The Demon of Demography

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b“there is no danger that we will ever be a minority in the land,” beven if we annex the territories. He gave no figures of his own to banswer a projection by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics bshowing the Arabs of Greater Israel making up 48 percent of the bpopulation by 1995.

bWhat is even worse is that the proponents of annexation so bavoid reality that they blithely speak of granting Israeli citi- bzenship to the Arabs of the liberated lands!

bSharon was interviewed in the National Observer (February b2, 1974) by Lawrence Mosher. In discussing the Arab popu- blation of the liberated lands he said: “Here I see three possible bsolutions. One is to offer Israeli citizenship to the Arabs, which bI think would be good and normal. I don’t see any demographic bproblem here [sic].”

bEliezer Livneh, one of the hawks of the Greater Israel bMovement, writing in Midstream magazine (October 1967), pre- bsented several views on what to do with the then newly liberated bterritories. He then presented the view that he enthusiastically bespoused: “A third school of thought demands that Israel simul- btaneously incorporate all the new territories into a democratic bJewish state and that it undertake an ambitious program to re- bsettle the refugees. . . .”

bLivneh made it clear that he understood that only a certain bnumber would resettle elsewhere. And the others? “The remain- bing refugees must be granted Israeli citizenship and their eco- bnomic, cultural, and social level raised to Israeli standards.” bNaturally, the hundreds of thousands of Judea-Samaria-Gaza bArabs who were not refugees at all would also be granted citi- bzenship.

bHow could Israel, the Jewish state, possibly absorb the Ar- babs? Typically, an answer is given that avoids answering. Wrote bLivneh: “Zionist thought [sic] always took into account the bprobable existence of a large number of Arabs in the Jewish bstate. As originally conceived by the UN, the Jewish sector of bPalestine was to have had an Arab minority of 45 percent. Had bthe Arabs not fled the area in huge numbers in the 1948 fighting, bthey would soon have formed a majority of the population.”

bHow blasé and utterly unresponsive! And had they not bfled and had they been the majority, what would have happened bto Israel, to Livneh, to Midstream? And since the 1967 Arabs b