Year-End Population Statistics Gloss Over Israel’s Biggest Problem

By Richard H. Curtiss

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics announced at the end of 1996 that the country’s population had reached 5,764,000, an increase of 2.6 percent over the end of 1995. The same office said the country’s demographic makeup is 80.8 percent Jewish, 14.6 percent Muslim, 2.9 percent Christian and 1.7 percent Druze.

The report said Israel’s growth rate dropped .001 percent (1/10 of 1 percent) in 1996, largely because of reduced immigration, with only 69,000 new residents coming in during the year. Since 1990, more than 600,000 immigrants have arrived in Israel, the majority from the former Soviet Union.

The figures, as announced, mean that Israel has 4,657,312 Jewish residents, 841,544 Muslims, 167,156 Christians, and 97,988 Druze, for a total of 1,106,688 non-Jewish residents, most of them Palestinians.

Since the Palestinian population in the former occupied territories is estimated at between 2.2 and 2.4 million, it means that in the former mandate of Palestine (both Israel and the future Palestinian state) there already are close to 3.5 million Muslims and Christians. Furthermore, the Palestinians in the occupied territories have one of the highest birthrates in the world, while the Israelis have one of the lowest.

So how long before the Palestinians inside Israel’s borders and in territories under its control outnumber the Jews there? Not very long at all if you take into consideration two other seldom discussed factors. One is that virtually none of the some 3.5 million Palestinians now living outside the mandate of Palestine (the Palestinian diaspora) are there voluntarily. Some have made new lives in their adopted countries, and many of their children will remain in those countries if they have a choice. But in countries like Syria, Lebanon and Jordan where tens of thousands of Palestinians still live in refugee camps, many would choose to return in a second.

When things went badly for the fully employed and prosperous Palestinians in Kuwait after Saddam Hussain’s invasion, virtually all had to leave. A very few went to Europe, Syria or Lebanon, and more went to Amman where they could build homes and live as Jordanian citizens. But many returned to where they had started in Gaza or newly liberated West Bank towns like Ramallah, where they are building homes and businesses with their savings from the Gulf, and settling back in to stay. When a final settlement is reached between Israel and Palestine, it’s realistic to expect perhaps half of the Palestinian diaspora to seek to return, making Jews an instant minority within the borders of the former mandate of Palestine.

It could happen even before that because of the nearly invisible Jewish emigration factor. For years the Israeli government has concealed the Jewish emigration rate. The true extent of Jewish emigration could only be estimated by comparing the difference between those who arrived and those who departed from Israel’s Ben-Gurion airport. That revealed that departures over the years were 600,000 higher than arrivals.

The Israeli government’s practice is to continue to count Jewish emigrants as residents of Israel, so long as they visit Israel at least once every four years. It’s also obvious that the steady trickle of native-born Israelis who have been leaving for the U.S., Canada and Australia for years now is being augmented by a stream of immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union who couldn’t get jobs and are moving on.

U.S. Jewish sources estimate that there now are 700,000 Israelis living in the United States alone. If most of them still are counted by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics as residents of Israel, it means that there may already be fewer than 4 million Jews permanently residing in Israel.

That should be a subject of discussion for all of the participants in the peace process, which is seeking to divide the former mandate of Palestine into two states that can live in peace with each other. But the Israeli government is simply wishing the problem away and American diplomats know that raising it is not a prudent career move. Yet all admit that there will be more Muslims and Christians than Jews within the former mandate of Palestine by the year 2010, and most acknowledge that the line may be crossed by the year 2000. None admit publicly that it could happen in 1997 or 1998.

But it’s a reality that can’t be ignored in examining Israeli political party platforms. That of the Labor Party consists basically of living with the growing Muslim population within Israel’s borders, but fencing off the much larger Muslim and Christian communities in the West Bank and Gaza into a Palestinian state they call an “entity” built on less than 20 percent of the Palestinian mandate.

The even less realistic Likud Party wants to keep all of the mandate, from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, which would leave a Jewish population with full national rights as an occupation authority over an even larger Muslim and Christian population with no rights at all—a formula for inevitable, and justified, revolution.

Israelis to the right of Likud, like the Moledet Party and the West Bank “settlers,” would deal with that inevitability by ethnic cleansing, which they call “transfer.” It consists of re-enacting the events of 1948, when Israeli forces gave the Palestinians under their control a choice between fleeing at gunpoint into neighboring countries or ending up in mass graves.

One thing is certain. If the United States insists that the final choices must be left to “the parties themselves,” meaning the heavily armed Israelis and the largely demilitarized Palestinians, the rest of the world will intervene, and not on behalf of Israel’s Jews. The American “friends of Israel” now riding so high in the media, Congress, the White House, and even at political appointee levels in the State Department and CIA seem blind to the fact that 250 million Arabs, with the tacit support of the European Union and virtually all of the Asian nations, are not going to tolerate a Middle Eastern re-enactment of the European holocaust, using Palestinian Muslims and Christians as the victims, to solve the inevitable demographic problem so grievously ignored by Zionist visionaries of 100 years ago.