The Demon of Demography

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bonly is this an irresponsible giving up of Jewish Eretz Yisrael, bnot only is it the creation of a dagger in Israel’s heartland as bArab sovereignty returns to within fifteen miles of Tel Aviv, bHerzliya, Ramat Gan, Petah Tikva, and Netanya; it also does bnothing to solve the population problem.

bThat population problem is the greatest threat to the sur- bvival of Israel, and it exists with or without the liberated lands. bWhat madness makes us persist in avoiding it? What terrible bthing binds our will so that we do not muster our courage and bresolve to solve it?

bThe refusal to deal with the problem honestly is clearly seen bin the June 1979 speech by Sharon, in which he mocked the bwarnings of Arab population growth and “proved” that since bWorld War I the Jews had grown more than the Arabs despite btheir birthrate. Now even Sharon knows full well that all this bhappened almost solely because of Jewish immigration and the bflight of more than half a million Arabs from the country.

bOnly a demogogue or an ignoramus could refuse to admit bthat on the eve of the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, balmost 40 percent of the population within its projected bound- baries were Arabs and that more than 500,000 fled. How many bmore Arabs would there be in Israel today had they not run baway? Who can refuse to know that in the four years between b1948 and 1952 the Jewish population almost tripled, thanks to bthe huge aliya of both European Holocaust survivors and of b650,000 Jews from Arab countries whose religious fervor and bZionism moved them to go to Israel? Who cannot admit that bonly for those reasons did the Arab population shrink to barely b11 percent of the total population? And who can deny that since bthen the Arab population has achieved a remarkable rise as re- bported in Central Bureau of Statistics figures? “The natural in- bcrease of non-Jews is so great that it overtakes the percentage brise of the Jewish population despite the immigration to Israel bbetween 1952 and 1978 of nearly one million people” (Maariv, bMarch 28, 1980).

bFrom where will such aliya come today? The Arab nations bare depleted of their Jews, Soviet Jewry rushes in huge numbers bto the West, not to Israel. Will the assimilated and affluent bFrench, English, and American communities emigrate to Israel bin the millions?

bIndeed, the reverse is true. Most of the projections of the b