To return to the new Peace Now website click here.

Yossi Alpher's Analyses an Israeli Demographic Study of Palestinian

Americans for Peace Now (APN) asked Mr. Alpher for his analysis of a new demographic study carried out by several right-wing Israelis and American Jews....

Arabic Media Internet Network

January 25 ,2005

Yossi Alpher's Analyses an Israeli Demographic Study of Palestinian
Population

By: Americans for Peace Now

Yossi Alpher is a former senior official in the Israeli Mossad (Israel's equivalent of the CIA) and the former Director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. In July2000 , he served as Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Israel, working on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Currently, Mr. Alpher is the co-editor and co-creator of bitterlemons.org and bitterlemons-international.org - internet forums for elite Israeli, Palestinian, and global perspectives - which he launched in
collaboration with Ghassan Khatib, now the Minister of Labor in the Palestinian Authority.

Americans for Peace Now (APN) asked Mr. Alpher for his analysis of a new
demographic study carried out by several right-wing Israelis and American Jews.

Q. A new report issued by the "ABC Demographic Project" purports to claim that the real Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza is only 2.4 million, and not 3.8 million as the Palestinian Authority argues. Therefore, the report argues, there is no "demographic threat"

to Israel as a Jewish state. How reliable is the report? How relevant is its argument concerning the absence of a demographic threat?

A. The report was not compiled by professional demographers, but rather
by a collection of people with an admitted right wing bias. On the Israeli side (the report has American authors, too) these include Yoram Ettinger, a prominent right wing polemicist and former diplomat, and Ezra Zohar, an accomplished agronomist, economist and former senior civil servant.

Highly reputed demographers like Prof. Sergio della Pergola of the Hebrew University and the geographer Prof. Arnon Sofer of the University of Haifa have sharply criticized the report's methodology. Incidentally, compared to della Pergola and other distinguished Israeli demographers who warn of a Palestinian Arab majority within 10 years and state that the Gazan population is now doubling every 16 years, I have encountered equally credible demographers from Harvard who argue that the Gazan
population is doubling every 12 or even eight years!

My own examination of the report (I have no demographic training) revealed the following:

On the positive side, the report makes two useful points that are relative to the danger of miscounting the Palestinian population. First, both the Palestinian Authority and Israel tend to count East Jerusalem's 230,000 residents as part of their societies; hence there is a possibility that some comparisons of the total Jewish and total Arab populations between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea count the East Jerusalem Arabs twice, thereby inflating the Arab figure.

Secondly, the report points out that there is a considerable disparity
between population growth projections issued by the PA Bureau of
Statistics, and the actual count of births recorded by the PA Ministry
of Health.

Beyond these interesting points, the report appears to have little basis
in reality or even common sense. Here are some examples:

* After noting that Jerusalem's Arabs are sometimes counted twice,
the report apparently doesn't even count them once, thereby reducing the Palestinian Arab population without crediting them to the Israeli Arab
population (one way or another they have to be counted as part of the
Arab population between the river and the sea).

* The report eliminates from its count some 100,000 Palestinians assumed to be living in Israel illegally, thereby further reducing the total Palestinian Arab count between the river and the sea.

* The report eliminates Palestinian ID holders living outside of Palestine for more than one year. While nearly every country, including Israel, drops emigrants from its population lists after a certain period of time (in Israel the limit is five years), the one year limit imposed by this report is arbitrary and not reasonable: the past four years of violence have caused many Palestinians to move abroad temporarily. Note that Iraq, with American acquiescence and UN cooperation, is allowing Iraqis who left the country decades ago (including the Iraqi Jewish population in Israel), to vote on January30 . Not counting Palestinians who left two, three and four years ago helps enable the report's authors to argue that the Palestinian growth rate had dropped to2 .4% by2003 .

* The report takes as one basis for its corrective count population trends in the Arab world, and particularly Jordan, and concludes that Palestinian claims of a very high birthrate (3.8% in1997 ) don't jibe with the overall trend of a declining birthrate elsewhere in the region. It conveniently ignores the special circumstances pertaining to Palestine, an entity swept up in revolutionary fervor where the authorities make no attempt to implement birth control programs and people boast of winning the "battle of the bedroom" against Israel. A slightly improved basis of comparison could have been obtained by comparing Palestinians in Palestine to Muslim Palestinians in Israel, who (according to the Israel Bureau of Statistics, whose count of Israelis the report does not dispute) are growing at a very high rate of 3.2% a year.

* The report's reliance on PA Ministry of Health statistics ignores the difficulty in keeping track of Palestinian births during the past four years of chaos in the territories.

The biggest problem with the report is the declared objective of its authors, which is to deflate the argument that the Palestinian population is a demographic threat to Israel by "proving" that it constitutes only38 % of those living between the river and the sea--and not nearly50 % . Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the report is accurate. Are its authors trying to imply that this justifies ongoing Israeli rule over Palestinian Arabs? This, after all, is their unabashed political position. Can Israel call itself Jewish and democratic if 38% of its inhabitants are not Jewish, and most of them (leaving aside the Israeli Arab population included in the38 % figure) are disenfranchised? Alternatively, can Israel call itself democratic and Jewish if it gives equal rights to38 % of its population who are not Jewish? Democratic--yes, but Jewish?

Nor, for the record, do Mssrs. Ettinger and Zohar advocate making Israel
a binational state.

There is nothing wrong with challenging Palestinian demographic statistics. Some Palestinian officials may indeed exaggerate them for obvious political reasons. But the skewed methodology and politicization by this group of "demographers" rule out the accuracy of their report.

And their political objective--to prove that even a mere 38% non-Jewish
component in the population under direct and indirect Israeli control somehow let's Israel off the demographic-political hook--is ludicrous.

YOSSI ALPHER'S WEEKLY Q&A FOR APN CAN BE VIEWED HERE


c 2005 Arabic Media Internet Network - Internews Middle East