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bdemographic threat. It is demagoguery of the worst sort, the bkind that deliberately hides the truth. Giving up the liberated blands will do nothing but gain Israel a relatively brief span of btime before the same demon shows up again, while giving up bprecious territory that brings the enemy within a few miles of bIsrael’s heartland. With or without the territories, Israel faces bthe reality of Arab population explosion and it refuses to face bthat fact. bIn this the “hawks” are as hapless as the doves; they have bno answer for what to do with either the Arabs of Israel or the bliberated lands. Begin and the hawks simply do not reply to the bsimple question “What do you do with the million Arabs of the bterritories?” just as no one replies to the same question about bthe Arabs of the state. Those who demand annexation of the bliberated lands, no less than the “doves,” blithely ignore the bquestion of Arab population or fall back on evasive replies. They bsimply have no answers. bBack in 1949, when Prime Minister Ben-Gurion defended bhis signing of an armistice with the Kingdom of Jordan and thus bhis implicit recognition of its control of Judea and Samaria, he bsaid: “A Jewish state in existing reality . . . in western Eretz bYisrael [that is, including Judea-Samaria] is impossible if it is bto be democratic, for the Arabs in western Eretz Yisrael out- bnumber the Jews. . . . How then will it be a Jewish state? We bwant a Jewish state even if it is not in the whole of the bcountry. . . .” bTo this, opposition leader Menachem Begin replied: “We b—a minority in Eretz Yisrael? If we accept that assumption then bthere are many parts of Eretz Yisrael which should not have bbeen included in her boundaries. . . .” One senses Begin’s in- bdignation, but he has not replied to the question. He did not banswer in 1949, and to this day one awaits a rational reply. bInstead, we hear evasions such as: No clear demographic bprojections are really possible (why it is not made clear); the bpast is no guide to the future (why not is again not spelled out); bJewish immigration to Israel will make up for the higher Arab bbirthrate (a delusion of major dimensions). The truth is that, bhaving no answer to problems, the “hawks,” no less than the b“doves,” avoid them. bThus Ariel Sharon in June 1979 told the Knesset that b
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