Thread: Palestinian population fast approaching that of Israeli Jews

Palestinian population fast approaching that of Israeli Jews

THE PALESTINIAN population in “historic Palestine” will equal the Jewish population before 2015, according to projections released by the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics.

The bureau said Palestinian inhabitants of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza currently total 4.1 million while Palestinian citizens of Israel amount to 1.4 million. This gives a total of 5.5 million Palestinians, approaching the 5.8 million for Israeli Jews.

Due to a higher Palestinian birth rate – 32.8 per 1,000 – as compared to the Jewish Israeli birth rate – 26.2 per 1,000 – the bureau said the “number of Palestinians will reach the number of Jewish residents by the end of 2014, around 6.1 million, at the current growth rate”.

Thereafter, the land between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan river will not only become a Palestinian majority area but this majority will grow.

Since immigration numbers almost equal those for emigration, the Palestinian figure has not been affected by the 7,000 Palestinians, mostly men between the ages of 15-29, who leave annually. The lure of education, better living conditions and improved job opportunities pushed 32,000 young men to depart between 2005-09. However, during this period an estimated 30,411 returned, the highest number being 7,077 in 2009.

Palestinian migrants tend to return home because great importance is placed by the Palestinian community on “steadfastness”, they have few opportunities to settle abroad, and they do not want to become permanent exiles. The number of Palestinian refugees was set at 5.6 million, most living in Arab countries.

The latest statistics issued by the Israeli government show that the population of Israel minus the Palestinian territories, is 7.7 million, 75.4 per cent Jewish, 20.4 per cent Palestinian, and 4.2 per cent foreigners.

Israel’s figures are 5.8 million for Jewish and 1.5 million for Palestinian citizens.

While Israel’s population growth rate of 1.9 per cent remains steady, it is significant that during 2010 Israel absorbed only 16,000 immigrants. Of these 6,000 were born abroad to Israeli parents and 4,000 moved to Israel on family reunification schemes. This means that only 6,000 are new Jewish immigrants, suggesting that immigration has slowed while emigration has accelerated, particularly over the last decade.

US Census Bureau figures show that more than 140,000 US residents were born in Israel, a 30 per cent increase over the number in 2000 when Israeli residents totalled 109,720. Of those currently living in the US, 90,179 have US citizenship.

However, the US official figures are questioned by Israeli official sources and media. According to the Israeli consulate in New York, as many as 600,000 Israelis now live in the US. This figure indicates that the number of Israelis who migrate to the US is larger than that of US citizens moving to Israel – which was, according to the Jewish Agency, 23,640 from 2000-2009 – an average of 2,300 a year.

The discrepancies between US and Israeli figures are explained by differences over who is considered an Israeli. Neither Soviet-born Jews who went first to Israel and then settled in the US nor children born to Israeli residents of the US are necessarily considered to be Israeli citizens by the US Census Bureau.

Some Israelis contend that since Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005, the narrow coastal strip with its Palestinian population should be excluded from the equation.

However, Palestinians point out that Gaza is indisputably part of “historic Palestine”. Furthermore, the international community considers that the strip is not only occupied Palestinian territory but also remains firmly under Israeli domination through its control of land, air and sea access.

Other Israelis, including former prime minister Ehud Olmert, hold that the high Palestinian birth rate is a “demographic time bomb” set to rob Israel of its Jewish majority. They argue that the only way for Israel to remain a democratic Jewish state is to reach a deal for a two-state solution.

Mr Olmert insists that unless such a peace settlement is reached Israel would have to embrace the one-state solution, where Jews and Palestinians would have equal rights, or become an apartheid state, where a Jewish minority will dominate a restive Palestinian majority.

As Israel's ultra-Orthodox rise in numbers, so does a sense that things have to change

By Matti Friedman

JERUSALEM — Dramatic changes may be coming in Israel: Demographers now estimate about a third of last year's Jewish babies were born into the ultra-Orthodox community, an insular and devout minority that has long been at loggerheads with the rest of the increasingly modern and prosperous country.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews — known in Hebrew as "Haredim," or "those who tremble" before God — have a birthrate far higher than that of other Israeli Jews, with 10 children in a single family not uncommon. They seem poised to become far more numerous and influential.

Relations between Haredim and other Israelis have never been smooth. Critics have long complained that they shun work in large numbers in favour of religious study, rejecting mainstream Israel even as they rely on that mainstream for financial support.

But increasingly, even some Haredim share a sense that things cannot continue as they are.

"The Haredim have set up a state within a state and have a long conflict with the state of Israel, which is now on the eve of an explosion," said Kobi Arieli, a popular radio host and author from the liberal edge of the Haredi community. "There is no chance that this situation will continue."

Many community leaders chafe at change, and are especially sensitive to secular concerns about their growing population.

"What does society want us to do, kill ourselves? Our community is a fact and everybody needs to understand that we exist and are not going anywhere," said Rabbi Shmuel Pappenheim, a spokesman for the Eida Haredit, an umbrella group of ultra-Orthodox factions. "This community will continue to thrive and nobody can change it."

Part of the issue is the community's poverty: About half of ultra-Orthodox adults do not work, and many men are full-time Torah students with government stipends that anger the secular majority but are nonetheless quite meagre. Of the estimated 700,000 Haredim in Israel — around 9 per cent of the population — just under 60 per cent live below the poverty line.

If Haredim don't begin working in larger numbers, the financial daily The Marker posited this week, "this threatens Israel's future."

Perhaps the most corrosive issue is the military draft. Israel's early leaders agreed to support seminaries and issued several hundred draft exemptions, but over the decades, as the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews ballooned, so did the number of full-time students with exemptions. Today there are around 50,000. The law that exempts them requires them not to work, lest they lose their exemptions. The arrangement that has resulted is unique to Israel; abroad, ultra-Orthodox Jews work and their communities support themselves.

Last week, in unusually strong language, Israel's military chief, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, criticized Israelis who do not serve in the army, including the masses of young Haredi men. Those who do not serve should be "ashamed," Ashkenazi said.

That feeling is widely shared, and pressure is growing to find ways to draft Haredi youth. But the community's strong political parties have foiled attempts to reduce the draft exemptions, cut funding, or force ultra-Orthodox schools to teach basic subjects like English, math and science.

Socially and politically conservative, the ultra-Orthodox parties prefer to align with rightist coalitions that have pursued more hardline policies. Although they have supported left-leaning governments as well — generally when these had majorities without them anyway — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described them as his natural allies.

The Haredi lifestyle is inspired by the Jewish world of eastern Europe that was destroyed in the Holocaust. Comprising a mosaic of sects and factions of varying shades and beliefs, they share a tendency to reject a secular society they see as morally corrupt and to sanctify religious study, modesty and charity.

In Israel's early days, the precursors of today's Haredim rejected Zionism and pioneered what they called the "learning society," which meant that all young men — and not just a small intellectual elite, as had been the case in Europe — were to devote themselves to religious study instead of work. This was meant to restore the world of Torah scholarship that had been destroyed by Nazi Germany. Over the years, many Jews who emigrated to Israel from the Arab world also have joined this camp.

They mostly live in separate neighbourhoods and study in separate schools, with little interaction with a majority that has largely come to view them as a burden.

The interactions that do exist are charged, with secular Israelis often resenting what they see as attempts to impose Haredi religious mores on others. This month, for example, saw tiffs over gender segregation on some bus lines in Haredi neighbourhoods, and over similar segregation at a concert in a secular area to be attended by Haredim.

Because it is difficult to precisely define who is Haredi and who is not, exact figures on the community's population and birthrates are difficult to come by. A November 2010 report by two demographers at Haifa University, Arnon Soffer and Evgenia Bystrov, estimated that 30 per cent of the Jewish newborns are now Haredi. Government statistics predict that by 2025 the Haredim will have jumped from 9 per cent of the population to 15 per cent.

"We are not yet seeing the full strength of the process of ultra-Orthodox growth," the demographers wrote — this "will be felt when the young generation reaches the age of military service and work." The demographers warned that the economy would not be able to support a bigger Haredi population.

Alongside those concerns is a nascent feeling that change is slowly coming.

Ultra-Orthodox society is not monolithic or static and there are signs of movement, said Sergio DellaPergola, a demographer at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The number of ultra-Orthodox men serving in the army or performing national service has quietly inched upward from almost none a decade ago to several thousand today, and the government voted this week to encourage more to join. The army has formed special programs tailored to ultra-Orthodox needs, where men can serve in male-only environments and eat food meeting the strictest standards of Jewish dietary law.

Over the same period, the number of Haredim in professional training programs has risen from several hundred to 6,500, The Marker reported. The number of Haredi men with jobs has risen 8 per cent in eight years.

This foreshadows greater changes, said Arieli, the Haredi author. Many young Haredim, he said, are simply unwilling to live in isolation and poverty.

"It will happen slowly," he said. "From year to year more and more Haredi youth will join the army and go to work. This is what is already happening, and it will change everything."

Time Running Out for Two-State Solution

Analysis by Mel Frykberg

RAMALLAH, Jun 2, 2011 (IPS) - Time is of the essence if the implementation of a two-state solution to end the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to succeed. Changing demographics both within Israeli and Palestinian society could render this impossible, with a one-state solution the only feasible outcome.

An eventual one-state solution, however, would lead to two possible scenarios. Either Israel would extend the franchise to all Palestinians in the occupied territories, which would lead to the end of Israel’s Jewish character, or Palestinians would be denied the vote and Israel would be officially pronounced an apartheid state.

Following recent talks in Washington between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, analysts and political pundits are warning that with the establishment of facts on the ground the two-state solution is under growing threat.

"Israel could be the Titanic heading towards the iceberg," says Gershon Baskin, the Israeli co-CEO of the Israel-Palestine Centre for Research and Information (IPCRI).

"The two-state solution is still possible despite the physical realities on the ground. The settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem can be dismantled or evacuated and handed over to the Palestinians similar to what happened to the settlements in Gaza during Israel’s withdrawal from there in 2005," Baskin told IPS.

"Furthermore, an agreement can still be reached with the current Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership. They will continue to cooperate with the international community and with Israel if the latter shows flexibility.

"But if no agreement is reached with the Israeli government then the next generation of Palestinian leaders will give up entirely on the two-state solution and will ask for the vote to be extended to the Palestinian territories. Due to the Palestinians’ higher birth rate this will lead to one-state and the end of Israel’s higher Jewish demography."

Baskin travels regularly to the West Bank and films non-violent protests against the continued expropriation of Palestinian land and the expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their homes to make way for illegal Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem.

"The young Palestinians I speak to who have no political affiliation say that the current Palestinian leadership is the most moderate the Israelis will ever have. They argue that they have given Israel the most generous offer ever. The Palestinians are prepared to settle for a homeland on just 22 percent of historical Palestine and will accept the Israelis keeping the remaining 78 percent."

Palestinians were the indigenous majority before hundreds of thousands either fled or were expelled by Israeli forces during the state’s establishment in 1948.

The last chance for the two-state solution may come in September when the PA takes its case for independence to the UN. The General Assembly will recognise the fledgling state and then the Palestinians will have the moral victory of recognition even if the Security Council doesn’t back the establishment.

The matter can then be taken to international bodies such as The International Court of Justice amongst others. This could lead to international sanctions against Israel as an illegal occupier of another country.

Dr Samir Awad from Birzeit University near Ramallah agrees that the time for a two-state solution is running out.

"It is becoming more problematic. The plans presented to the Palestinians by the Israeli leadership are designed for rejection. They want to present a state without East Jerusalem, without the Jordan valley, no right of return for refugees, the continuation of many settlements, and maintaining border and air space control," Awad told IPS.

"The situation could be resolved if the Americans would pressure the Israelis but they won’t. But the realities of history can’t be ignored, and history will ultimately be on the side of the oppressed and those denied historical justice. People should remember this."

In the meantime the demographics of Israel’s population have changed dramatically in the last few decades with Haredi or orthodox Jews heading to become a quarter of Israel’s population in the future, with their high birth rate.

Extremely right-wing Haredi political parties such as Shas are powerful coalition factors in the make-up of Israeli governments, dictating a fair amount of policy. The Haredi population has little education and high rates of unemployment, leading to a drain on Israel’s economy as well as its secular and more politically compromising demographic.

Furthermore, Russian immigrants to Israel now comprise approximately a fifth of the population. Coming from former totalitarian regimes many of them are also little inclined to accept the Palestinians as equals.

And within Israel itself the birth rate of Israel’s Palestinian minority outstrips that of the Jewish majority. Combined with the "demographic threat" in the Palestinian territories, this is another "time bomb" the Israelis fear.

This is the reason that some of Israeli’s Knesset members are arguing that Israel’s survival may well depend on the successful implementation of the two-state solution.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said in 2007, "if the two-state solution fails, Israel will face a South African style struggle for political rights." And "once that happens," he warned, "the state of Israel is finished." (END)

Israel, Ireland and the peace of the aging
By Spengler

Sometimes, the best thing to do is nothing at all.

A generation from now, the Palestinians will make peace with Israel, for a simple reason: they will grow up - literally. Palestinian Arabs comprise one of the fastest-aging populations in the word.

United States President Barack Obama was misinformed when he told the America-Israel Political Action Committee May 22 that "the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories".

In fact, Palestinian fertility on the West Bank has already converged on the Israeli fertility rate of three children per woman, if we believe the Palestine Ministry of Health rather than the Palestine Authority's Statistics Bureau.

There is endless debate about the Palestinian population numbers. Israel's peace party has advanced the "demographic argument" for years, and has been consistently wrong. The decisive data point is that Palestinian Arab fertility has plunged and, in consequence, the Arab population will age rapidly. That augurs well for peace, a generation from now. After three-quarters of a century of warfare, starting with the 1937 Arab uprising against British rule in Palestine, it's not a hardship to wait one more generation.

In this regard,the Northern Ireland peace agreement of 1998 is worth revisiting. At the Obama White House, the Irish sense of victimhood blends easily with the president's own anti-colonial resentment, and the Third World sympathies of such advisers as the Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett.

Ireland has been the White House template for a "peace process", which is why Obama brought in as chief negotiator former Senator George Mitchell, who negotiated the Irish settlement in 1998. Samantha Power, Obama's foreign policy aid in the Senate and now head of the National Security Council's human rights desk, figures prominently in the president's inner council. Born in Dublin, Power brings the sensibility of post-Catholic Ireland to international affairs: sensitivity to minority rights, horror at violence, and an urge to wield military power on behalf of beleaguered ethnic groups.

Power persuaded the president to intervene in Libya to save civilian lives, perhaps the silliest and least successful use of American arms since the founding of the republic. Like Ireland's president Mary Robinson, the former human rights chief at the United Nations whom Obama gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Power identifies the Palestinians with the Catholic Irish, as a putative victim oppressed by a colonial power.

Leave aside the obvious differences (for example, every Catholic cleric of standing denounced Irish Republican Army terrorism, while plenty of prominent Muslim clerics endorse suicide bombing). Time heals some wounds. Northern Ireland's guerilla war between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority ended in 1998 for a number of reasons.

Prominent among them was the simple fact that the hell-raising youngsters of the 1970s had become middle-aged fellows with jobs and families. Former Senator Mitchell negotiated the "Good Friday" agreement that effectively ended the conflict. But he resigned in frustration last month as President Obama's negotiator in the Middle East.

As a student journalist, I traveled in Northern Ireland in 1970, gulping improbable quantities of Guinness with Catholic radicals in Londonderry and Belfast. Everyone was young, and everyone was mad. I watched the Protestants' Orange Order march on July 12, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne in 1692 that finished off Irish resistance. I joined a busload of protesters off to demonstrate at Armagh Prison in support of Bernadette Devlin, then the heroine of the nationalist cause.

The Ulster Defense Regiment stopped us at a roadblock, waved us out of the bus, and stuck submachine guns in our ribs. "Don't worry," said the fellow next to me. "They don't have any bullets." The protesters sang the theme song to Dad's Army (a British comedy about the elderly Home Guard of World War II) and jeered at the Protestant cops. We were drunk, and they were drunk. It's surprising more people weren't killed. No-one was sober enough to care.The young IRA types I met didn't want peace. They wanted to raise hell and they held their lives cheap.

By the time George Mitchell came around to mediate in 1998, the hell-raisers of 1970, or what was left of them, had families and gave some thought to how to pay a mortgage. Prison and bullets had winnowed the ranks of the hard core.

Distribution of Irish population by age group, 1970 vs 2010




Source: United Nations Population Division

Ireland's population was front-loaded into the teens and twenties back in 1970, when the troubles were at their worst. By 1998, the bulge in the population distribution had moved into the thirty-to-forty-year bracket. The Irish got older, and got tired of killing. Something like this well may occur in the Palestinian territories over the next generation.

The data shown above for Ireland are quite accurate; Palestinian demographic data are notoriously unreliable, for the Palestine Authority records more phantom aid recipients than ever the Cook County Democratic Party recorded phantom voters. According to an authoritative study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies [1], the West Bank and Gaza population in 2004 was only 2.5 million, rather than the 3.8 million claimed by the Palestinian authorities. The numbers are inflated to increase foreign aid and exaggerate the importance of the Palestinian population. The Begin-Sadat Center observes:
[The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics] projected that the number of births in the Territories would total almost 908,000 for the seven-year period from 1997 to 2003. Yet, the actual number of births documented by the PA Ministry of Health for the same period was significantly lower at 699,000, or 238,000 fewer births than had been forecast by the PCBS... The size of the discrepancy accelerated over time. Whereas the PCBS predicted there would be over 143,000 births in 2003, the PA Ministry of Health reported only 102,000 births, which pointed to a PCBS forecast 40% beyond actual results.
The United Nations data are adopted without revision from the Palestinian statistics bureau, which inflates birth data by 25% to 40%, and also counts hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living abroad as if they were still residents. It is clear that the overall population estimates are much too high - perhaps by 1 million of the supposed 3.5 million total - but less clear how much of the overestimate is assigned to each age bracket.

Palestinian fertility, report by Statistics Bureau vs Palestine Ministry of Health


Sources: UN Population Division, Begin-Sadat Center

Bearing in mind that the data are unreliable, the age distribution chart below is nonetheless indicative.

Distribution of population in Palestinian Territories by age group, 2010 vs 2040 (projected)


Source: United Nations Population Division

Around 80,000 Palestinian men are employed by one or another of the "security forces" in Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestine Authority's grossly inflated numbers claim that there were 587,000 men aged 20 to 40 in the territories; the actual number is probably around 400,000, which means that one in five has a job carrying a gun. Taking unemployment into account, that implies that one in three Palestinian men with a full-time job is a gunman.

That may change over time. 5,800 Palestinians are working at technology companies on the West Bank, and the booming Israeli software sector is outsourcing to the West Bank, with a third of Palestinian software companies filling orders for Israeli firms, Bloomberg News reported March 15.

And the top school for Palestinian computer science students is Ariel University in Samaria, in the midst of a settlement near Nablus. "Administrators at the Ariel University Center are proud to have the Arab students, saying their enrollment is an example of loyalty and equality among Israeli citizens. For their part, the Arab students seem not to feel uncomfortable attending the college despite its reputation and location," wrote the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"On campus the fact that we are in occupied territory is irrelevant - it doesn't affect us at all. We leave all the politics outside," the Chronicle quoted Manar Dewany, a 20-year-old student in math and computer science who commutes each day from the Israeli Arab town of Taybeh. "I never even considered it a reason for not coming here," Ms Dewany added. "I have no problem with it. Why not come here? This place is full of Arabs."

No one outsources computer technology to Egypt, where very few of each year's crop of 700,000 college graduates meets world standards. The education that young Arabs receive at the settlers' university on the West Bank is better than anything available among Israel's Arab neighbors. In a quiet way, the settlers of Samaria may do more for peace than the diplomats.

By 2040, the stone-throwing kids of the First Intifada will be close to retirement age, and the gun-toting young men who dominate today's Palestinian employment picture (or those who still are alive) will have families. If they missed out on high-tech jobs, the spillover from the West Bank's economic growth - driven in turn by Israel's economic miracle - will keep them employed in service industries. Absent additional violence, the West Bank will flourish while Egypt and Syria descend into penury and chaos.

There is no urgency to make peace, except in the minds of the Palestinians' present leaders. The world has allowed them to rule a little fiefdom as warlords of private armies, with little accounting for billions in foreign aid, and the opportunity to indulge in a grand ideological tantrum on the tab of Western donors.

The window is closing for radical Islam. That makes the present an exceptionally dangerous period, because the radicals know that it is closing. Contrary to what Obama said on May 22, the radicals understand better than anyone else that time and demographics are against them. The Palestinians of the West Bank are better off than any other Arabs in the region by any tangible measure - health, literacy, higher education, per capital income.

They have the good luck to reside next to one of the world's most dynamic economies. In a generation the world may have moved beyond the likes of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. That gives Abbas an incentive to gamble while he still has chips on the table. If the radicals can be contained through the present generation, though, they can be extirpated in the next.

Israel on New Year: Population of 7,797,400

Central Bureau of Statistics releases data on Israeli population ahead of Jewish New Year. Findings show growth in birth rate and aliyah

Yaron Druckman
Published: 09.26.11, 13:44 / Israel News

Approaching the 8,000,000 mark: On the eve of Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) the Israeli population consists of some 7,797,400 residents: 5,874,300 Jews, 1,600,100 Arabs and approximately 323,000 defined as others, according to new data published by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics on Monday.

The additional 217,000 foreign workers residing in Israel were not included in the statistics.

In the previous Jewish year (2009/2010) the total number of residents stood at 7,645,000. In 2008/2009 there were 7,465,500 people living in Israel.


ewish population growing (Photo: Reuters)

According to the CBS, in the passing year Israel's Jewish population grew by 1.7%, the Arab population by 2.5% and other sectors by 1.7%. The Muslim population rose by 2.7%, the Christian grew by 0.9% while the Druze population rose by 1.8%.

An above-average growth rate was recorded in Jerusalem (2.3%) and in central Israel (2.2%), while the Tel Aviv District showed the smallest population increase (0.6%).

Some 166,255 babies were born in the past year, an increase of 3.2% compared with 2009. The average number of children per household is 3.03, compared with 2.96 between 2008-2009.

In 2010, the Jewish woman had an average of 2.97 children, the highest number since 1977.

Putting off marriage

As for marriage, statistics show that more and more Jews put off the ceremony to a later age, with 64.4% of men and 45.5% of women between the ages of 25-29 still single. However in the Muslim community only 43.5% of men and 19% of women these ages were recorded as single.

The Israeli population is relatively young in comparison to Western nations. In 2010, some 28% of the population consisted of children aged 0-14, whereas in other Western countries the number is considerably lower - 17%.

Israel's elderly population has also increased, reaching 4.7% in 2010 compared with 3.8% in the early 1990s.

Throughout 2010, some 16,633 immigrants came to Israel – a 14% increase in comparison to 2009. The majority of immigrants originated from Russia (3,404), the United States (2,530), France (1,775), Ukraine (1,752) and Ethiopia (1,655).

The CBS also released data on the ultra-Orthodox education system for the first time. The numbers showed that the amount of yeshiva students has risen by 28% since 1997 – from 108,228 to 138,249.