Defusing Israel's
"Demographic Bomb"
By Hasan Abu
Nimah
11 March, 2005
The
Electronic Intifada
Israel
has long lived in fear of the so-called "demographic bomb"
-- the fact that the Palestinian population in Israel and the occupied
territories is increasing much faster than the Israeli Jewish population.
While Israeli Jews thought the day they would become a minority was
perhaps still twenty years away, the evidence is increasing that the
bomb has already exploded and Palestinians are already a majority in
historic Palestine, as they were until Israel was created.
According to a new
US government report (The State Department's Annual Country Reports
on Human Rights Practices for 2004), the Palestinian population in Israel
and the occupied territories now exceeds 5.3 million, while the Jewish
population stands at 5.2 million. The report states that the population
of Israel stands at 6.8 million, of whom 5.2 million are Jews, 1.3 million
are Arabs, and 290,000 are other minorities (which apparently includes
even more Arabs like Druze and bedouins). The report also puts the number
of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip at approximately 1.4 million,
in the West Bank at approximately 2.4 million, and in East Jerusalem
at nearly 240,000. The figures were analysed by the website The Electronic
Intifada.
This new reality
has to be confronted with much more than the symptomatic treatment being
applied to the conflict now with the clear intention on Israel's part
to buy more time to create more facts on the ground in the form of settlements.
The settlements have done much to change the situation, but they, too,
are being superseded by other facts on the ground, created by the natural
growth of the population.
Over the years,
Israelis have counselled various approaches to cope with the day when
Israeli Jews are a minority population ruling over a majority with no
rights. Some advised that Israel should withdraw from much of what its
army conquered. Otherwise, they warned, Israel could only preserve its
democracy by giving civil and political rights to the enlarged Palestinian
population, but lose its "Jewish character". Or it could preserve
the Jewishness of the state by maintaining Palestinians as second-class
citizens but be openly viewed as an apartheid regime.
When Israel was
created in 1948, two conditions for its survival in a predictably hostile
environment were required. One was the physical removal of much of the
indigenous Palestinian population. The other was that it had to possess
enough military capability to counter any Arab attempt to defeat, at
any time, the Zionist project for Palestine. To meet the first condition,
much of the land was ethnically cleansed, starting in 1947 and continuing
well into the 1950s. In order to meet the second condition, Israel realised
it needed a superpower sponsor -- which it found in the United States
-- and quickly built up an impressive conventional and nuclear arsenal.
At the end of the
1948 war, Israel had established itself by force on 78 per cent of the
historic land of Palestine. Through ethnic cleansing and terror, all
but 170,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes in the area
that became Israel.
The total of Arab
Christian and Muslim population of Palestine in 1946, according to a
Palestine government estimate submitted to the United Nations Special
Committee on Palestine in 1947, was 1,269,000. About two thirds of all
those people were expelled or fled from their homes, towns and villages
in Palestine, taking refuge in neighbouring countries. British figures
quoted in Benny Morris' book on the Palestinian refugee problem put
the number of those who were forced out at 810,000, of which 210,000
went to Gaza, 320,000 went to the West Bank, and 280,000 went to Lebanon,
Syria and Transjordan. There were fewer than 600,000 Jews in Palestine
on the eve of the war.
With most of Palestine
depopulated and occupied, Israel seemed to be in control. In later years,
Ben Gurion was quoted as saying: "We must do everything to ensure
they never return, the old will die and the young will forget."
This is exactly what did not happen, with Israel now facing new facts,
equally irreversible and much harder than those it created, to counter.
It is true that
Israel built settlements, confiscated more land, destroyed more houses
and farms, ethnically cleansed more Arabs and built by-pass roads (for
Jews only), with the result that less than 10 per cent of Palestine
remains uncolonised, but rather than reducing the figure of 170,000
Arabs who stayed in Israel, the reality now is that there are more Palestinians
than ever, and they exceed the number of Jews despite the decades of
efforts Israel made to bring Jews to Palestine from all over the world.
What is baffling
is that Israel seems to have chosen and predetermined the very thing
it feared most. By insisting on keeping the territories it occupied
in 1967, it effectively reversed the "benefits" of the ethnic
cleansing of 1947-48. Clearly, successive Israeli governments thought
they would eventually find a way to keep the land and get rid of the
people (physically or politically), but time has only worked against
this Israeli intention and yet, Israel's embrace of the occupied territories
is only growing tighter as it keeps building settlements while the international
community watches and does absolutely nothing to enforce its own laws.
The real dilemma
now is that if Palestine is to be partitioned, it must be divided according
to an equitable formula. The original 1947 UN partition plan for Palestine
was grossly unfair because it awarded more than half the country to
the Jewish minority which, at the time, numbered no more than one-third
of the total population. Naturally, the indigenous Palestinian population
wanted nothing to do with such a partition, imposed without their consent
by outside powers. But what was unjust and unworkable in 1947 looks
very sane compared with what the peace process industry is proposing
now -- to squeeze millions of Palestinians into fragmented reservations
covering about 10 per cent of Palestine and call it a Palestinian state,
while the Israeli Jewish minority continues to control 90 per cent of
the country and use it for its exclusive benefit. Neither this nor any
other apartheid formula will do anything other than renew and prolong
the conflict.
A powerful army
and a nuclear bomb may have been useful deterrents to Israel when it
perceived its main enemies to be surrounding Arab states. But no Arab
state presents any remote threat to Israel today. The "enemy"
now is right inside Israel and the lands it occupies. It is not an army
to be defeated or to be threatened by nuclear weapons. No matter how
much military might Israel has, over five million Palestinians cannot
be subjected to Israel's cruel, degrading rule forever, nor can they
be ethnically cleansed.
In any solution,
whether it involves two states or one, the only way to defuse this "demographic
bomb" is for Israel to abandon the racist doctrines according to
which an entire group of human beings -- women, men, the elderly and
babies -- are viewed, merely by the fact of their existence, to be a
"threat", to be walled in, ghettoized and treated as an alien
presence in the land they have lived on and nurtured for generations.
Ambassador Hasan
Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United
Nations