Palestina Enggan Tunduk
Demographic changes well underway in Israel and the West Bank may mean the Jewish nation could end up with an Arab majority.
Already, population statistics have sent shockwaves through Israel’s conservative Likud leadership – to the point that some Jewish leaders who once espoused a “greater Israel” that included the West Bank, are seeking to disengage themselves from the land of their Biblical promise.
Before the modern State of Israel was formally established in 1947, the Jewish people could only claim a homeland intermittently throughout history. Always considered a spiritual home by Jews, a Jewish state did exist off and on for a millennium before it was finally vacated by the Roman Empire in the second century A.D., with parts of it renamed "Palestine," after the Jews' ancient enemies, the Philistines.
Conquered from the Romans by the Byzantines in the 7th century, the land eventually became inhabited by Arab peoples.
After centuries of diaspora – the scattering of Jews in settled colonies outside Palestine – Zionism, or the desire to see a Jewish state created, began to take hold in and around the ancient lands of Palestine.
In response, Jews began to relocate gradually to the area around the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was still controlled by the Turks (Ottoman Empire – the most powerful of the modern Muslim empires, founded in the 16th century) and, after World War I, the British. [Editor's note: Bosnia's Muslims are descendants of this empire].
Today, of Israel's roughly 6.75 million people, the majority – about 5 million – are Jewish.
Cause for Worry
But there is a phenomenon occurring that has some Jewish leaders worried. Israel's non-Jewish minority, consisting of more than 75 percent Arab Muslims, is growing at nearly 5 percent a year, faster than Israel's Jewish population at 3 percent annually (according to 1997 figures).
Due to a continual influx of people from surrounding Middle East nations, will Israel will soon be an Arab nation in all but name? Some believe so.
As the Jews-to-Arabs ratio declines in Israel, Jewish populations around the Arab world are also waning, and have been since the end of World War II.
According to online encyclopedia Wikipedia, nearly 900,000 Jews lived in communities throughout the Arab world but today, that number has declined to fewer than 8,000.
Entire Jewish communities, such as one that previously existed in Libya, are gone entirely. In others only a few hundred Jews remain. Most Jews were forced to flee Arab homelands following the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948.
During the exodus, Israel absorbed about 600,000 of the 900,000 Jews living abroad, but in the process property and lands owned by fleeing Jews were confiscated by Arab governments. Today nearly half of Israel's Jews are descendants of that exodus; the remainder went to Europe and the Americas.
Arab leaders have also begun noticing the trend.
In the Shadow of Arab Culture
In November 2001, the Arab Strategic Report, published by the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in London, said a high Palestinian birthrate, coupled with a halt in Jewish immigration to Israel and Palestinian migration within Israel's borders will eventually lead to the establishment of a Palestinian Arab State where the Jews will live "in the shadow of Arab culture."
Dr. Wahid Abd Al-Magid, publisher of the report, advocated an end to Arab-Israeli conflict by changing Israel's demographic balance within its own borders. According to the plan, Israeli Arabs must be the basis for stopping Jewish immigration to Israel and providing economic support for the migration of Arabs into Israel. The added migration would eventually bring about a Palestinian-Arab state, al-Magid said, and Jews who wished to do so could remain and live under the "umbrella of our Arab culture."
"The Arabs of 1948 could become a majority in Israel in the year 2035, and they will certainly be a majority by 2048, a century after their 'Nakbah' [tragedy of the 1948 war] and their first defeat," al-Magid wrote in the report.
"The demographic threat is not solely the outcome of natural population increase of Palestinians who remained in Israel in 1948, but also of the infiltration of tens of thousands of Palestinians into Israel. These stay in Israel and create facts on the ground through marriage with citizens of the 1948 population…" he added.
Palestinians claim much of the land inhabited by Israel belongs to them or their descendents. According to the Arab Association of Human Rights:
"The Palestinian Arabs within Israel made up the majority of inhabitants of Palestine before to 1948. As a result of the war of 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel, 84 percent of the Palestinian population were exiled and became refugees. Those Palestinians who remained found that they had become a minority virtually overnight in what had become a Jewish state…"
Gaining the Upper Hand
Ultimately, however, Palestinians – indeed, Arabs in general – may eventually gain the upper hand in Israel, at least demographically.
One Israeli leader, former speaker of the Israeli Parliament, Avraham Burg, thinks so. In August 2003, he charged Israel had failed in its historic mission to become a "light unto nations" because of its belligerence.
And in December, the London Guardian reported, Burg spoke openly of a subject considered unspeakable by many Israelis when he said, "Between the Jordan [River] and the Mediterranean, somewhere between next year and two years' time, there will be born the first Palestinian ... of the Palestinian majority," ushering in a generation of Arabs who will outnumber Israelis.
The most recent immigration figures reflect at least the philosophical accuracy of Burg's prediction. Immigration to Israel has fallen to its lowest level in 15 years, the Guardian reported, a phenomenon which has drastically curbed Israel's population growth. Ongoing violence and a faltering economy have led to the collapse, analysts say.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has vowed to attract a million immigrants in the next decade, but over three years' time, immigration has been reduced by half. Officially, Israel's Jewish population stands at about 81 percent of the total, compared to 19 percent Arab and "other" nationalities. But the Jewish population, despite government incentives for couples who have more than one child, grew at its lowest rate last year in since 1990.
Simple Mathmatics
"At the heart of this is simple mathematics," said the Guardian. "Forecasts from the United States' Population Reference Bureau show Israel's population doubling in 45 years, that of the West Bank in 21 years and that of Gaza in 15 years. In other words, Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and Israeli Arabs will outnumber the Jewish population by 2020.
"David Landau, editor of the English-language edition of the newspaper Ha'aretz, has warned of a "cataclysmic" demographic challenge if Jews lose their majority status in their own country. He told a symposium in San Francisco that he feared Palestinians would abandon calls for a two-state solution and insist on equal voting rights within a wider Israel - which would end the Zionist dream.
Arnon Soffer, a geography professor at Israel's Haifa University and a lecturer at the Israeli army's Staff and Command college, first warned of the impending Jewish demographic minority in the 1980s, but was widely dismissed. He predicted Arabs would outnumber Jews in both Israel proper and the occupied territories by 2010.
But Soffer has found favor with such Israeli notables as former Prime Ministers Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, as well as other Israel political, social and cultural leaders. And in February 2001, the night of his election, Sharon sent an aide to ask Soffer for a copy of his 1987 treatise about the demographic threat to Israel; it was the same study that had led Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to declare in the late 1980s that the "Palestinian womb" was his people's greatest weapon.
Forward magazine reported Soffer has repeated is dire predictions recently. "I've been saying, 'Folks, the State of Israel is coming to an end,' and suddenly, in the last three years, the scales have fallen from people's eyes," Soffer, 68, said in a recent interview. "The change in public opinion began with the intifada and the Israeli Arab riots, and then the suicide bombings. People realized this was a new situation."
Solutions
Worse than the notion of a Jewish minority in Israel are the solutions to prevent it from happening. Soffer says he believes the idea of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians is a "utopian" notion. He says he believes even Palestinian moderates like Yasser Abed Rabbo and Sari Nusseibeh are playing to the Israeli left, while still planning to take over the Jewish state demographically.
A policy of expulsion or transferring the Arab and Palestinian populations out of Israel altogether would be the best solution demographically, but the one that would most likely cost Israel the most politically. Yet "without expulsion Israel is faced with the choice of delivering political rights to the burgeoning population or practicing a form of political apartheid," the Guardian reported.
One of the first practical solutions, however, could simply be educating average Israelis of the demographic danger. Soffer, in the "Proposed Solutions" segment of his updated pamphlet, "Israeli Demography, 2003-2020 — Dangers and Opportunities," he wrote, "A campaign should be started against traitorous academics and journalists who preach hatred of Israel at universities in Europe, the United States and Israel itself.
"He also says it is time to dismantle the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and even proposes setting up prisons for "10,000 lawbreakers" in the case where the settlers would react with violence to any Israeli army attempt to evict them. Forward reports: "Facing down the settlers on the hilltop outposts will be a fateful test for the government and army, and if they fail, [Soffer] said, 'Israel will become a banana republic.'
"Soffer says he would give the Palestinians 85 – 90 percent of the West Bank, excluding small sections just over the Green Line where the Jewish settlements are concentrated — roughly the sections now being surrounded by the new security fence. And he would also give the Palestinians East Jerusalem, with the exception of places holy to Jews like the Temple Mount and Mount of Olives. "Who needs it? Let Arafat take it and go to hell," he said.
"If such a course is carried out, there will remain within the bounds of Israel in 2020 an Arab population of 1,300,000, [while the] Jewish population will then number six million. These are statistics that a Jewish-Zionist Israel can digest," he wrote. But, if borders don't change, the Israeli Jewish population in 2020 will be 6.3 million, compared to more than 8.7 million Arabs.
The only other hope is one that seems distant – massive immigration. Sharon's plan to entice a million more Jews to Israel before 2010 will have to be modified to coincide with some sort of truce with the Palestinians, a reduction in the violence besieging the country, and economic improvements. Otherwise, says the Guardian, "for all its military might, it is the birth rate that is wounding Israel."
source : Jon E. Dougherty
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