'Demographic bomb' threat false alarm

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By Ryan Jones
September 12, 2005

Left-wing Israeli politicians and ?peace? movements have for years used the fear of a looming Arab demographic majority west of the Jordan River to scare Israel into relinquishing control over parts of its ancient homeland.

That tactic was resorted to by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to justify his ?disengagement? from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria, the first successful Jewish surrender of the biblical Land of Israel.

But a detailed study released earlier this year revealed that the number of Arabs cited as ?proof? of the need to create a separate Palestinian Arab state in order to protect the Jewish democracy was grossly inflated.

Bennett Zimmerman, a former strategy consultant, historian Dr. Roberta Seid and Dr. Michael Wise, an expert in mathematical modeling techniques showed through an ?adherence to normative statistical methods and to simple arithmetic? that rather than the nearly four million residents regularly claimed, only 2.4 million Arabs currently live in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

A portion of their study entitled ?Arab Population in the West Bank and Gaza: The Million-and-a-half Person Gap,? which was first released in January, was reprinted in the weekend edition of Ha'aretz.

The experts pointed out that Israel had taken to blindly relying on Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics figures, which are nothing more than a forecast developed in 1998, and not actual demographic data.

And even that forecast is fraught with what can only be purposeful discrepancies.

For example, over 325,000 Palestinian Arabs living abroad, some 13 percent of the purported population, were included in the PCBS' 1997 census.

Furthermore, the 210,000 Arab residents of Jerusalem were counted twice in the PCBS estimate for the ?West Bank.?

The PCBS also projected 907,000 births and 236,000 immigrants from 1997-2003. But the PA Ministry of Health recorded only 669,000 births during that period, and due to rising violence associated with the ?Oslo War,? a net 74,000 ?Palestinians? actually left the PA-controlled territories.

Other discrepancies brought the numbers even lower.

The result is that in 2004 Jews firmly outnumbered Arabs 3 to 2 west of the Jordan River, a ratio that the survey points out is ?similar to that which existed in 1967? when Israel first took control of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

When Gaza is removed from the equation, the Jewish population west of the Jordan more than doubles the Arab population, leaving no compelling demographic reason to allow the birth of another Arab state in the cradle of Jewish civilization ? Judea and Samaria.

The conductors of the survey decried the fact that inaccurate data stands behind so many of Israel's most important and historic decisions over the past decade.

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