(as Arabs say).
Whatever the case, 700,000 Palestinians - as the Arabs began
calling themselves - went to neighboring countries or to Gaza,
then under Egyptian control, or the West Bank, then under
Jordanian rule.
"Contrary to most colonial projects, the Israeli one was
intended to substitute one people for another," French
researcher Phillipe Fargues said in a 2000 study on the region's
demographic battle. "It was not a will to dominate the Arab
peoples so much as to dominate the territory. Relative sizes of
the two populations were at stake."
As early as 1943, while the British ruled the area, the chief
rabbi of Palestine urged Jewish families to have big
families: "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth."
Pressure to procreate grew even greater after 1948.
"Being a Jewish state and knowing that we lost 6-million Jews
during the Holocaust, it is on the back or front of every Jew's
mind that it is our responsibility for the future to make up for
that traumatic loss," says Ettinger of the Ariel Center.
"Certainly when we talk about the demographic requirements of a
Jewish state, that behooves many among us, either religious or
nonreligious, hawks or doves, to have at least two children,
three, four or five children."
As an incentive to reproduce, Israel in 1949 instituted the Ben
Gurion Award - given to every woman delivering her 10th child.
It was discontinued a decade later because so many Arab women
qualified.
Israel's natural population growth has been greatly augmented by
immigration, including the influx of almost 1-million Jews after
the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nearly 95 percent of Israel's
Jewish population originates from immigrants without them, there
might be fewer than 300,000 Jews now in Israel.
Ettinger thinks immigration will continue, counterbalancing the
effects of the Palestinian birth rate.
"We have more than 1-million Jews, probably 2-million, still in
the former Soviet Union, there are 6-million Jews in America,
and some of them I believe are going to end up in the Jewish
state," he says. "We've got a half million Jews in France and a
half million in Latin America.
"And who's to say that the Jewish birth rate has to stick to 2-
point-something? It certainly could go up to 3-point-something,
which would turn the whole thing upside down. When you consider
the fact that we are 6-million Jews compared to 600,000 in 1948,
you cannot but be highly optimistic about Jewish demographics in
this part of the world."
But there is little economic incentive for Jews in America or
Western Europe to emigrate to Israel, which has a lower per
capita income than where they now live. Moreover, the Jewish
population in the United States is shrinking and aging even if
American Jews did move to Israel, they would have only a modest
effect on the birth rate.
Ettinger is more optimistic than many Israeli leaders, who have
long worried about the Palestinian baby boom.
Soon after taking office in 1969, Prime Minister Golda Meier
expressed concern about what would happen if Israel annexed the
land it had seized in the 1967 Mideast War: "We would have to
wake up every morning wondering how many Arab babies had been
born during the night."
But as the prospect of a complete withdrawal from Gaza and the
West Bank grew increasingly remote, "both Israeli and
Palestinian politicians realized that demographic growth is the
Palestinians' most potent weapon," Fargues said.
Paradoxically, he found, the continuing conflict might be partly
responsible for the high birth rate that so concerns Israel.
Thanks to huge amounts of humanitarian aid from the United
Nations, Islamic charities and other organizations, Palestinians
generally enjoy good health and live long lives, assuming they
don't die of man-made causes. The aid, which includes money,
food and schooling, helps ease the burden of raising children.
And while high unemployment normally discourages large families,
the opposite has been true in Gaza.
In the first Palestinian uprising, from 1987 to 1993, incomes
dropped 40 percent in a single year yet the birth rate went up.
It seems that many fathers lowered the "bride price" to
facilitate marrying off their daughters in a time of great
insecurity. The result: Many more teenage brides and many more
babies.
"I hate her"
In her face, Thuraya Eshbear looks older than the 35 years she
admits to. But at just 5 feet and 100 or so pounds, she has the
petite figure that caught the eye of Majed Eshbear as she
returned home from school one day.
Tall, handsome, with a thick shock of hair, Eshbear was divorced
from his first wife, by whom he had six children. He married
Thuraya, and over the next 20 years, she would have 13 children
and three miscarriages.
A few years ago, Eshbear began to look around again. This time
he settled on Manal Sultan, 18 years his junior, a pretty woman
with a wide perfect smile. Sultan had never seen Eshbear, let
alone met him, before her father agreed to give her hand in
marriage.
Thuraya was so angry at her husband for taking another wife that
she went home to her mother's. But after 15 days she came back.
Now both wives live with Eshbear under the same roof.
"I love her," the younger woman says of Thuraya.
"I hate her," Thuraya says of her rival.
As for Eshbear, he says, wearily, the two women fight and argue
all the time. He might consider getting married again, "but not
in Gaza."
Under Islamic law, men are allowed to take up to four wives. The
original rationale was that in time of war, when so many men are
killed in battle, widows would have no one to provide for them
unless the surviving men could marry more than once.
But if there is one thing that Eshbear's wives agree on, it is
that the practice is anachronistic.
"It's not fair. I think one wife is enough," Thuraya says, her
heavily kohled eyes flashing in anger. "As women, we can't leave
our children, but as a man he can leave and take a second and a
third and a fourth wife."
Both women insist, though, that they love Eshbear and that he
loves them.
Thuraya, who favors tight jeans and T-shirts instead of
conservative Islamic dress, is the family dynamo. After her
husband married Sultan, she decided to get a job and stay out of
the house as much as possible. She rises at 6, gives the kids
breakfast and takes a taxi to the hospital. There she mops
floors and cleans toilets up to 12 hours a day.
Except for two married sons, no one else in the family works.
Sultan, who has a year-old boy, stays home. So does Eshbear, who
closed his sweet shop three years ago when the intifada began
and Gaza's economy hit bottom.
Now he spends most of the day watching cartoons on TV with his
youngest kids and smoking one cigarette after another. He is
still thin and handsome, his hair is still thick and black, but
he has the tired, resigned look of a man who doesn't expect life
to get much better, or even much different.
Eshbear says he is 47 but he struggles to remember names and
ages. He thinks Sultan is younger than she says she is. He
thinks Thuraya has 15 kids, not 13. He hesitates when asked the
name of a particular child.
He never intended to have 20 kids, he says, but "my sisters love
children so they say, "Bring, bring, bring."'
He pauses. "I made a mistake. If there were not this number I
could teach them better."
Contraceptives are available from public and private clinics in
Gaza, but they are used more to space children than to limit the
number. And it is almost always the woman, not the man, who
takes the responsibility of birth control.
Eshbear might not be as embarrassed about his big family as he
sounds, nor should he be, says Sarraj, the psychologist.
Children can be a hedge against the future in a place where
there are no retirement plans and the government, the
Palestinian Authority, is on the verge of collapse.
"Children mean support," Sarraj says. "It is desirable to have
children because of the insecurity of our society - you are not
guaranteed to live tomorrow but to have children is to give some
protection to the family."
And, she says, there is another reason Eshbear might actually be
proud of his giant clan.
In Gaza, where the conflict with Israel has thrown 60 percent of
adults out of work, fathering children is one sure way an
unemployed man can prove his masculinity.
"To be a man in Gaza means providing food and money and
clothing," Sarraj notes. "If you can't do this you cannot be a
real man - except if you show you are productive by giving lots
of babies."
