ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of Zionism along several biopolitical dimensions: colonisation and eugenics with a focus on Arthur Ruppin, population containment, and the relationship between modernisation and demography. Not only Ruppin but also other Zionist colonisers in high places subscribed to social Darwinism in one form or another. In Zionist discourse, Arab demography constitutes a core element of the 'existential threat' facing Israel as a Jewish state. Biopolitics assumed importance in state planning as demography and quantitative statistical techniques became prominent tools of social engineering with the ascendancy of positivism in the works of French thinkers August Comte and Henri Saint-Simon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The debate surrounding Israeli demography is addressed in two articles by Ian Lustick. Both articles unpack the political dimension of the ethnic construction of population data. Being a colonial-settler state, Israel's policies and public attitudes toward the Arabs have hampered the decline in their birth rate that was universally postulated by demographers.
