We have become accustomed to thinking of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a physical war of guns and bombs, and then an intellectual war of words and pictures. But there’s yet another front: statistics.
One of Israel’s warriors in that area is consultant, businessman, writer and speaker Yoram Ettinger.
He came to speak to leaders of Milwaukee’s Development Corporation for Israel/Israel Bonds this week with the apparent main purpose of showing how false statistics are being used as “psychological terrorism” against Israel.
The numbers in question are the figures and projections for the Arab population in the territories Israel captured in the 1967 Six Day War — Judea, Samaria and Gaza, as Ettinger and others call them.
To many Israelis and to Jewish peace activists, these numbers prophecy “demographic doom,” said Ettinger. They project a huge growth in the population of Palestinian Arabs in the territories, that when added to Israel’s Arab population could overwhelm Israel’s Jewish population.
Therefore, goes the argument, Israel has to get rid of these territories before the “population bomb” explodes and Jews become a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick, in an article in the Jan. 14 issue, wrote that it was largely because of these statistics that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided on his controversial plan to withdraw Israel and Israelis from Gaza and part of the West Bank.
But the numbers used to raise these alarms, and to “scare Jews into hasty retreat and hasty decisions” have gone without critical examination until about nine months ago, Ettinger said.
‘Outrageous’ discrepancies
A team of eight — Ettinger plus four other Israelis and three Americans from a group calling itself the “American Research Initiative” — began compiling, analyzing and comparing statistics about the Arab population’s births, deaths, immigrations and emigrations in the territories from Palestinian Authority, Israeli, Jordanian and other sources, going back to 1990.
They found numerous discrepancies “in outrageous ways” between the statistics from other sources and those of the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, Ettinger said. These included, he said:
• The Palestinian Arab population of the territories is actually 2.4 million, not the 3.8 million the P.A. claims.
• The P.A. over-reported Palestinian Arab births; under-reported deaths; included both Israeli Arabs in Jerusalem and Palestinians living abroad; and claimed that Palestinian Arabs were migrating into the territories when in fact a greater number were leaving than entering every year.
The upshot, said Ettinger, is that the proportion of the Jewish population between the Jordan River and the sea remains stable at about 60 percent and is likely to continue to be so. (A full text of this report can be seen online at www.pademographics.com.)
Moreover, the Palestinian population is likely either to remain stable or to decline, Ettinger said.
More Palestinian Arab women are using birth control; the Arab population is changing from predominantly poor rural with high birth rates to poor urban with lower birth rates; the age of marriage is later and the number of divorces is growing; and the general level of education is rising, he said.
All these factors usually result in a population producing fewer children, Ettinger said.
Ettinger is on record as opposed to both the Sharon government’s planned withdrawal from Gaza and to any surrender of the West Bank to Palestinian control. He told The Chronicle that he opposes the latter on security grounds.
If Israel withdrew to the 1967 borders, which would make Israel eight miles wide at its narrowest point, it might not survive another 1973-style surprise attack that came from the Judean hills in the West Bank, he said.
“The bottom line is: Can Israel afford to give away its irreplaceable security requirements in the worst neighborhood in the world?” he said. “No responsible person can say that the Jewish state should rely on the goodwill of the United Nations, the United States and the Arabs.”
Ettinger also said he believes that the intense controversy over the planned withdrawal from Gaza is a “typical” clash of opinions in Israel; “I don’t see it deteriorating into a civil clash.” Claims that it could are “not realistic,” he said.
Ettinger is president of U.S.-Israel Opportunities Ltd., based in Jerusalem. He has degrees in business from schools in the United States and has had a wide-ranging career in both Israeli business endeavors and diplomacy.
His speaking tour for the Israel Bonds included Houston, Dallas, Montreal, Tampa, Palm Beach, Philadelphia and New York as well as Milwaukee.
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