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Arabs Will Soon Outnumber Jews Between Jordan and Sea, Agency Says

Palestinian Authority Sees Balance Tipping Sometime After 2014

Palestinians will outnumber Jews in Israel and the Palestinian territories within four years, a new report by the official Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) reveals.

PCBS forecasted that the number of Palestinians living in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan – the region containing Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – will grow from 5.5 million at the end of 2010 to 6.1 million by 2014. The Jewish population, which it put at 5.7 million today, will grow more slowly, reaching the same 6.1 million in four years.

Assuming that population growth remains unchanged from its current rate, Jews will become a minority of 6.7 million, versus 7.2 million Palestinians, by 2002, the PCBS said in a report released on Thursday.

Demographic issues have long played a role in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Some Israeli leaders, like former Prime Minster Ehud Olmert, have warned that Israel needs to reach an agreement on a Palestinian state to ensure a Jewish majority for Israel. Many Palestinians believe time is working in their favor and advocate the so-called “one-state solution” because it would eventually leave them a majority.

"These statistics place a challenge both to Israel and the Palestinians," Basem Ezbidi, a political scientist at Ramallah’s Bir Zeit University, told The Media Line. "It’s a huge challenge to the Zionist project, which always endorsed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, but it could also bring more Palestinians to consider the one-state solution."

Although officially a statistic report from a government agency, almost all the data presented in the report referred to Israel and underlined how quickly the Palestinian population was growing. They pointed to the high Palestinian birthrate, its declining mortality rate and more youthful population.

Ezbidi said the statistics were likely to be used to pressure Israel into resuming negotiations toward an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel. He doubted the PA would use them to rally support among Palestinians for a one-state solution.

"So far, the one-state solution carries very little appeal on the Palestinian street," he said. "Two generations of Palestinians were raised on the notion of an independent Palestinian state, and they can imagine nothing else."

U.S. President Barack Obama’s effort to restart talks failed earlier this month after Israel refused to give into Palestinian and U.S. demands to freeze the construction in West Bank settlements. While the Palestinian Authority, to which the PCBS reports, has stepped up efforts to win support for a unilateral declaration of independence, it remains committed to a negotiated agreement with Israel.

Ghassan Al-Khatib, a Palestinian government spokesman, said the two-state solution is the only realistic plan on the table.

"We will continue to fight the occupation and endorse the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders," he told The Media Line. "If anything is bringing some Palestinians to consider the one-state solution, it’s not demographics but the failure of negotiations and the stagnation of the peace process." 

The PCBS is confident that the battle of the wombs is going in the Palestinians’ favor because of the high Palestinian fertility rate: an average of 4.1 children per adult woman in the West Bank and 5.3 in Gaza, one of the highest in the world. In Israel, the rate is 2.96 children per woman, but the rate is higher among Israeli Arabs, who constitute about a fifth of Israel’s population and the PCBS counts as Palestinians, than among Israeli Jews.

But some dismissed the new data as no more than Palestinian propaganda. Aryeh Eldad, a member of Israel’s parliament for the right-wing National Union Party, said Palestinians manipulated their data in order to scare Israel into negotiations.

"Policy shouldn’t be confused with propaganda," Eldad told The Media Line. "The real situation is completely different: Jews constitute 60% of the population in the land of Israel, or 65% if the Gaza Strip isn’t included."

Eldad said Palestinians inflated the number of births and underrepresented Palestinian emigration. According to a recent report issued by PCBS, 7,000 Palestinians leave the West Bank and Gaza every year.

But Professor Yehezkel Dror, founding president of the Jewish People Policy Institute, said the exact number of Palestinians made no difference for matters of strategic policy planning.

"One million Palestinians, more or less, makes no difference," he told The Media Line. "There are lots of Palestinians, and Israel can’t absorb them without destroying the Jewish and democratic nature of the state."

Dror said both Israelis and Palestinians manipulated the numbers to suit their own political agendas.

"Numbers are a source of power," he added. "But the real number of Palestinians is unclear since no independent and objective census was ever carried out. I am very skeptical about the numbers presented."