Protracted national conflict and fertility change: Palestinians and Israelis in the twentieth century.

TIIECOURSE OF fertility change in Palestine and Israel over the second half of the twentieth century might seem of negligible interest for the history of the demographic transition, since their combined 8.9 million inhabitants represent only one-sixth of one percent of the world population. Yet the exceptional political history of these populations, in which demography played a major role for both sides in nation-building, sheds a particular light on the political dimension of fertility change, a matter of interest beyond the limits of this small piece of land. Nowhere else in the world are populations at the two extremes of fertility transition found side by side in such a small territory (26,351 km2), with total fertility rates ranging from barely above the replacement level among Jews born in Europe and among Christian Arab Israelis (2.1 3 and 2.10 respectively in 1992-96), to the highest level recorded in today's world among Palestinians of the Gaza Strip (7.73 in 1991-95). In this article, I argue that these extreme contrasts of fertility are a corollary of the long-lasting state of belligerence between Arab Palestinians and Jews that began in the wake of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Most demographic research is conducted at the national level, both for practical reasons (the state has taken the lead in the collection of statistics and the construction of statistical categories applied to population) and for reasons of ideology (population is fundamentally conceived as a national body). Accordingly, most studies of demographic differentials are made within the fraine of international boundaries. This circumstance applies to the demographic literature on Israelis and Palestinians. Usual comparisons in this literature are between populations found within the same national entity, whether Israel proper (Ashkenazi Jews vs. Sephardic Jews; native Jews vs. immigrant Jews; Jews vs. non-Jews-by default: Arabs; Muslims vs. Christians), or within the Palestinian territories (West Bank vs. Gaza Strip; refugees vs. nonrefugees) .' Territory and borders are fundamental ref-