By Ryan Jones
Jan 24, 2006
Leaning on what an in-depth survey has proven to be false demographic data, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Tuesday closed the 6th annual Herzliya Conference by stating Israel has no choice but to relinquish much of its biblical heartland and draw more favorable final borders.
"The choice between allowing Jews to live in all parts of the land of Israel and living in a state with a Jewish majority mandates giving up parts of the Land of Israel," Olmert said.
Olmert announced that if elected prime minister in March, he will seek to sign a final status peace agreement with the Palestinian Arabs based on terms most observers know the regime of Mahmoud Abbas will never accept - Israel's retention of major settlement blocs, a united Jerusalem under Jewish rule, and security zones throughout Judea and Samaria.
In the absence of such an agreement, Olmert and his top Kadima Party colleagues have made clear they will immediately begin to implement a unilateral withdrawal.
He went on to say it will be a "historic mistake to let the Palestinians escape their commitment to dismantle the terror groups,"? and insisted the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza will only receive independence once they put an end to all anti-Jewish violence.
However, the stand-in leader failed to explain how he would reconcile his firm belief that Israel must surrender the lands the Arabs demand for the good of the nation and his insistence that the "Palestinians"? honor their commitments should they continue to fail to do so.
A day earlier, former Israeli National Security Advisor and Tafnit Party chief Uzi Dayan presented a similar plan to The Jerusalem Post.
Dayan also predicated his blueprint on demographics.
"Israel is stronger without [most of Judea and Samaria] than with them,"? he said, explaining that his plan would allow Israel to exist as "a democratic, Jewish state."
But a detailed study released last year revealed that the demographic figures many Israelis feel necessitate creating a separate Palestinian Arab state in order to protect the Jewish democracy have been 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.
Their study entitled "Arab Population in the West Bank and Gaza: The Million-and-a-half Person Gap"? was first released in January 2004.
In it, 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.
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.