Who Will Rule the Country?

When Israel became a nation in 1948, the majority of its citizens were Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Americas; they had the best education, the choicest jobs, the most money. Today, though Westerners still run the country, they are deeply worried that they will soon be displaced as Israel's ruling class by an unschooled, unskilled mass of settlers of Afro-Asian descent, who already outnumber them. Moroccan-born Dr. Andre Shuraky, Premier David Ben-Gurion's chief adviser on immigration problems, warned last week that in 15 years three out of every four Israeli Jews will be of Afro-Asian origin.

Shuraky pointed out that in 1950, 56% of Israel's babies were born to Westerners; by 1960, only 22% were. In the same decade, the Afro-Asian group's births soared from 32% to 60%. The non-Jewish population is now growing fastest of all, with a fantastic rate of increase of 40 per 1,000 (v. a world average of 18). Arabs and Druzes, who represent only one-tenth of Israel's 2,200,000 people, produced one-fifth of all babies born there last year.

As a result, David Ben-Gurion, himself an Eastern European from Plonsk in Poland, fears that a sharp shift in influence away from the more sophisticated Westerners will arrest Israel's surging economic growth. Last month he appointed a commission of demographers, sociologists and doctors to see what could be done either to reverse the population trend or to prevent Israel from stagnating under the dead weight of a semiliterate majority. The commission's most obvious recommendation will be to improve the nation's patchy educational system. In the universities, Afro-Asians account for a scant 5% of the 10,000 students, though they now represent 54% of Israel's Jewish population. Moreover, few Afro-Asians can afford to attend high schools; though Ben-Gurion is pushing free schooling, most parents must shell out tuition fees of some $200 a year. The problem is most acute in the elementary schools, where Afghans, Yemenites, Moroccans and Iraqis make up 55% of the first-grade population, but dwindle to 27% by the eighth grade. Warned the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz last week: "We must now plan our educational policy with an eye on 1982."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.