Notes on Palestine and the “demographic crisis” of Europe

The first frost came a few days ago, after weeks of unseasonable sun and warmth. It felt late, and particularly abrupt, but with that statement I could just as easily speak to Palestine as to the weather here.

I’ll be honest — I’m still quite wrecked over all that. I try not to get “swept up” in geopolitical moments. I try not to stare too hard at events over which I have no control. I try not to, but this time just feels too urgent.

Why, though? I’ve known of the situation in Palestine for my entire life, and I’ve always sensed that some moment of reckoning would happen in those lands during my lifetime. It’s inevitable: you cannot keep a couple of million people in a walled-off open-air prison camp forever; eventually, they will react in ways any human in such a situation would react.

What’s severely jarring about this time? Well, a lot else in the world feels likewise headed towards inevitable conclusions, too. John Michael Greer just published an essay that covers a bit of this:

As I write these words, to start with, Russian forces on the eastern front of the Russo-Ukrainian war have pushed their way through the Ukrainian lines and are moving to encircle the fortress city of Avdeevka, the linchpin of the Ukrainian defenses in the western Donbass.  At the same time the war between Israel and the Hamas militant movement is blazing, as 300,000 Israeli troops converge on the Gaza Strip while Israeli and Hezbollah forces exchange rocket fire across the northern border. An assortment of other wars flare elsewhere, unnoticed by most people in industrial nations; the outrage fanned by our corporate media is as always highly selective.

…

Nor can the US simply keep printing money and churning out unpayable IOUs to cover the gap and keep the economy humming away, as we’ve done for the last fifty years. The deficit spending of the last half century was possible because the US dollar was the global currency of trade, and economic globalization forced every bank around the world to stockpile dollar-denominated investments as a basis for credit-based cash flows. Now the global economy is coming apart as other nations realize that the ongoing inflation of the dollar imposes a hidden tax on every transaction, and Russia demonstrates that being able to make everything you need within your own borders has certain hard advantages. The dollar isn’t going to be forced out of global trade all at once, nor will any one competing currency replace it overnight.  Instead, the dollar faces the same death of a thousand cuts that doomed the British pound sterling’s once-inviolable status as global reserve currency.

Greer’s list wasn’t meant to be exhaustive, and there’s a particular situation I’m really quite worried about here in Europe.

Palestine and the “demographic crisis” of Europe

Europe is in the middle of a demographic crisis threatening the pyramid scheme of its retirement and social systems, and the crisis has already been deftly leveraged by far right nationalist groups.

Though much more generous here, state-run retirement programs in Europe are structured similar to US social security. Every worker and employer is taxed on salaries, and those funds get used to pay for workers currently collecting retirement benefits.

But European birth rates have been really low for quite some time, meaning that governments will soon need to find other ways to fund these benefits. Of course, they could always tax the banks and the corporations, but capitalists don’t like to part with their money so easily. So, there are only two other options: reduce the benefits or increase the tax base.

Remember the explosive protests in France at the beginning of this year, after Macron pushed through a delay in the retirement age for workers from 62 to 64? That’s one of the available strategies. Adding two more years to the time people have to work before collecting benefits means two more years of paying taxes and — more importantly for the governments — two fewer years that they’ll be paid these benefits. Also, forcing people to work a few more years means they’ll potentially die a little younger, which again reduces the benefits the governments will pay out.

Of course, this isn’t popular with anyone. In fact, it’s one of the few places that left-aligned and right-aligned working class people generally agree. Regardless of your politics, getting something you were promised taken away from you will likely make you angry.

The other option is a slower one, and much more politically divisive. That’s the one where you import workers in from other countries to create a steadily-growing tax base. European governments have been doing exactly that, and it’s causing really severe social disruption.

To be clear, it’s not the fault of the immigrants. In fact, they get a really bad deal out of this, since few of them are offered any kind of well-paid work. Instead, they’re brought in as an ever-expanding lower class who are practically guaranteed not to get the retirement benefits they’re working to fund for the aging Europeans.

Increasing the population artificially through immigration will always be a bit disruptive to a society. If it’s done slowly enough, the immigrants and those already there will have time to adjust to each other, and their cultural differences can turn into deeply-enriching cultural exchange and cosmopolitanism. Do it faster, though, and things become quite messy.

This year in tiny Luxembourg, the Liberal government stated their intention to grow the population from 600,000 to 1 million people, and commissioned research to prove that there was more than enough room for those extra people. That’s 400,000 people, or two more people for every three already living here.

Why would they want to do that? Well, because of the demographic crisis. Luxembourg has some of the most generous benefits in Europe, but Luxembourgers (including foreign-born citizens) aren’t having enough children to guarantee these benefits over the next few decades. The thing is, there’s already an insane housing crisis here (average home price is 1.37 million euros) and the infrastructure cannot even accommodate the current population. These stated plans led to the end of the Liberal-Socialist-Green government coalition which has governed here. The Conservative party is back in power, the Greens are considered a joke party now, and the far-right AdR party (which campaigned on a referendum about the population increase) earned quite a few seats.

The tension and fear over these increases is even stronger elsewhere in Europe, and suspicion and strife are now the rule. As you probably know, many of the imported immigrants are from North Africa and the Middle East, and they are also usually Muslim. They’re brought in to work the worst jobs available and live in some of the most depressing places, all the while paying taxes to fund retired European workers. But there are not really enough jobs for them, and it’s a certainty they’ll never benefit from the same kind of retirement they’re helping fund for others.

In addition to all that, their cultural and religious differences create stress for them and also stress for those already here. In some places, this stress is more like a powder keg than a mere cultural difference. Extreme nationalists blame the immigrants for everything going wrong in society, and conspiracy theories like “the Great Replacement” re-narrate the entire situation as a larger Islamic take-over of Europe.

How does this relate to Palestine? Maybe you saw this: