What Will Israel Do as the Arab Demographic Tide Rises in Palestine?

By Andrew I. Killgore

“We shall try to spirit the penniless Arab population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country.”—Theodor Herzl (1895), Diaries.

“Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when the world’s attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.”

—Binyamin Netanyahu, when he was Israel’s deputy foreign minister in 1989, quoted in Yediot Ahronot.

“You see, we are 4.7 million Jewish people and 4 million Arab people west of the Jordan River (Israel, West Bank and Gaza Strip)...And whoever says he is against the Palestinian state—what does he suggest? That we shall become binational? That will be the end of being a Jewish state.”

—Shimon Peres, former prime minister of Israel (May 12, 1998 on the Charlie Rose show).

Theodor Herzl, father of political Zionism and ultimately of the state of Israel, recognized, as quoted above, that there were Palestinians in Palestine, and that if Jewish ambitions were to be realized the country had to be “cleansed” of its native inhabitants. Thus, although the diaries of the earliest Zionist immigrants recorded their consternation upon finding that Palestine was already populated by Arabs, the slogan of the World Zionist Organization during the first five decades of this century remained: “A land without people for a people without land.”

This aimed at easing the world’s moral qualms that Palestinians were being systematically displaced. After 750,000 to 800,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven out during the 1947 and 1948 fighting were not allowed to return to their homes by Israel in 1949, the new propaganda line was that they had been ordered to leave their homes in radio broadcasts by Arab leaders who wanted the Palestinians out of the way while Arab forces swept the Israelis into the sea. The reports of such broadcasts and of concerted Arab plans to drive the Israelis out of lands allotted to them by the United Nations in 1947 were just as made up as the empty-land slogan.

Another Zionist effort to ease-moral-qualms in the 1980s also was a hoax. A writer named Joan Peters conceded in her book From Time Immemorial that there had been Palestinians in Palestine after all. But, she contended, they were recent arrivals who had flocked into Palestine to batten on the prosperity brought to the area by the Jewish settlers. Many American Zionists labeled this newest variation on the empty-land myth “brilliant historical research.”

The number of Palestinians in Palestine remains the critical issue for Israel.

Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, Minister of Education and Higher Education in the Palestinian Authority, said recently she had assumed that the most outrageous of the old Zionist fabrications were discredited, dead and buried. But she found that they had been resurrected in Israel’s propaganda exhortations during the 50th anniversary celebrations.

Propaganda gimmicks to ease moral qualms may buy time to stave off the gathering storm of world moral reproval against Israeli land thefts. But they do not affect the changing population balance between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. This is a critical real-life numbers game which Israel is losing as of now.

When Herzl was talking grandly in 1895 in the privacy of his diary about “our own country,” Jews were hardly one-twentieth of the population of Palestine. When Britain’s Balfour Declaration promising a Jewish state in Palestine was issued in November 1917, there still were only an estimated 55,000 Jews among another 670,000 Muslim and Christian Palestinians. When the U.N. General Assembly voted in 1947, under heavy U.S. pressure, to partition Palestine, 53 percent of the country was allotted to the Jewish one-third of the population (650,000 people) for what would become an independent state of Israel the following year. The two-thirds of the population who were Muslim and Christian Palestinians (1,350,000 people) got 47 percent.

Of the 750,000 to 800,000 Palestinians who were not permitted by Israel to return to their homes in 1949, some were in the Arab-controlled West Bank and Gaza Strip. Others wound up in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and even Egypt.

In the 1967 Israel-Arab war another 300,000 Palestinians were driven out, mostly at gunpoint, by Israel, mainly into Jordan, whose population today comprises more Palestinians and their descendents than indigenous Jordanians. Israel therefore ended up after the 1967 war in control of the entire former British Mandate of Palestine, plus Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai peninsula. To this it subsequently added, after repeated “incursions” by Israeli forces, a slice of south Lebanon.

The number of Palestinians in Palestine, however, remains the critical issue for Israel and the Zionist movement, just as it was in the days of Herzl a century ago. Israeli leaders differ over what to do about it.

Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, quoted above, seems to want to make peace with the Palestinians, conceding them a state. Current Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, quoted above when he was deputy foreign minister in an Israeli coalition government in 1989, advocated expelling “masses” of Palestinians from the (occupied) territories when the world’s attention was focused elsewhere. There is no evidence that he has changed his mind. In fact, his unwillingness to see the Palestinians concentrated in a state of their own makes no sense unless he still contemplates expulsion of the Palestinians, or “transfer” as all of his Likud party predecessors have called such a program of ethnic cleansing.

Lopsided Statistics

What is “right” for Israel? Presumably Netanyahu and Peres both know the current statistics and the lopsided directions they are taking. These are that Gaza’s Palestinian population doubles in 14 years, the West Bank’s Palestinian population doubles in 17 years, and Israel’s Jewish population doubles in 47 years. Washington, DC’s Population Reference Bureau doesn’t list the “doubling” rate for Israel’s Muslim and Christian Arab citizens, but it may not be far behind that of their West Bank co-religionists.

Both Israeli leaders also know that a recently completed census by the Palestinian Authority showed 2,920,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Adding between 1 million and 1.1 million Palestinians in Israel proper brings the Palestinian total to the 4 million figure conceded by Peres.

Both Peres and Netanyahu also know but won’t admit that at least 1 million—some recent estimates reach 1.5 million—Jewish Israelis don’t actually reside in or near Israel, but in the United States and elsewhere. (Israel counts any former Israeli who has returned during the previous four years for a visit as still legally residing in Israel.)

The Israeli leaders also know that the estimated 750,000 Jews who settled in Israel during and after the breakup of the former Soviet Union constitute the last large group of Jews of any number who are likely to come from outside to Israel—ever. (There are no more than 13 million Jews in the world, including those already in Israel.)

And the Israeli leaders know that 19 out of 20 of the Jews who chose to leave the former Soviet Union initially elected to go to the United States rather than to Israel. Nearly all of those who arrived in Israel did so only after the Soviets cancelled direct refugee flights to anywhere else but Israel, leaving them no choice, and the U.S. changed its rules on which former Soviet citizens were entitled to refugee status, creating a backlog that would require a decade to clear. Israeli leaders have to wonder, therefore, what percentage of the immigrants from the former Soviet Union still intend to go to the United States when and if they get the chance.

Perhaps the fundamental difference between Netanyahu and Peres is their assessment of what solution to Israel’s demographic conundrum is feasible. Netanyahu believes a situation will develop, or can be created, to provide an opportunity for him to expel “masses” of Palestinians, perhaps a million or two, and thus allow Israel to keep all of the land of Palestine without Palestinians.

Peres, presumably, does not believe this can be done. That means making peace with a Palestinian state, and perhaps making a virtue of necessity by using Israel’s educated Palestinian population as willing bridges for Israel into the high-flying world of Gulf petroleum production and petrodollar investment.

Given Netanyahu’s outlook, however, peace would be the ultimate disaster for Israel. This would mean that “creating” a big crisis in which “masses” of Palestinians would be expelled at gunpoint across some temporarily undefended Arab border would become virtually impossible.

Would America’s State Department and White House “Israelists,” Hebrew-speaking political appointees who have studied and lived in Israel, stop a major expulsion effort by Netanyahu in some future crisis situation? Given their track record of letting Binyamin Netanyahu stop the peace process at will, the answer is most assuredly no.

Would the Palestinians flee if the Israelis started killing whole families outright as they did in the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948 and as their Maronite proxies did in Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in 1982? My Palestinian friends tell me never, that they are prepared to die in their homes rather than flee into a miserable exile life. I believe the Palestinians.

Would the European nations, backed by world public opinion, defy U.S. attempts to keep them out of Middle East affairs and move decisively to stop Israeli massacres and save the Palestinians? To our shame and to their credit, I believe that they would. And, I can assure them in advance, I and every decent American will support them when they do.

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