That’s ridiculous. There is no resource shortage, not even close. It’s entirely a distribution issue.
Presumably, your child is working for a living. Resource acquisition isn’t a zero sum game so long as we aren’t making use of all available resources, and we aren’t even close to doing that.
That’s patently absurd. In 1948 the population of the entire British Mandate was around 1.7 million. Today Israel has 9 million people and the Palestinian territories have almost 5 million.
Clearly there was room for all 1.7 million people, almost ten times over, when this conflict began. The issue isn’t resources.
I’ll continue to maintain raising kids in hell holes is immoral, and no matter how dire the environment, there is inevitably societal pressure to do so. Just as a thought experiment, what would be the major negative repercussions if a place like Gaza were to experience a drastic population decline?
If humans were unwilling to reproduce in hell holes and dire conditions, probably none of us would be here today. It’s very possible that in a few hundred years our descendants will consider our own conditions to be dire. (Also possible they’ll see it as a lost golden age.)
If there is some chance of getting out of or improving their situation, then it seems reasonable to expect people to wait to have kids, but individuals in Gaza have very few options to do that. It is not reasonable to expect people to give up having kids entirely.
However, it is surely true that the high birthrate contributes to the problems: older populations are less violent.
You can say that for pretty much anywhere in the world. A drastic population decline in the US would be a great aid in reducing global warming, for instance. Although the details of how the population declined drastically would matter.
But some generic “gee, it’d be nice if the population were lower” has never reduced the birthrate anywhere. A belief that your kids will survive, coupled with options for a pleasant and secure child-free life, does tend to reduce the birthrate. Gaza has neither of those, which is probably why the birthrate is so high.
Maybe… but neither birth control nor abortions are available in Gaza so if a woman gets pregnant, either by choice or by force, there’s most likely going to be a baby and a family. Also, poor people facing oppression and early death tend reproduce, often young and often.
The issue is that both sides want ALL of the land in dispute. There is only so much land in the Levant and either all parties involved will have to, at some point, learn to share or else one or more parties will eventually be exterminated.
That leaves there choices:
we somehow duplicate the entire Levant so both sides can have it all (sorry, fresh out of god-level miracles, ain’t gonna happen)
two-state solution (apparently not acceptable to some in the region)
genocide, ethnic cleansing, and continued fighting and terror.
Of the viable choices I’d prefer to see #2. Unfortunately, it appears that is not the choice of the people with power and guns in the region at present.
Who cares? Discussing the best and most ethical way to reduce Gaza’s population seems ethnic-cleansing-adjacent to me at best, and I don’t think it’s something for Israel to consider in reality.
Yes. I’ve commented a couple of times on the practicalities for anyone in Gaza who wants fewer children; but that is a decision in any case for the people of Gaza – ideally for each individual woman in Gaza – to make. ‘This problem would be solved if those people would just stop having kids!’ (not a direct quote from anybody) is an attitude that makes me rather queasy.
AFAICT, mainstream Muslim doctrine does not prohibit or deprecate the use of birth control, although at least in some interpretations deliberate permanent sterilization is prohibited. So yes, there is no rule against voluntary (temporary) fertility control on the part of Muslim women. (There do appear to be some militant-Muslim movements worldwide campaigning against contraception as some kind of western genocidal plot against Muslims, but they don’t seem to have much impact on mainstream doctrinal views or on Muslim-majority countries’ government-sponsored family planning support initiatives.)
Palestinian Christians, AFAICT, are mostly Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic, both of which disapprove of non-abstinence contraception methods. However, only about 1-2% of Palestinians are Christians, so their contraception practices or lack thereof aren’t impacting the overall population significantly.
