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Sunny Population Prospects

By Frank Adam

The Palestinian Authority has been caught cheating by its own birth figures and the registers of its own reception classes as noted by the UN, the World Bank and the CIA. There is also the brazenly admitted double counting of those PA Arabs already in the Israeli census.

The detailed figures are available on www.theettingerreport.com if one trails the links to the papers of Eberstadt and Shah, and Yaacov Faitelson (qv Institute for Zionist Strategy site) – and footnote sources. The nub of the argument is that after the PA 1997 census their boffins and PR saw an opportunity to declare population figures based on optimistic projections to scrounge extra foreign aid and frighten Israel & the Diaspora.

However demographic projections are compound interest on variable rates in which war - the Second Intifada - did not help. For most of the late century Arab and all Third World populations have increased but the PA publicists rejected that they can also drop – as has been happening across the entire Moslem World. They certainly even cynically did not correct their projections by consulting the real live births registered by their own Health Ministry and real live kiddies registered for reception class by their own Ministry of Education.

Summarising: the PA claims over 4.1 million Arabs based on the 1997 figures and projections from those children born to the women aged 15 to 45 - as per reasonable census practice. However between urbanisation and education the Arab birth rate in PA as across the whole Moslem World has been declining as a rate, so the actual Arab birth rate as revealed by health and education is about 100 000 a year. This cuts 550,000 to 600,000 from the projection and claimed total. Further the children per woman fertility rate is already lower among PA than Galilee Arab families, reflecting greater urbanisation.

Other fiddles are: counting as PA Arabs the 270 000 Arabs of “East” Jerusalem already in the Israeli census, and the 105 000 PA Arabs who married Israeli Arabs and live in Israel. Leaving out those abroad for study or in Israeli jails, the PA also included over 350 000 who have been abroad for more than a year, which is unprofessional demography.

Totalling and subtracting: there is a PA over-claim of 1.3 million on their population up to 2010 inclusive; and the Israel Arab community comparable without Jerusalem, and without the discount dowry spouses from Judea, Samaria and Gaza is about 900 000 compared to the 1967 quarter million. It follows European communities should be writing to MP’s and MEP’s to revise their aid to the PA and only give money for specific projects that pay wages to build waterworks rail and roads.

On the Israeli side of the account there is now an annual Jewish birthrate over 120 000 which includes some decline in the haredi birth rate and a bulge in the secular birthrate. This is partly economic pressures, and the children of the ex-Soviet aliyah having two rather than one child; but overall between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, the birth rates are converging to three per woman as much among the Arab as the Jewish communities, though the Jerusalem Jewish rate is over 4 per woman and the Jewish population of the territories is over 5.

Together with PA Arab emigration which has built up to an annual average of 30 000 this decade past and likely to continue so under Arab political strife in the PA, the population balance of 60:40 Jews to Arabs in the whole former Mandate will probably hold even if it fluctuates, as after 1948, to 70:30 over the next generation ie 20 to 25 years – even without an aliyah bulge as smaller Jewish communities pull stumps or dissolve under marriage choice pressures or €uro-Moslem violence.