Beware Palestinian data

Op-ed: Israeli policymakers afflicted by demographobia, the illogical fear of demography

Yoram Ettinger
Israel Opinion/Ynet
03 January '11

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) declared in December, 2010 that 2014 will, ostensibly, usher in a Jewish-Arab demographic parity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean followed by an Arab majority. That projection has been reverberated by Israeli demographers and politicians, who claim that conceding geography (Judea and Samaria) is, supposedly, a prerequisite for a secure Jewish demography. They do not examine, or doubt, the PCBS, "since the PCBS is credible, professional and supervised by Norway and the UN." Really?!

Instead of conducting a public debate on the future of the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria, they try to scare policymakers and the public at-large into retreat and concessions. Their campaign feeds pessimism and fatalism, eroding Israel's bargaining position and posture of deterrence. They claim that Jews are doomed to become a minority west of the Jordan River. Really?!

Reality has refuted "Demographers of Doom," at least since the end of the 19th century. In March 1898, Shimon Dubnov, the leading Jewish demographer-historian, contended that Herzl's Zionism was devoid of demographic infrastructure, since no more than 500,000 Jews could be expected in the Land of Israel by the year 2000. He was off by 5 million Jews!

On the eve of the establishment of the Jewish State, Professor Roberto Bacchi, the founder of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics and the guru of Israel's demographers and statisticians, warned that Jews were eventually doomed to become a minority within the Partition Plan. He pressured Ben Gurion to delay declaration of independence and projected that – under the best case scenario – there will be 2.3 million Jews in the Land of Israel, a 34% minority. He was off by 3 million Jews!

Since 1967, Bacchi's students have attempted to convince Israeli prime ministers to subordinate national security considerations to the "Demographic Scare." They have urged Israeli leaders to sacrifice the irreplaceable geography and topography of the over-towering Judea's and Samaria’s mountain ridges – historically and militarily – on the altar of demography.

In 2010, they adhere to Professor Bacchi's legacy. Thus, they underrate Jewish fertility, which is higher than most Arab countries (2.9 and trending upward versus 2.8 in Jordan, 2.5 in Egypt, 2.5 in the Gulf States and trending downward.) They idolize Arab fertility ignoring its sharp collapse. And, they ignore annual net-Arab emigration from Judea, Samaria and Gaza since 1950 (other than six years), while downplaying the prospect of aliyah.

During the 1980s – as they do today - they underestimated the number of Soviet Jews by 50% and stated that no massive aliyah was expected even if Moscow would open its gates. In defiance of Israel's demographic establishment, over one million olim arrived, catapulting the Jewish State to unprecedented heights technologically, medically, economically, culturally and demographically.

(Read full "Beware Palestinian data")

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The Smoking Gun: Arab Immigration into Palestine, 1922-1931

Fred M. Gottheil
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2003
pp. 53-64
(h/t Michal Dar-El)

In deep antiquity, particularly in Egypt, the early civilization where the arts were most strongly developed, the visualization was aspective: that is the artist, working in paint or low-relief sculpture, conveyed to his two-dimensional surface not so much what he saw as what he knew was there.

- Paul Johnson, The Renaissance

Palestinian demography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has never been just a matter of numbers. It has always been—and consciously so—a front-line weapon used in a life-and-death struggle for nationhood among two peoples living in what used to be known as Palestine, each having competing ideologies and competing claims to territorial inheritance and rights to national sovereignty.

The problem with staking so much on so narrow a focus as past demography is that the data generated by demographers and others since the early nineteenth century are so lacking in precision that, in some matters of dispute concerning demography, "anyone's guess," as the saying goes, "is as good as any other." Or almost so. Of course, people still engaged in this high-stakes game of Palestinian demographic warfare will argue otherwise. With few exceptions, they insist that their own sources are superior, their own estimates more scientific, and their critics more ideological.

There are really two issues—or two battlefronts—associated with estimating Palestinian demography. The first has to do with sheer numbers, i.e., measuring over time the size of Palestine's total and subgroup populations. The second battlefront is considerably more contentious. It is estimating the percentages of population growth among subgroups attributed to natural increase and to immigration.

This immigration factor—or its absence—is paramount. If a significant percent of a population is composed of recent arrivals, then claims of historic tenancy are compromised. This explains why Arab Palestinians and others use the term "intruder" to describe the Jewish population of Palestine. The importance of Jewish immigration to the Jewish population of Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is undisputed. But Jewish claims to territorial inheritance and to national sovereignty lay elsewhere, in history rather than demography.

On the other hand, for Arab Palestinians, the character of their demography is at the heart of their claim to territorial inheritance and national sovereignty. Their contention, seen by them as being beyond dispute, is that Arab Palestinians have deep and timeless roots in that geography and that their own immigration into that geography has at no time been consequential. To challenge that contention, then, is to challenge their self-selected criterion for sovereignty.

(Read full "The Smoking Gun: Arab Immigration into Palestine, 1922-1931")

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