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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they, too, are being superseded by other facts on the ground, created by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
