Palestinians could become majority in Israel soon

Fri, Jan. 09, 2004

Palestinians could become majority in Israel soon

BY IKE SEAMANS, Staff Columnist

Palestinians have always believed that eventually they would be the majority, which could lead to the disintegration of Israel. ''Eventually'' is almost here.

Even before the birth of the Jewish state in 1948, hand-wringing Israeli intellectuals pondered this looming demographic dilemma. Politicians ignored them, firmly convinced that goodwill, irrefutable logic -- or military muscle -- would prevail. However, in a stunning reversal last month that shocked the nation, Deputy Prime Minister Yehud Olmert, a conservative hard-liner, called for a unilateral withdrawal from large swaths of Gaza and the West Bank as well as sections of Jerusalem (where he was once mayor) to save the country from impending disaster. ''The cloud of demographics is coming down on us,'' he warned. ``The birth clock is ticking.''

In the West Bank and Gaza, half of the three million Palestinians are under age 15. Children may be their greatest weapon. ''If we can't defeat them militarily, we'll overwhelm them with numbers'' is the ever-present mantra.

''This is the crisis facing Israel,'' says Mahdi Abdul-Haid, director of a Palestinian think tank in East Jerusalem. In Israel and the territories, there are 9.7 million people; half are Jewish, 44 percent Arab. By 2020, demographers estimate that the figures will flip-flop because Palestinians are increasing in number six times faster than Israelis. An average Israeli family has three kids; Palestinian households have at least six.

`Initiated separation'

''From a nationalist point of view, people decline to practice birth control,'' says Khaled Nabris, a Palestinian economist. ''It's a time bomb.'' During a 1996 visit to the teeming Deheisheh refugee camp, Yasser Arafat beseeched obliging couples: ``Have 12 children; two for you and 10 for the struggle.''

Haifa University Professor Arnon Soffer has been warning about this dire demographic shift for decades, only to be dismissed as the ''Doomsday demographer'' by rival scholars, skeptical journalists and politicians who ignored his research. ''The trends and indicators all point to an economic and ecological catastrophe waiting to happen,'' he predicted years ago. ``It will be the death knell of the ideological dream of a Jewish state.''

In 2001, Soffer was the first to urge an immediate ''initiated separation,'' the establishment of two states with a well-defined demographic border. The Palestinian state would include Arab sections of Jerusalem and three heavily populated Arab enclaves inside Israel. The Israeli entity would contain Jewish-majority areas of the West Bank and Gaza, the annexation of 50 Palestinian villages after withdrawing from 50 Jewish settlements. For maximum security, Palestine couldn't share borders with Arab nations and there would be no economic cooperation between the two states.

Ocean of Arab states

Soffer's scheme even prohibits Palestinians from working in Israel because they might be tempted to remain. (In 2002 he reported that 153,000 Palestinians slipped illegally into Israel.)

Long before the government finally took him seriously, Soffer told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, ``The coming demographic transformation highlights the need to implement this separation plan with full force. [If not,] Israel will be engulfed in an ocean of Arab states in which Islamic radicalism is a rampant force.''

A couple of years ago, in Shufat, a refugee camp in East Jerusalem, I met Mohammed Nofal and his seven children. ''One hundred years ago, when disease came to a village, half the people died,'' he told me as the muezzin's haunting cadences summoning worshipers wafted seductively from the minuscule mosque's slender minaret. ``Now our disease is Israel. If it kills half our population, we will still have the other half to continue fighting.''