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Sean Gannon is a freelance writer and researcher on Irish and Israeli affairs, specialising in the relationship between the two countries. He is currently preparing a book on this subject and writing the chapter on Ireland for a forthcoming study on the interplay between Anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and antisemitism in Europe since 9/11.
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By Sean Gannon
February 19, 2004
On 15th October 2001, Ariel Sharon summoned Haifa University geographer Arnon Soffer to the prime minister's office to discuss his recently published findings on Israel's demographic future. Given the higher Palestinian birth rate, Professor Soffer had predicted that by the year 2020, only 42% of those living in Israel and the administered territories would be Jewish, a figure which U.S Population Reference Bureau forecasts have since supported. According to Soffer, only a complete evacuation of the Gaza Strip, a withdrawal from most of the West Bank and the transfer to PA control of predominantly Arab-populated areas within Israel's pre-1967 borders such as the northern Triangle region would ensure a continued Jewish majority and the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Two and a half years later, the seeds sown in that meeting have borne fruit. Just three weeks after he told a press briefing for foreign journalists in Jerusalem that he did not believe the burgeoning Palestinian population posed "any demographic dangers," Prime Minister Sharon disclosed to Haaretz and Maariv respectively that he had ordered the effective evacuation of Gaza and requested an analysis of the legal implications of a cession of Israeli Arab towns, such as Umm el-Fahm, to a future Palestinian state. While the announcement of the impending dismantlement of Gaza's Jewish settlements has been broadly welcomed by Arab and international opinion, Sharon's remarks concerning the transfer of Arab towns have been condemned as "anti-democratic," "racist" and, by Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Ala, as "undebatable and unacceptable."
Such criticisms are misplaced and must be ignored. Demography may have ended the dream of a Greater Israel but it cannot be allowed to end that of a Jewish state and, without what may appear draconian measures, this it will surely do. Given that the growth rate in Israel's Arab sector far exceeds that of the Jewish, and with 58.8% of Israeli Arabs as opposed to 38% of Jews now under the age of 24, the 80:20 ethnic balance which has existed since 1948 is clearly in peril. In fact, Professor Soffer claims that the percentage of Jews has already slipped to 77% and will decline to 71% by 2020; and even this figure, he maintains, is inflated, including as it does 300,000 foreign workers and 231,000 Russian non-Jews.
The Palestinians clearly understand the implications of these trends and when Jerusalem's inevitable relinquishment of most of the territories puts paid to their increasing clamor for a bi-national state in post-1923 Palestine, their attention will turn to the long-standing Israeli Arab demand for a "state of all its citizens." As far back as 1994, Chairman Arafat promised Israeli Arabs that he would work to make them the "leaders and ... inheritors" of Israel and he now hopes that what he calls his "biological bomb" will succeed where his explosives' belts have failed.
And while terrorism has a role to play (Islamic Jihad's Abdullah al-Shami said in December 2002 that suicide terrorism threatened Israel's future because by striking at the nation's "feeling of security and [placing] a deep threat in the Israeli heart," it "frustrates the plans of settlement and immigration to Israel" and "prods Israelis to move abroad"), the emphasis now is on the elimination of Israeli through a process of demographic dilution and democratic subversion, which would see the Jewish sector steadily decline as a percentage of population and result in the inevitable establishment through Israel's 'one man one vote' system of a second and eventually just one Palestinian Arab state between the river and the sea.
This cannot be allowed come to pass. As Binyamin Netanyahu pointed out in his much-criticized address to the Herzliya conference last December; "In our Declaration of Independence, we say that our raison d'etre is that we are a Jewish state, and this means that we must guarantee a Jewish majority."
But how can this be done? Large-scale Jewish immigration, Israel's traditional answer to the higher Arab birth rate, is manifestly a thing of the past. The Prime Minister may talk of bringing in a further one million Jews by the end of the decade but it is difficult to see how this might be achieved even if the most optimistic predictions concerning aliyah from Argentina and Europe prove accurate.
The passing by the Knesset last July of the 'Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law' was a move in the right direction. In ending the automatic right to apply for citizenship of or permanent residency in Israel which had been granted to Palestinian Authority spouses of Israeli Arab citizens under the 'family reunification' provisions of the Oslo Agreements, it closed the door through which, according to a 2001 Interior Ministry estimate, 140,000 Palestinians entered the country in the previous eight years. But given that Israeli Arabs are on course to become the majority in Israel even without an influx of their kinsmen from the territories the 'marriage law,' although welcome, represents little more than the a finger in the demographic dike. More drastic action is required.
The transfer of Arab-majority areas of Israel is the obvious solution. The taboo which surrounded the trading of land from within the state's pre-1967 borders has already been broken; the idea of a land swap in the context of compensation for the annexation of West Bank settlement blocs was by mooted by Yossi Beilin in 1995, endorsed by Shlomo Ben-Ami in his 1999 book, A Place for All, and consequently discussed during the Camp David-Taba negotiations which began the following year. Their focus, however, was on the uninhabited Halutza Dunes but if territorial compensation must be paid from inside the Green Line in order to facilitate a final agreement it makes far more sense, as Efraim Sneh pointed out in March 2002, to tend to two problems at once and trade towns in the Triangle and Wadi Ara region. In fact, given the seditious activities of Islamist and other elements there, highlighted once again in the February 8th indictment of two Israeli Arabs on Hizbullah-related terrorism charges, it will also go some way to solving a third.
With polls conducted over the past two years showing that between only one-quarter and one-third of Arabs in these areas favor coming under PA control, Israel will be doubtless be denounced for taking any such action, not least because of the legal difficulties it would involve. But let Jerusalem's critics take note; to deny Israel the right to take measures to protect its Jewish majority is to deny its right to exist as a Jewish state. And to deny Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is to deny its right to exist at all.
Hashem Mahameed, an Israeli Arab politician from Umm al-Fahm, presumably spoke for the majority of Palestinians when he condemned the talk of the town's transfer as "a very racist proposal." Let him call it what he will. On this subject, one nation's 'racism' is another nation's defense of its 'right to exist.'
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