Facing Israel’s Population Problem
Facing Israel’s Population Problem
August 22, 2016
Prof. Alon Tal is a veteran Israeli environmental leader and professor of environmental policy at BGU’s Bona Terra Department of Man in the Desert. Here is an excerpt of an op-ed written by Prof. Tal discussing Israel’s mounting overpopulation issues.
J Weekly — When I first began to talk about Israel’s overpopulation problem, friends and colleagues took umbrage or simply scratched their heads. How can we be talking about policies to reduce Israel’s fertility levels so soon after the Holocaust?
My response is that Zionism has always been nimble and practical, committed to adjusting to the evolving realities and challenges facing the Jewish people. Things have changed, and that requires new policies and ideologies.
Prof. Alon Tal
By many criteria, Israel is already the most crowded Western nation in the world. And its population of 8.5 million is set to double over the next 35 years. More and more Israelis are coming to realize that “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron, and that the quality of life in our country will not get better with a larger population.
Indeed, it is quickly growing worse.
Every year Israel must build at least 60,000 new housing units if it wants to provide homes to a growing population that is justifiably frustrated at the extraordinarily expensive housing market. We are losing this race and prices keep going up.
Prime Minister Netanyahu went to the climate summit in Paris in 2015 and promised the world that Israel would do its part to address the crisis of global warming by reducing per capita emissions of greenhouse gases 26 percent by 2030. It is not clear that we’ll meet that target.
In addition, Israel’s social crises are largely a function of demographic proliferation. Israel’s hospitals are among the most crowded in the developed world, as are its classrooms.
The time has come to embrace the legitimacy, indeed the synergistic benefits, of twin centers of Jewish life in the U.S. and Israel. Jewish culture has always been about quality over quantity. The simple truth must begin to inform our vision of Israel’s future.
Read more on the J Weekly website >>
Get Prof. Tal’s new book The Land Is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel >>
Come hear Prof. Tal speak in Berkeley, California or Seattle, Washington >>
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