{"id":2235,"date":"2020-04-20T08:31:27","date_gmt":"2020-04-20T08:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/?p=2235"},"modified":"2020-04-20T11:18:08","modified_gmt":"2020-04-20T11:18:08","slug":"overpopulation-in-israel-a-self-made-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/en\/health-nutrition\/overpopulation-in-israel-a-self-made-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Overpopulation in Israel: A self-made crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Photo by Aviv Perets on Unsplash<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, Israel\u2019s continual population growth has repeatedly made headlines on the national news and has made experts worried about the future of the country. With a staggering 9.1 million people, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics<\/a>, Israel is the second-densest<\/a> country in the developed world, proportional to its size.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\naddition, Israel has a yearly population increase rate of 2% and an average\nfertility rate of three children per family, which positions the country far\nabove the OECD<\/a> average, and the trend does not show any signs\nof slowing down. Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS)\nofficial estimates<\/a> project\nthat Israel will reach a population of between 14 to 17.6 million people by\n2050.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In light of this accelerating development, one might argue that Israel is headed for a population density crisis come mid-twenty-first century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A man, who\nwas among the first to bring this issue to public attention is Prof. Alon Tal,\nthe current chair of the Department of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2015, he founded the Forum for Population, Environment and Society<\/a>, or in Hebrew ZAFUF (crowded). The goal of this organization is to bring the matter of overpopulation not only to public attention but to convince decision-makers to take measures to alleviate an impending population crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) official estimates project that Israel will reach a population of between 14 to 17.6 million people by 2050. Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A crisis in the making   <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alon Tal is\nwidely respected for his environmental activism, and is renowned for being one\nof the first to speak out about Israel\u2019s overpopulation crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in\n1990, Alon Tal founded the environmental advocacy group the Israel Union for Environmental Defense<\/a> (IUED). By that time, Tal was already\nconcerned about the fact that Israel\u2019s population is growing at a rate that\nwill inevitably become a problem in a not too distant future. In 1994<\/a>,  Israel\nwas home to roughly 5.3 million people, which is about 3.8 million people less\nthan today\u2019s population. According to Tal, Israel is growing by 1.5 million\npeople every decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAfter four\nto five years working in the IUED, I began to feel that I was only dealing with\nthe symptoms and not the causes,\u201d Tal recounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you\nthink about it systematically, you realize that the cause of all of our\nenvironmental problems, which ultimately also become social problems, is that\nwe are becoming more and more crowded,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the late-nineties,\nTal moved to New Zealand for one year to write his book Pollution in the\nPromised Land<\/em>, which contained a section about population growth in Israel.\n\u201cI didn\u2019t know that much about the topic at that point, but I was already giving\nit a lot of thought,\u201d Tal says. When I started talking about it openly, there\nwas a lot of pushback,\u201d he adds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Society did\nnot yet seem ready to deal with, let alone acknowledge the urgency of the\nproblem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2016, however, Tal\u2019s latest book, The Land is Full<\/em>, drew a lot of attention and had a substantial impact on the public\u2019s perception of overpopulation in Israel. He was invited to speak on numerous TV shows about his book, and \u201cpeople began to understand the issue, and became aware that we need to step up in order to change something,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Overpopulation can result in more traffic, to poorer education and health care systems, increased poverty rates, slower legal services, and many more. Photo by Jens Herrndorff on Unsplash<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCrowded\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Alon\nTal\u2019s own words, ZAFUF came into existence after an encounter with Professor\nEyal Rotenberg from the Weizmann Institute, in Rehovot, Israel, at a conference\nof the Israel Society of Ecology and Environmental\nSciences<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZAFUF was\nfounded with the aim to raise public awareness of the issues that\noverpopulation in Israel entails. These issues are plentiful and range from more\ntraffic, to poorer education and health care systems, increased poverty rates,\nslower legal services, and many more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tal\nemphasizes that on the current trajectory, we are making it almost impossible\nfor our children to have a reasonable quality of life. According to him, every\nyear, Israel needs to build 60,000 housing units, which means that, in return,\nthe country needs to give up vast areas of open spaces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIsrael is\ngoing to double in size in the next 30 years, and it is not going to be pretty.\nWe have to do whatever we can to preserve some quality of life in this\ncountry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According\nto Tal, a very striking example that shows just how serious the problem has\nbecome is the Corona (COVID-19) crisis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf we had\nfour million people in the country, and the same amount of hospitals, which\nhaven\u2019t really been able to grow at the same rate as the population, the\ncountry could deal with the crisis better. No question about it,\u201d Tal says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the quick response to the spread of the virus and the hefty measures imposed by the government, while case numbers were still generally low (compared to other countries), might stem from the fact that the health care system cannot accommodate too many sick people at the same time. Most hospitals are already at capacity<\/a> and do not have enough room if mass numbers of people get sick all at once. Israel has 2864 ventilators<\/a> at its disposal. Although in comparison, Switzerland<\/a>, which has a population of 8.5 million, has to make do with less than half as many ventilators, health officials have already warned that additional equipment is needed to treat the predicted number of intensive care patients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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According to Tal, Israel would be better prepared to handle COVID-19 if the country had fewer people. Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

No\ngovernment incentives in the bedroom<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

According\nto Alon Tal and ZAFUF, the public needs economic incentives that encourage\npeople to reduce their fertility. However, he points out that this does not\nmean the imposition of restrictions or government control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the\nother hand, in order to incentivize people to have fewer children, other\nincentives have to be taken away. According to Tal, certain public policies that\nhave been in place for 40 years, such as a very high monthly child allowance\nprovided by the state, are the reason for Israel\u2019s current population problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe\noverpopulation crisis Israel is facing right now is of our own making. Public policies\nsubsidize high fertility,\u201d Tal stresses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI always\nget annoyed when people say to me: how can you support government interference\nin our bedroom? ZAFUF wants to do the exact opposite! We want to pull the\ngovernment out of the bedroom because right now, the government sits in our\nbedroom, handing out money if we have more children,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tal\nemphasizes that all the discounts and tax incentives that families get for\nhaving more children are damaging to the overall well-being of society, and\nthat the country needs to get rid of them. These public policies made sense\nwhen Israel was an “empty country”, but now they\u2019ve become obsolete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore,\nTal points out that because the Ultra-Orthodox Jews have a lot of political\npower in Israel, it is extremely hard to push for a change regarding these\npolicies. Ironically, the Ultra-Orthodox are one of the demographic groups that\nwill hurt first and they already are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t\nhave a lot of money. Children are expensive. They don\u2019t have money to go abroad\nfor vacations. Their children don\u2019t get equal opportunities and they perpetuate\ntheir own poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe\nquestion that we need to ask ourselves is at what point quantity of life\nimpinges on quality of life. In ecology, there is the term \u2018carrying capacity,\u2019\nwhich refers to the maximum amount of organisms an ecosystem can support without\ndeteriorating. We are close to reaching that point, but this is not what we\nwant; we want an optimal capacity. A healthy and thriving society,\u201d Tal\nstresses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou can always stuff more people on the train, but then no one is going to enjoy the ride,\u201d he concludes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This ZAVIT article was also published in The Jerusalem Post (print edition) on 04\/05\/2020.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In recent years, Israel\u2019s continual population growth has repeatedly made headlines on the national news and has made experts worried …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":2268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14,13,9],"tags":[],"acf":[],"post-meta-fields":{"_edit_lock":["1587382226:11"],"_edit_last":["11"],"subtitle":["With COVID-19 all over the news and on everyone\u2019s mind, it\u2019s easy to cast aside the issues that are at the root of many of modern society's problems and those that could exacerbate global crises like Coronavirus"],"_subtitle":["field_59d3d36ea7fe1"],"_wpml_media_duplicate":["1"],"_wpml_media_featured":["1"],"_thumbnail_id":["2268"]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2235"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2235"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2273,"href":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2235\/revisions\/2273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zavit.org.il\/intl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}