Muslim and Christian Palestinians May Outnumber Jews by Year 2000

By Andrew I. Killgore

"The land without people—for the people without land." —Israel Zangwill, 1901

"But there are Arabs in Palestine. I did not know." —Max Nordau, 1897

"My step on the road to reality was not taken until 1904, when I appear to have become fully aware of the Arab peril."

—Israel Zangwill, 1904

"By establishing the State of Israel in the traditionally Arab land of Palestine and by forcibly displacing its original inhabitants, the Zionists did not provide their adherents with a peaceful refuge, but placed them astride a volcano."

—Henry Cattan, 1976

"To the German Kaiser I shall say—let us go! We are aliens, they do not let us dissolve into the population, nor are we able to do so."

—Theodor Herzl's Diaries, about 1895

"We shall spirit the penniless population [Palestinians] across the border....the process of expropriation and removal of the poor shall be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

—Theodor Herzl's Diaries , about 1896

When Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism and ultimately of the modern State of Israel, died in 1904 his dream of establishing in Palestine a state for Jews seemed dead. He had tried and failed to gain the support of a great power, without which he knew a future Israel could not be created. As a consequence, the seventh World Zionist Conference in 1903 had given up on Palestine and settled on Uganda in Africa as the site of a future Jewish State.

Herzl was despondent because he believed the world's Jews would never ingather in Uganda. He also was convinced, as the quotation from his diaries indicates, that Jews would never be allowed to "dissolve" into European society nor that they would be able to do so.

Austrian-born Herzl's conclusions were based on the old prejudices about Jews that permeated central Europe, and the poisonous anti-Jewish suspicion in "enlightened" France that attended the long-drawn-out trial for treason of Jewish Major Albert Dreyfus, which Herzl covered as a correspondent for his Vienna newspaper. Falsely accused, Dreyfus was finally cleared, but only after French society had been deeply divided over the matter.

Only 13 years after Herzl's death, however, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, named for its minister of foreign affairs, promising to support a Jewish State in Palestine. Herzl had failed because the Zionist movement at the time could provide no quid pro quo for any great power. But in 1916, when the wording of the declaration was being negotiated with the British, the Zionists promised secretly to help bring America into World War I on the side of the Allies.

There is no evidence that Zionist adherents had all that much influence in the Washington of 1916, or that they played a role in President Woodrow Wilson's decision to enter the war in April 1917.

Grabbing at Any Straw

But, as Winston Churchill wrote later, Britain was very near defeat after the carnage of the July-November 1916 Battle of the Somme when the British and French armies tried and failed to drive the German army from France's Somme Valley. And thus, as Churchill put it, Britain had to grab at any straw that promised succor to the Allies. That straw was the still officially secret Zionist promise to help influence U.S. opinion to join the Allied side. As the Encyclopedia Britannica 15th edition has it, Britain "hoped" that that would be the result.

The Balfour Declaration was one thing. Getting the Jewish State established was another. Hitler's persecution of the Jews in the 1930s drove large numbers of Jews from Germany and elsewhere in Europe to the relative safety of Palestine. And the unprecedented horrors of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe during World War II prepared the world to accept the birth of a Jewish State on May 15, 1948. It also prepared the world to close its eyes to the grave injustice inflicted thereby on the Palestinians, the trauma from which continues to haunt the world to this day.

If establishing a Jewish State seemed improbable, maintaining it may be even harder. The problem is not threatening Arab armies, but simple demographics. For propaganda purposes, Zionism had maintained that Palestine was an empty land. But Herzl knew better. He would oust the Palestinians "discreetly," according to his diaries. To satisfy himself that the world's Jews would go to Palestine, he assumed that the world didn't want them elsewhere and that they, presumably due to some immutable difference from other people, would be unable to join the larger society.

For propaganda purposes, Zionism had maintained that Palestine was an empty land.

When the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, Jews comprised about 5 percent of Palestine's population. By 1948 they were almost one-third: 650,000 Jews to 1,350,000 Muslim and Christian Palestinians. In the United Nations partition of the country in 1947, Jews were allotted 53 percent of the territory while the two-thirds who were Palestinians received 47 percent.

In the 1948-1949 Arab-Israel war, 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by force and terror. However, not all left Palestine completely. Some became refugees in the West Bank or Gaza. Theodor Herzl had written in his diaries, as quoted, that the Palestinians could be gotten rid of discreetly. But to achieve even this limited effect, instead of "circumspect" means the Zionists employed pure terror and violence, especially in the well-publicized April 9, 1948 massacre of 200 Palestinian villagers at Deir Yassin, down the hill from Jerusalem.

Sometime in the 1960s, Israel made its immigration and emigration figures high state secrets. There is nevertheless circumstantial evidence to go on and a formula for figuring actual emigration as worked out in April 1959 by the late Anton Nyerges, a Foreign Service political officer at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv: Any announced Israeli emigration figure must be doubled to achieve the actual number.

Nyerges wrote in an official report that 14,000 Yordim (a pejorative term in Hebrew for those who "go down," or emigrate, from Israel) had left Israel in 1958, according to announced government of Israel figures. He then made a persuasive case that unannounced emigrants such as students, tourists and businessmen who had no intention of returning to Israel would about equal the declared emigrants. Thus Nyerges concluded that the real number of Israeli emigrants in 1958 was 28,000.

In 1958, during my assignment as consul in Jerusalem, Americans and Canadians living in Israel totaled 2,000, according to Israeli statistics. Everyone assumed that Israelis living in the U.S. and Canada greatly exceeded that number, but nothing official was available.

In March 1977 the Wellington, New Zealand Evening Post carried an editorial page article claiming that 600,000 Israelis lived in the three North American cities of New York, Montreal and Los Angeles. No official authority was cited as the source. Anecdotal figures in the U.S. put 600,000 Israelis in New York alone, and one million living in the United States as a whole. The figure of 50,000 Israeli emigrants per year to the U.S. is frequently heard these days.

Israel currently claims population figures ranging from 5 million to 5.2 million. If 900,000 of these are Palestinians (a figure Dr. Israel Shahak, Holocaust survivor and retired Hebrew University professor of chemistry considers low), that leaves 4.1 to 4.3 million Jewish Israelis. But if that figure includes the conservative estimate of 600,000 Jewish Israelis who actually are not living either in Israel-proper or in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, the number of Jewish residents of Israel is 3.5 to 3.7 million.

The Palestinian population of Israel-proper and the West Bank and Gaza seems to be 3.3 million. This includes the 900,000 Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and 2.4 million Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. The latter figure comes from a recent Israeli "study" carried by Agence France Press and published in the Dec. 8, 1994 edition of The Washington Times.

Discovering that 2.4 million Palestinians were living in the West Bank and Gaza was said to have "dismayed" Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who reportedly had accepted as correct a lower Israeli estimate of 1.9 million Palestinians. In the same AFP report, Palestinians were said to have complained that in the past Israel always undercounted Palestinians.

Whether the resident Jewish population of 3.5 to 3.7 million will outnumber the 3.3 Palestinians for much longer in the former Mandate of Palestine is doubtful. The evidence is against it.

The total fertility rate (TFR) in Israel is 2.9. TFR is the number of children an average woman will have in the course of her lifetime. The Palestinian TFR in the West Bank is 5.7, about twice that of Israel. The TFR in Gaza, where having lots of children constitutes in part a political statement, is 7.9, two and a half times greater than in Israel.

At current rates of increase, Palestinians in the old Mandate of Palestine (Gaza, the West Bank and Israel-proper) may surpass Jews as early as the year 2000. This date could be delayed only if more of the world's Jews immigrate to Israel, or if Israel were able to expel large numbers of Palestinians in a crisis situation, such as another Arab-Israeli war.

The prospect of large new Jewish immigration to Israel does not look promising. About 500,000 Soviet Jews have gone to Israel, according to Israeli claims, although many of them are not really Jewish. It is possible that more eventually will go, but some actually are returning to their former homes, according to reliable reports.

The other possible source of Jewish immigrants to Israel is the United States. In that case, however, the actual movement of people is largely the other way. For most people, America is simply a more desirable place to live than Israel. Theodor Herzl's pessimistic statement that Jews would not be allowed to dissolve into the general society, nor would they be able to do so anyway, has been overturned by history. He could not have imagined then the situation in America today, where the intermarriage rate of Jews outside their faith now surpasses 50 percent. With assimilation accelerating, chances of a large Jewish emigration from North America to Israel look paper-thin.

"Ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians from Israel and the occupied territories succeeded twice, both in times of war. In addition to the 750,000 Palestinians forced out in 1948-1949, another 200,000 were stampeded across the Jordan River into Jordan in the Israel-Arab war of 1967. These were mainly from the giant Palestinian refugee camps of Aqabat Jaber and Ein Sultan at Jericho, which were flattened by Israeli bulldozers as the frightened refugees were hauled by truck to the Jordan River and forced to cross it.

Subsequently, a third attempt at ethnic cleansing in time of war failed. The massacre by Lebanese Maronite militiamen of 1,500 to 2,000 Palestinians after Israeli forces surrounded the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was designed to precipitate the flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians toward Syria, and ultimately into Jordan, which they might have destabilized. But the Palestinians in Beirut stayed put, and Palestinians everywhere assert that they will never flee anywhere again, no matter how great the provocation.

It is reasonable to assume that in peacetime the world would not tolerate an Israeli expulsion of large numbers of Palestinians. But if the Likud bloc succeeds to power in Israel and then can precipitate a big war involving Jordan and/or Lebanon, another attempt to "ethnically cleanse" Palestine is a worrisome possibility.

Barring that eventuality, Israel will continue to lose the war of demographics with the Palestinians.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.