To this day, the Beduin are taking demographic and geographic control of the Negev, because we failed to take the appropriate steps to secure our most vital needs. In extreme cases, a Beduin marries his cousin; they have 15 children. He takes a second wife from the Hebron mountains; he has another 15 children. He takes a third wife from the Gaza Strip; then has yet another 15 children. Then he can take more and divorce as many as he pleases, who collect Bituah Leumi [National Insurance money] as single mothers. With his 45 or 60 children, in one generation, he is a village. So not building a fence is a crime against Zionism. If you let Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank move freely into Israel, we are doomed.

Policemen arrest an anti-disengagement protester.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski [archive]

The worst danger was the allocation of child allowances, because it encouraged Muslim Arabs and haredi Jews (Christian Arabs didn't go in this direction) to have many children and only one parent participating in the workforce. Such a policy increases the non-Zionist, non-productive, non-democratic and non-modern elements within the country. This is an existential threat to Israel - almost as much as an Iranian nuclear bomb.

In 2003, when Binyamin Netanyahu was finance minister, he reduced the child allowances. This was as important as having aircraft that can reach Iran.

You don't really believe that people have dozens of children because of child allowances, do you? Wouldn't the populations in question be having that many children anyway?
There is this legend, perpetuated by people who don't know what they're talking about, that haredim necessarily have many children and don't work because their religious belief dictates it. But look at haredim in Antwerp or in New York: They work and have far fewer children. The same goes for the Arab world. The campaign in Egypt to lower the birthrate succeeded, as it did in Iran.

We shouldn't be mortgaging our future by changing our demographic balance in this direction.

We have a commission of inquiry into the failures of the Second War in Lebanon. But the issue of child allowances - as they were until 2003 and could come back - is far more critical in the long run.

But the child allowances were only a part of an entire welfare state system that has been around since the days of David Ben-Gurion.
It wasn't from the days of Ben-Gurion; it was from the days of [Yitzhak] Rabin.

For a long period of time, the idea was to support families whose children serve in the army. It was only after 1992 that it changed vis- -vis the Arabs; unfortunately, it eroded vis- -vis the haredim earlier than that.

Surely you are familiar with the study conducted by Bennett Zimmerman, Roberta Seid and Michael Wise of the American Research Initiative, showing there are far fewer Palestinians than is commonly stated.
I'm familiar with it, and it doesn't matter much. It's the "so what" effect. It doesn't matter if the Arabs are already 50% - or let's be radical and say 40%. The question is: Can we have a state with an overwhelming Jewish majority? If it is not overwhelming, this state will not be modern; it will not be democratic; it will not keep the kind of salt-of-the-earth people who make Israel survive and prosper. If you have millions of Arabs inside Israel, Israel is doomed.

Which brings us back to the issue of the Arabs who are already citizens of Israel. If there is not an "overwhelming" majority of Jews in places like Haifa and Jaffa, are you saying that they're doomed?
What I'm saying is that you can keep a certain proportion of Arabs, even if it is problematic, say 16% - or even 20-something. You can live with it. But 50% - or even if you accept the study that says it's 40% or 45% - is something else.

In an interview in these pages in 2004, your colleague (and co-promoter of disengagement) Arnon Soffer said: "We will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed... if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day."

If the idea, as you say, has nothing to do with peace, but self-preservation, why did we allow Kassams to land while we were withdrawing? And why does mainstream Israel not view disengagement as you do?
In time, the mainstream will come again to see things my way. Look, there is this very childish approach which says: Let's make enormous concessions and then, if the Palestinians do commit even the slightest provocation, all hell will break loose.

But, in every situation, you must ask yourself what the smart thing is to do. The key to being politically smart is to forget about justice and conduct a very strict cost-benefit analysis. For instance, would it have been justified to say that once [Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser] Arafat committed this or that act of terrorism, we would immediately destroy PA infrastructure and reoccupy Palestinian cities and refugee camps? Yes, completely justified.

But wasn't it wiser to do what [former prime minister Ariel] Sharon did - which was not respond to the Dolphinarium bombing [in 2001] until the Americans were on board?

Remember what happened in the interim between the Dolphinarium bombing and Operation Defensive Shield? The Karine A incident. The Americans finally understood that Arafat was a terrorist. As a result, we were able to do something very radical with American support. The difference was enormous, because the Americans shielded us from potentially dangerous European pressures. This was worth waiting for. We have no option of responding to every provocation by indiscriminate mass killing of Palestinian civilians, because of what we are. That is another dimension of the strong society we discussed before.

Professor Soffer, like you, said it was time for a unilateral step, time to tell the Palestinians that we would no longer let them keep killing us.
Soffer had an important role in warning Israelis of the dire consequences of integration with the Palestinian territories, and his outrage at their terrorism is, of course, justified. The broader question we are discussing here is conceptual. We should choose our methods and timing, realizing that, for the Palestinians who are fighting us under the post-Camp David-Taba circumstances, killing our children is more important than giving hope to their own. This is a problem we have to deal with wisely.