by Gregg Roman
Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli consul, found that PA numbers are inflated by, among other things, counting roughly 400,000 Palestinians who have lived abroad for a year or more
Originally published on November 22, 2016.
Critics
of Israel love to exploit Jewish fears and anxieties. The most extreme
resort to Holocaust inversion, boycotts, blacklists, and other
singling-out methods reminiscent of Europe's anti-Semitic past.
Secretary of State John Kerry likes to wave around the threat of Israel's demographic extinction.
Acute
Israeli sensitivity on this matter came to the fore in the late 1960s,
when Israeli rule over the newly won Gaza Strip and West Bank was
thought by many to be untenable owing to much-higher Palestinian birth
rates. If Israel chose to annex the territories, it would be obliged
either to disenfranchise their Palestinian inhabitants, making Israel
undemocratic, or extend the vote and watch Israel's Jewish majority turn
into a minority. For Israel to remain both a democratic and a Jewish
state, according to the conventional wisdom, it would have to give the
territories up. "The womb of the Arab woman," the late Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat famously said, was his "best weapon."
Critics say Israel can't remain 'both Jewish and democratic' if there is no peace.
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Fast-forward
five decades. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics
(PCBS), the number of (non-Jewish) Arabs living in the West Bank, Gaza,
and East Jerusalem (4.62 million) and in Israel (1.68 million) for the
first time matches the number of Jews (6.3 million). Taking into account
still-higher Palestinian birthrates, as neatly graphed out in a
September 2016 full-page New York Times advertisement
by a pro-Palestinian group, the Jewish population in the expanse of
territory "from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River" is projected
to decline to 44 percent in 2030.
In
his drive to wrest Israeli concessions he believes will break the
Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic logjam, Secretary Kerry has repeatedly
warned of a demographic doomsday for Israel. "How does Israel possibly
maintain its character as a Jewish and democratic state when from the
river to the sea, there would not even be a Jewish majority?" he warned last December. Time is "running out" for Israel, Kerry maintains,
insinuating that Arabs will be even less likely to accept a Jewish
state as part of the former Palestine mandate once they become an
overall majority, instead returning to their demand for a "one-state"
solution. Israel then winds up
"either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens — or ... a
state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state."
The combined ratio of Jews to non-Jews in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza doesn't matter.
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But time is not running out, at least not for Israel. There are three big problems with the demographic doomsday argument.
For starters, the central underlying premise of this argument — that the combined
ratio of Jews to non-Jews in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza matters —
is laughably obsolete. There's no more reason to include Gaza in the
equation than to include Lebanon or Jordan. The Israeli occupation there
ended a decade ago, and its 1.6 million residents are pretty much free
to determine their own future but for the brutal rule of their own
homegrown Islamist regime. Indeed, most Palestinians in the West Bank
also live in self-rule areas that Israel has effectively vacated and
does not wish to govern.
The real question, then, isn't what happens if Israel were to suddenly annex all territories where Palestinians live en masse,
but what happens if it holds on only to territories that most Israelis
want and can be easily defended? Jews currently make up roughly 80
percent of Israeli citizens, and there's no reason to believe this
figure will be appreciably affected by implementation of a final status
agreement.
The PA deliberately inflates Palestinian population estimates and projections.
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The
second problem with Kerry's alarmism is that the oft-cited official
PCBS estimates and projections of Arab population growth have been
deliberately inflated to boost the PA's negotiating stance and qualify
for more foreign aid. Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli consul, found
that PA numbers are inflated by, among other things, counting roughly
400,000 Palestinians who have lived abroad for a year or more — a large
portion of whom won't be coming back if they can help it — including
some 100,000 babies born abroad (ditto).
Third,
Kerry seems blithely unaware that the birth rate of Israeli Jews, which
reached a low of 2.6 in the 1990s, has been rising steadily in recent
years, to 3.1 in 2015 — the same
as that of Israeli Arabs — even as Palestinian birth rates have
steadily declined, to 3.7. With the highest birth rate in the developed
world and substantial Jewish immigration adding to their ranks every
year, Israeli Jews are not at risk of becoming a minority in the
foreseeable future.
Unfortunately
for Secretary Kerry, most Israelis are well aware that time is not
running out on Israel's future as a democratic Jewish state. A
democratic Jewish state is very much in existence and running strong.
For all of the loud condemnations of Israel on Western college campuses,
Israel's diplomatic relations are stronger than ever before, even in
the Arab world, and its international trade is massively expanding. It's
kind of hard to rain on that parade. Most Israelis couldn't care less
if Gazans or West Bankers choose to have slightly bigger families than
the inhabitants of Tel Aviv.
When
John Kerry declares again and again that Israel is "out of time," what
he's really doing is communicating to Palestinians that the much dreaded
Jewish state next door will cease to exist if they simply continue
their refusal to compromise.
If
the next secretary of state wants to bring about peace between Israelis
and Palestinians, he should try appealing to their hopes, not their
fears.
Gregg Roman is director of the Middle East Forum.
Source: http://www.meforum.org/6421/the-myth-of-israel-demographic-doomsday Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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