An update (sort of) on Gaza

Man, oh, man, is Gaza a mess.

I wrote pessimistically about this region? territory? geographical place? earlier, and speculated that the fact that they have such an astonishingly high birth rate and such a low median age, would alone go a long way towards explaining its extremism, if the place is simply hugely, disproportionately, occupied by young people.  Nearly 2/3rds of the population is under the age of 25, and their birth rates and population youthfulness is much more extreme than the West Bank.

But now there’s a new UN report out about the population growth in the West Bank and Gaza.  The first thing you’ll note is that this report, produced by the UN in conjunction with some sort of local experts, decrees itself to have been co-published by the Prime Minister’s Office of the State of Palestine.  What this means when Hamas is off doing its own thing in Gaza isn’t particularly clear, but it has a forward by Rami Hamdallah, who has the title of Prime Minister, though his actual role in the government isn’t clear to me, form the Wikipedia description anyway, and the forward itself is more a call for independence than anything else.

The report itself is an odd bird.  It forecasts a dramatic increase in population, especially in Gaza, but also among ethnic Palestinians in the West Bank, and its starting point is a higher present fertility rate in both of those regions than in the prior World Bank statistics I’d seen, though, to be sure, the rate has also been dropping dramatically.  In Gaza, the rate was 7.4 in 1995 (the first year shown), is now 4.5, and is 4.24 according to the World Bank.  In the West Bank, the corresponding rates are 5.62 in 1995, 3.7 now, and 2.83 according to the World Bank.  (I think the World Bank figure includes everyone, so also Israelis, and the UN report only includes ethnic Palestinians, so that might be a part of it, but it’s also been my understanding that the fertility rates of the orthodox Jews who form the “settler movement” are also quite high.)

What this means is that the population, especially of Gaza, has skyrocketed, and is projected to continue to grow even more.  The Gaza population is projected to increase from 1.8 million now (2015) to 3.1 million in 2030 and 4.8 million in 2050.  And this is on top of increases from 1.1 million in 2000, and 650,000 in 1990, according to Wikipedia.

At the same time, though, the report anticipates a drop in the TFR over time.  Their math says that women are increasingly educated, and that it’s a known fact that more educated women have lower fertility, so that it models an expectation that fertility rates by 2050 will drop to 2.0 for the West Bank and 2.47 for the Gaza Strip.  But is this a reasonable expectation?  According to a 2014 article at Al-Monitor.com, the high birthrates are not a matter of a lack of family planning, but a strong cultural preference.  A further 2014 article at New Scientist from 2014 ties the population growth more directly to the infitada:

Randall’s study, involving interviews with 16,204 Gazan women and 4900 Jordanian women for comparison, concluded that the Intifada was a key driving factor for the surge in marriage and fertility. In the Intifada years of 1989 and 1990, for example, women were 1.4 times more likely to marry than in 1980. The rate during the Intifada was even higher, at twice that in 1980, for more educated women.

“Whether the phenomenally high fertility levels in Gaza are also a more long-term response to political oppression and a perceived need to increase the numbers of Palestinians cannot be inferred from the data available, but it certainly seems to be a plausible hypothesis,” concludes Randall’s study. “In a situation where disempowerment, underemployment and marginalisation have left few opportunities for expression of identity, reproduction is one of the few liberties which remains, and also contributes to the larger goal of increasing the Palestinian people,” it says.

Pedersen says that a sense of duty to expand the population is a factor that can’t be dismissed. “There have been statements from Hamas urging women to have more children to create a larger army,” he says.

In addition, the article explains,

husbands earn more money as their families expand. “It’s employers that are willing to pay it,” says Pedersen. “Traditionally, men will get extra wages if they have extra children.”

Which seems to call into question the UN’s model that this region will fall in line with everywhere else and have a decreasing birthrate and, eventually, a demographic dividend, as the next generation of young people has fewer children to support.

Oh, and incidentally?  The Gaza Strip has a land area of 141 square miles.  For comparison, this is nearly exactly the size of Detroit, not the metro area, but the city itself.  The only two places that are more densely populated are Singapore and Hong Kong, and these have extremely low birth rates (TFR of 0.8 and 1.2, respectively).  Assuming these two places keep their top spots by immigration, but with a stable population, Gaza will claim the top spot by 2030 – and that’s at the “medium” projection based on the expected fertility declines.

So what next?  Admittedly I didn’t read it completely, but the UN report seems oddly-sunny report in any case, talking about how with increasing education the area will be chock-full of educated workers who, when jobs appear, will bring prosperity to their country – and yet seems to have the additional purpose of lending support to statements that the population of ethnic Palestinians in these areas is slated to be so massive that Jews had better watch out.

image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AGaza_Beach.jpg; By Gus at Dutch Wikipedia (Transferred from nl.wikipedia to Commons.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons