Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a war on demographics
Palestinians mourn over the bodies of those killed in Israeli air strikes, at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on 20 May 2025
Joseph Massad writes in Middle East Eye on May 2025:
The ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has killed nearly 54,000 Palestinians, along with various plans to expel the remaining survivors, has one primary goal: to safeguard the Jewish settler-colony of Israel by restoring the lost Jewish demographic majority, which had been achieved through mass killings and expulsions since 1948.
Zionists understood early on that the only chance their settler-colonial project had of survival was through the establishment of a Jewish majority by expelling the Palestinians.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, outlined early plans for this in the 1890s, which the Zionist Organisation pursued from the 1920s. Expulsion, however, only became possible after the Zionist military conquest of Palestine.
On the eve of the 1948 war, Palestine had a Jewish population of 608,000 (constituting 30 percent), most of whom had arrived in the country over the previous two decades, alongside 1,364,000 Palestinians.
During the 1948 conquest, Zionist forces killed upwards of 13,000 Palestinians – one percent of the Palestinian population – and expelled around 760,000 Palestinians, or more than 80 percent of those who lived in the area that Israel would later declare a Jewish state.
It was these killings and acts of ethnic cleansing that established Jewish demographic superiority in Israel between 1948 and 1967.
Expulsion
By November 1948, about 165,000 Palestinians remained in Israel, whose Jewish colonial population had risen to 716,000 people, increasing its percentage from 30 to 81 percent almost overnight.
In 1961, the Jewish population had grown to 1,932,000 out of a total population of 2,179,000, raising the Jewish proportion to 89 percent.
Israel’s territorial expansion in 1967 undermined the Jewish demographic supremacy Zionists had worked to secure since 1948
On the eve of Israel’s 1967 conquest of three Arab countries, its population numbered 2.7 million, 2.4 million of whom were Jewish colonists and their descendants, maintaining their 89 percent share of the total.
The major demographic faux pas committed by the Jewish settler-colony was its 1967 conquest of the remainder of Palestine, along with the Golan Heights and the sparsely populated Egyptian Sinai.
While Israel’s voracious territorial appetite led to a conquest that tripled its geographic size, it also significantly undermined the Jewish demographic supremacy that Zionists had worked so hard to secure since 1948.