It is frequently claimed—especially by the Israeli left—that if Israel does not facilitate the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Jews will become a minority in their own country. This claim, writes Yoram Ettinger, rests on very shaky grounds:
Israel’s demographic establishment . . . regurgitates the numbers of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) without examination, ignores the dramatic transformation of Jewish and Arab demography, understates Jewish fertility, overstates Arab fertility, . . . overlooks the burgeoning Arab net emigration and Jewish net immigration, and discards the feasibility of significant waves of aliyah (Jewish immigration), which have occurred—[contrary to the predictions] of the demographic establishment—every two decades since the 1930s. . . .
The PCBS records include—in defiance of international regulations—more than 400,000 Arabs (mostly from Judea and Samaria) living abroad for over a year, the 300,000 Arabs of Jerusalem who are included in the Israeli records (hence a double-count), and over 100,000 Palestinians who married Israeli Arabs, received Israeli ID cards, and are also doubly counted. . . .
Moreover, the latest Palestinian census (2007) includes many people with mythological life expectancy, who were born in 1845, 1850, 1860, and so forth.
Read more on Israel Hayom: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=13951