The Demographic War for Palestine
by: Janet Abu-Lughod
December - December
1986
The Link - Volume 19, Issue 5
Population has, from the very beginning, been a major weapon in the war over Palestine. In the struggle between Palestinian Arabs and European Zionists, both parties have viewed the human count as crucial. Demographic controversies over the exact number of Jews and Arabs in Palestine at various points in history, i.e., over the size of the Palestinian Arab refugee population created by the 1948 war, over the national origins of residents, and over seemingly innocuous figures as live births, illegal immigration, forced or voluntary outmigrations, have created a level of tension seldom seen in the staid field of population statistics—an indication that statistics are serving as a surrogate for or at least a reflection of a more serious battle.
Statesmen on either side have recognized what every demographer learns in his or her first course: that once one has established a “bench mark” or base population (usually for a time during which statistical data are inadequate), there are only two ways for that population to change—either through net migration (the difference between the number of people moving into and out of a given territory) or through net natural increase (the excess of births over deaths in the same territory).
Early on, each side chose (or was forced to be dependent upon) its own arsenal and, ever since, has attempted to strengthen its weapons while disarming its enemy. The weapon par excellence adopted by the Jewish community to enhance its claim to Palestine was migration; the weapon of the Palestinian Arab population to maintain its legitimate claim to the country has been natural increase.
While each side had its own means of increasing demographic strength, each also sought to disarm its opponent. Thus, Jewish strategies have been directed primarily toward reducing the number of Palestinian Arabs in the country through acts of expulsion, both individual and collective, supplemented only recently by attempts to decrease the fertility of its Arab residents. On the Palestinian side, strategies have been unsuccessfully directed first toward controlling and reducing the number of Jews allowed to enter the country when it was under British Mandate, and second, and most recently, toward making life in Israel more difficult by discouraging new migrants and encouraging Israelis to leave. Given the low Jewish rates of natural increase, no attention has been paid to schemes designed to lower birth rates. All acts of violence by either side might however be viewed as methods for raising death rates and thereby decreasing the rate of natural increase.
This article will trace the course of demographic change in the territory historically known as Palestine, now entirely occupied by Israel, in order to show that policies which may appear accidental or irrational have their deep grounding in a demographic struggle for the country, and that the seemingly scientific discussions over numbers often conceal a deeper agenda.
Jewish Population Grows Through Migration
Zionist arguments stress the continuity of a Jewish presence in the Holy Land; however, even the most militant proponents of this position acknowledge that, historically, the number of Jews was very small. Most Israeli sources accept the figure of only 24,000 Jews in Palestine as late as 1882, according to a Turkish census in that year. Only for later periods do Jewish sources begin to diverge. Arthur Ruppin, official agent of the World Zionist Organization in Palestine, for example, accepted the Turkish estimate of 60,000 Jews in Palestine in 1914 and freely acknowledged that these numbers dropped significantly during and after World War I.1 However, his testimony has been ignored by present-day Israeli demographers who have revised this 1914 figure upward to an improbable 85,000.2
Even those most committed to the ideology of continuous Jewish presence, however, recognized that the “Arab Jews” native to the land were poorly adapted or immune to the blandishments of Zionism as a philosophy. They were too “assimilated” to Arabic culture and too devoutly religious to become secular, separatist Zionists. Nevertheless, they constituted a symbolic nucleus around which a Jewish state could be “thickened.”
Thickening, however, came from their European coreligionists. Aliyah (migration) was part and parcel of the idea of a Jewish State, for only through immigration to Palestine could the dream of a state for Jews be translated into reality. It is ironic that a Hungarian (Theodor Herzl), functioning in German and stimulated by the French Dreyfus Affair, should have provided the rallying call for the emigration of Jews from Eastern, rather than Western, Europe. Nevertheless, the early immigrants to Palestine were drawn disproportionately from the former. Coming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they helped swell the number of Jews from 24,000 in 1882 to the 83,790 enumerated by the British when, after becoming the Mandatory power in Palestine, they took the first “modern” census in the country in 1922.
One should not overemphasize the attractiveness of Palestine to Jews emigrating from Eastern Europe, however. There was an enormous exodus at that time, of which only a handful found their way to the Holy Land. Of the 2.4 million Jews who left Europe between 1882 and 1914, fully 85 percent came to the United States, while fewer than 2 percent went to Palestine.3 Despite the direct growth that came from the immigration of so many young adults, and the high rates of natural increase that such an age structure entailed, Jews, as recently as 1922, constituted only 11 percent of the total population of Palestine.4
Between the census of 1922 and the one of 1931 (the latter being the last official enumeration in the country), the Jewish population increased from 83,790 to 174,610 while the Arab population grew from 673,000 to some 862,000. Thus, in the nine-year period, the total population had increased by some 279,000 persons, 4,000 of which represented spurious growth, a function of failure to count this estimated number of Arabs in the first census. Of the remaining increase of 275,000, another 10,000 was due to a boundary change which added the Arab population resident in a district which had been Syrian before a boundary adjustment in 1923. Thus, there was a real increase of only 265,000, of which close to three-quarters was attributed to net migration consisted of 57,000 Jewish migrants who entered the country on official visas between 1922 and 1931, plus an estimated 9,000 persons (almost all Jewish) who were illegally present in the country when the census was taken.
If these figures are roughly correct, then either the Jewish population in 1922 was undercounted, illegal immigration exceeded the estimates, or the Jewish community had grown at a remarkably high natural increase rate of close to 2.5 percent per year. Even if the latter were true, however, in the absence of immigration, this would have added only some 21,000 new Jewish residents. Considering the fact that the Arab population would have added during the same period about 168,000 through natural increase, on a base of 673,000 plus 10,000, this would have meant that the natural increase rate for European Jews was almost equal to that of Palestinian Arabs.5
Even if so high a Jewish rate of natural increase had been sustained during the next 15 or so years, in the absence of migration the Jewish population would not have reached 260,000. While no census was ever taken again, which makes all numbers relatively suspect after 1931, the British Office of Statistics of Palestine continued, up to 1947, to publish its “best estimates” of the population in Palestine. The data series ends with March 1947.6 At that time, the Statistical Office estimated the Jewish population to be 589,341 (a footnote indicated that this figure had been revised upwards, evidently due to “corrections” suggested by the Jewish Agency demographers). Thus, between the end of 1931 and early 1947, about 320,000 Jews must have arrived in Palestine—either as legal immigrants, illegal immigrants or the offspring of such immigrants. Such migration was sufficient to raise their proportion in the population to some 30.8 percent, despite substantial natural increase in the Palestinian Arab community. During the same period, the Arab population increased to about 1,320,000 almost exclusively through natural increase.7
As is well known, the massive influx of Jews into Palestine during the 1930’s was directly due to the rise of Hitler. Between 1932 and 1936, the Jewish population in Palestine increased by 16, 21, 26 and 15 percent annually, as contrasted with the rates before and after those years, which hovered around 5 percent per year. The official British policy was to restrict legal immigration to Palestine, but this pleased neither side. The Jews complained that refugees were being turned away heartlessly, while the Arabs complained that the Mandate government was too lenient. The conflict over Jewish immigration became an increasing source of tension and was, to a major extent, the underlying precipitating factor in the Arab General Strike of 1936. Nevertheless, illegal entry was rampant, as reported with pride by later Jewish documents and celebrated in such novels as Leon Uris’s Exodus. Not only were Arabs unable to prevent the arrival of more Jews but they were also unable to prevent their own expulsion in 1948.
Even before the establishment of the State of Israel, unilaterally declared on May 15, 1948, it was clear that the demographic struggle for Palestine had become quite serious. Between 1932 and 1948, the Jewish population had increased by about 470,000; of this growth, some 135,000 (29 percent) was due to natural increase, while 340,000 was due to an excess of immigrants over emigrants. Europe was almost the exclusive source of the immigrants of that period; of those with known birthplaces, some 88 percent had been born in Europe. In contrast, only 1.5 percent of the new immigrants came from the United States and Oceania and less than 20 percent came from Asia.8
Once the state was declared, this trend intensified but was supplemented by the immigration of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa as well. The number of European Jews relocated to Palestine after the war peaked between 1948 and 1951 when some 330,000 newcomers arrived from Europe, including 300,000 from East European countries alone. During that same period, about 175,000 Jews from Iraq and Yemen and an additional 92,000 from Egypt and North Africa were transported to Israel and resettled, primarily in areas from which Arabs had been driven. In all, the net migration of Jews to Israel during that period totaled 666,400. Thus, in one fell swoop, the size of the Jewish population virtually doubled through the largest immigration ever experienced, either before or after. In considering the relative “rights” to the country, it is therefore important to recognize that an overwhelming majority of the present Jewish population of Israel consists of immigrants (and their descendants) who arrived after the state was established.
The Decline in Jewish Immigration
In subsequent years, however, this “success” story could not be sustained and, in most recent years, it has apparently been reversed. Since 1980 at least the number of Jewish residents leaving Israel annually has exceeded those coming in, a fact which is currently making the Jewish state quite uneasy. In the section that follows, this phenomenon will be examined in greater detail.
Tables 1 and 2 summarize the role that immigration played in the growth of Israel’s population between 1948 and 1980. [Website Editor’s Note: Tables are not reproduced in this text. They can be found, however, in the PDF Version carried on this site.] As can be seen, more than half of the total growth of the Jewish population came from immigration, although in every year since 1965, natural increase has contributed more than net migration to the annual growth.
A number of extremely interesting conclusions can be drawn from these tables. First, from less than 650,000 in 1948, the number of Jews increased by some 2,632,900 in the ensuing 32 years. Of that growth, some 47 percent (1.24 million) was attributable to natural increase. Massive immigration from abroad had swelled the population of child-rearing age and Jews from Arab countries (whose natural increase rates are substantially higher than those of the so-called Ashkenazi or European-origin Jews) had come to constitute a larger proportion of the total.
Most growth over the time period, however, still came from net migration. According to the figures presented by Schmelz, some 1.7 million Jewish immigrants went to Israel between the end of 1948 and 1980, while about 312,100 Jews emigrated from the country during the same period. The net effect of migration, then, was to add 1,392,600 Jewish immigrants to the resident population of Israel in the 32-year period, which accounted for 53 percent of all the growth that took place during that interval. If emigration had not occurred, the Jewish population would have reached 3.6 million by 1980 or even more, considering that emigration deprived the country not only of the emigrants but of their offspring as well.
Immigration trends were not smooth. Between 1952 and 1954, some 54,000 immigrants arrived but 33,900 residents left, yielding a net migration of only 20,200 during that three-year period. Between 1955 and 1957 the number of immigrants shot up again. Some 165,000 Jews went to Israel during those years, with Morocco and Poland the two largest “sending” states. However, during those three years, there were close to 29,000 emigrants, yielding a net migration of only 136,100. Immigration sloughed off between 1958 and 1960, with net migration adding only 46,900 in three years. An influx of Romanians, together with the rest of the Moroccan Jewish community, helped to push net migration to 193,000 in the 1961-64 period, but this number dropped back to 48,000 between 1965 and 1968.
In the post-1968 period, Israel became increasingly dependent upon Russian Jews to keep migration alive; hence the concerted campaign to “free” the Soviet Jews, for there are few other sources of potential numbers left. During the five-year period between 1969 and 1974, over 100,000 Jews immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union and those coming from the Soviet bloc altogether accounted for 82 percent of the 162,300 “refugees” who entered the country during that period. But by then what has become an avalanche of departures was already beginning. Although 268,400 Jews entered during that five-year period, 56,400 left, yielding a net migration of only 203,700. Since then, outmigration has continued to rise. Between 1975 and 1980, some 67,700 Israelis departed while 145,000 came in, yielding a net migration of only 77,300 in five years.9
This trend has become even more marked in the 1980’s, although current data exactly comparable to the forementioned time periods is lacking. It is evident, however, that the Jewish population increased to only 3,373,200 in the two years between 1980 and 1982, or by only some 45,250 per year. Knowing that natural increase now adds about 53,000 annually, we can see indirect evidence of the end of Israel’s growth from net migration. For perhaps the first time in its history, the number of Jewish emigrants each year exceeds the number of immigrants.
Certainly, in news releases of the past few years, it is suggested that rising numbers of Israelis are heading out of the country—although it is equally probable that a good number of them are only temporarily abroad. It is difficult to compare immigration data with the “arrival and departure” data available for the period beyond 1980. And yet we shall try to relate these to the information assembled earlier.
Recently, the Israeli Statistical Abstract included a series of tables that show a net out-movement from the country between 1948 and 1983 of approximately 403,000 residents; a somewhat different table in the same publication suggests that outmigration over the same period had reached 413,000.10 Such information is quite different from the number of annual entries and exits noted at immigration points, for many tourists enter and leave and residents may make multiple trips in and out in a given year. (This type of information, for example, is given in Table IV/2).11 I suspect that some of the discrepancies in these tables might be due to persons with dual citizenship who are sometimes listed as “residents” and sometimes as tourists and foreign nationals. Our interest is in the tables that report the movements of individuals with “resident” status, some of whom hold dual citizenship.
Since it is not possible to break down the Israeli figures to capture the annual outmigration, we must use the combined outmigration figures for 1948 through 1964, shown in Table IV/3 (as cited above), which indicate that 823,400 residents departed while, of these, some 707,900 had returned by 1983. This left a net outmigration for those years of 115,500. The pattern for subsequent years shows a gradual and then a very sharp increase in the gap between the number of residents departing and returning. Between 1965 and 1972, annual departures of residents rose gradually, doubling from 97,100 in the first year to 184,800 per year by 1972. All told, 1,085,800 “residents” were recorded as leaving during those years, of whom 1,043,600 had returned by 1983. Total net outmigration during that period, therefore, totaled only some 42,200. Since then, the deficits have grown significantly larger. Between 1973 and 1979, some 2,067,300 Israeli residents left the country, of whom 80,200 had not yet returned by 1983. In the four-year period between 1980 and 1983, some 2,343,400 Israeli residents left the country, of whom 165,300 had not returned by the end of 1983. Newspaper reports suggest that in 1984 and 1985 the deficits between departures and returns reached 90,000 annually.
The question is: at what rate can the population of Israel be expected to decline, now that net outmigration has approached and finally exceeded the rate of natural increase? This is a most difficult question to answer, for to reach a reasonable projection of natural increase, we need to know something more than raw numbers of outmigrants--we need to know the proportion of outmigrants who are of European descent (those with traditionally low birth rates) as contrasted with those of Middle Eastern Asian origin (who have had birth rates approaching those of the region).
It may perhaps turn out to be an irony that Israel, whose “demographic weapon” par excellence was, for so long, in-migration, has now become increasingly dependent upon the high fertility of its increasing base of “Arab” Jews to maintain its numbers. Migration is no longer its strong suit. A high proportion of the Jews Israel has “rescued” from Eastern Europe in recent years appear to be using Israel as a temporary base from which to reimmigrate—legally or illegally—to the United States.
And it may be a second irony that the Israeli state, which takes great pride in transforming and “modernizing” its Sephardic immigrants through education, will indeed be sealing its demographic fate by causing their natural increase rate to diminish, since education (of women in particular) is one of the strongest inhibitors to high fertility ever found. It seems only a matter of time before the dropping natural increase rate is no longer able to make up the deficit that has appeared in net migration.
The Displacement of Palestinians: The Inverse of Jewish Migration
If the Jewish population of Palestine has grown over the past century primarily through immigration from abroad, the descendants of the original population of Arab Palestine have expanded entirely through natural increase. However, due to their progressive expulsion from their country, their numbers within the historic territory of Palestine itself have grown only slightly since 1948, while the proportion of all Palestinians living within that territory has plummeted.
In contrast to the type of statistics available for pre-1948 Palestine and post-1948 Israel, we have little direct evidence of the growth of the total Palestinian Arab population and of its progressive dispersion from its country. Indeed, lacking a country, a unified geographic base, and a national authority to collect full census data in the various jurisdictions within which they live, Palestinian Arabs have found it difficult to develop “official” figures. In the section that follows I draw heavily on: research I conducted in connection with the UNESCO Palestine Open University project;12 Israeli statistics on “non-Jews” in Israel and in what Israel terms the “Administered Territories” (i.e., the so-called West Bank and Gaza),13 by the Palestinian Statistical Abstract;14 and a still unpublished report by the U.S. Bureau of the Census,15 whose findings, arrived at independently, are not inconsistent with my earlier works.
By the end of 1979, there were approximately 4 to 4.2 million Palestinians in the world; by 1984 the number had increased to about 4.65 million. The majority of these Palestinians, however, are no longer living in their own country but rather are dispersed throughout the Arab World and, increasingly, even beyond. Despite natural increase rates, which in recent decades have always exceeded 3 percent per year, successive forced outmigrations have reduced the segment within Palestine itself to less than 43 percent: about one-third as “third class” citizens of the Israeli state, the remainder as subjects of a harsh military occupation. Thus, if the story of the Jewish population in Palestine is told through in-migration supplemented by modest natural increase, the story of the Arab population of Palestine is told through high natural increase offset by periodic expulsions.
Earlier, a Turkish census of 1914 had indicated a resident Arab population in Palestine of about 630,000, a number which had increased only modestly to about 677,000 when the British took their census in 1922.16 This increase of only 7.5 percent over the eight-year interval (less than 1 percent per year) is lower than the estimated natural increase rate for the time. It indicates, contrary to the Jewish theory (as most recently repeated in Joan Peters’s book, From Time Immemorial) that there was substantial Arab in-migration to the country during that period, that there may actually have been some net outmigration, albeit temporary (see note 17 below). Nor was immigration a significant contributor to Arab growth during the nine-year period that elapsed before the British took their second census in 1931. The number of “non-Jews” in the country had, by then, increased to 861,815, of which some 10,000 had been added through a boundary change and perhaps 5,000 consisted of Europeans [British administrators, others]. The real increase, then, was some 170,000 or about 25 percent over the nine-year period, yielding a compounded annual increase rate of some 2.5. Most of this could be attributed to the rate of natural increase.17
After 1931 the figures become more conjectural, but it is possible to reach some reasonable estimates by projecting forward from the last official figures that appeared in British sources. According to the last-published General Monthly Bulletin,18 as of March 31, 1947, the total population of Palestine was 1,908,775; of these, 1,157,423 were Muslims, 146,162 were Christians (mostly Arab) and 15,849 were “others” (again, mostly Arab). Summing these, we reach the estimate of 1.32 million Arabs in Palestine as of March 31, 1947, and applying a reasonable rate of natural increase, close to 1.4 million at the time of their expulsion.
In the 38 years since then the total number of Palestinians has more than tripled. And yet, the number of Palestinians living in the territory of Palestine itself increased by only 43 percent. By the end of 1984, fewer than 2 million Palestinian Arabs still lived on their own soil. They represent the remnants of communities left behind, despite successive efforts to expel them. They are of three types, facing quite different challenges.
Palestinians Still In Palestine
First, there are the Palestinians, together with their descendants, who remained behind in the zone Israel preempted in 1948-49. Even though they were granted Israeli citizenship, they were subject to harsh military “defense” regulations, had much of their land confiscated and many of their villages in so-called strategic areas bulldozed to make room for Israeli settlements, were resettled into zones from which their movement was controlled via military passes, and even today enjoy only third-class rights within Israel. In 1949, just after the war and the repatriation of a small number of refugees under the reunification of family law, there were only 160,000 Arabs left in the territory demarcated by the Armistice agreement, although had there been no displacement, the area would have contained at least 900,000 Arabs.19
The difference between these two numbers, adjusting for natural increase, yielded our earlier estimate of about 780,000 Palestinians made refugees from this first war.20 It should be noted, however, that in the early years following the 1948 war, most of these remained on Palestinian soil, either in the Gaza Strip or on what later came to be called the West Bank [of Jordan] after the area was incorporated into Jordan.
It was this initial population of 160,000 which, through a large excess of births over deaths, increased by 3.5 times in the ensuing decades—reaching by the end of 1982 approximately 574,000 and, by 1984, some 579,200. At this point in time, 12.5 percent of all Palestinians fall into this category. There is already some evidence, however, that this share will drop in the near future due both to outmigration and to a decline in fertility. As footnote 10 indicated, among the 413,000 Israeli residents still abroad by 1983 were 34,850 who were “not Jews,” an Israeli way of referring to its Palestinian citizens. Since no Arabs are allowed to immigrate to the Jewish state, this suggests that there has been considerable net outmigration during the past three-and-a-half decades. Furthermore, Israeli statistics show a real fertility decline within its Arab subpopulation in recent years. Should outmigration and fertility declines continue, within the next decade no more than 10 percent of Palestinians will be living in Israel.
The second and third groups of Palestinians who still remain on their soil are the residents now under Israeli occupation in Gaza and in eastern Palestine (i.e., the West Bank). In 1967, when Israel conquered these residual areas of Palestine, they found not only the original inhabitants and their descendants but many of the refugees (together with their descendants) whom they had initially expelled in 1948.
This was particularly true in Gaza. By the end of 1952, there were close to 300,000 persons living tightly compressed into a zone which, before the 1948 war, had contained less than 100,000. Gaza residents, unlike their compatriots on the West Bank, were not given other passports and therefore found it relatively difficult to move out. During the years in which the Strip was under Egyptian administration, the population continued to grow through natural increase until it had reached a total of some 450,000 by 1967, just before the June war. It is unlikely, however, that there were that many people actually in the Gaza Strip when the war broke out. The census kept by the Egyptian administration was de jure rather than de facto, and there is some evidence that perhaps as many as 50,000 Gaza residents may have been working abroad when the 1967 war broke out; they have never been permitted to return. During the war itself it seems that an equal number were expelled, since according to an Israeli army census taken after the war, fewer than 350,000 resided in Gaza.
In the nineteen years during which the Gaza Strip has been under Israeli occupation, the resident Palestinian population more than recovered from the losses incurred in 1967. By the end of 1984, the number of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip was about half a million.21 Viewed from the standpoint of the Israelis, this population is feared as a surly rebellious “thorn,” but it is also highly valued and exploited as a source of cheap, nonunionized day laborers for Israeli farms and factories. Just as Jewish “absorption” after 1948 would not have been possible without the homes, land and property sequestered from Palestinian “refugees,” so the post-1967 economy of Israel would have foundered even more without the captive labor and markets of the Gaza Strip.
A very different situation prevailed in the West Bank. In 1948, most of the Palestinians forced from their homes did not head south to the inaccessible Gaza Strip. Instead, perhaps half a million sought refuge on the West Bank in those areas not threatened by the Israeli army, while another 150,000-160,000, mostly those being systematically expelled from the Galilee, took shelter in the adjacent countries of Syria and Lebanon. Of those who went first to the West Bank, perhaps a quarter proceeded beyond the river into Jordan. The rest settled into refugee camps, but once they had been granted Jordanian citizenship, many young men emigrated for employment either to the East Bank or eventually to the opportunities opening in the Gulf region, often leaving their families behind. Despite this temporary emigration, the population on the West Bank continued to grow through natural increase, reaching an estimated 900,000 by the time the June 1967 war began.
That war caused significant depopulation. From school transfer records available from the Jordanian Ministry of Education it is possible to determine how many students transferred from West Bank to East Bank schools between June and September of 1967. Multiplying this figure by accompanying adults, we conclude that some 250,000-300,000 residents of the West Bank were forced to flee during the war. This number is quite consistent with the results of the Israel Defense Census taken in November, which counted only 665,000 Palestinians left on the West Bank (65,000 in Arab Jerusalem and 600,000 in the remainder of the area).
Since that time, despite concerted efforts by the Israeli state to deport and/or imprison young men and political activists, to confiscate land and deprive farmers of their water to undermine their livelihoods, to hinder all independent economic development and thus force Palestinians to leave, and to implant menacing paramilitary Jewish “settlements” throughout the region to control the population, the population had managed by 1984 to recover to its prewar total of 900,000 according to the 1985 U.S. Census report cited above. If we add this to the half million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, we reach a total of 1.4 million in the occupied territories by 1984, as contrasted with the 1.1 million who remained behind after the 1967 war.
This increase, however, conceals real and steady depopulation over the nineteen years of Israeli administration. A simple estimate of the net displacement can be reached by subtracting the number of Palestinians currently within the post-1967 occupied territories from the estimated number who would have been living there, had natural increase not been counteracted by emigration/expulsion. If we assume a natural increase rate of 3.5 percent per annum, then the more than 1 million Palestinians left in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza after the expulsions directly associated with the 1967 war should have increased, by the end of 1984, to some 1.9 million. In fact, however, they totaled only 1.4 million in that year, which suggests that, in addition to the 300,000 to 350,000 persons immediately displaced by the war, there have been an additional half a million Palestinian Arabs (including offspring born after 1967) displaced since the occupation began.
Table 3 shows the status of the approximately two million Palestinian Arabs who, as of the end of 1984, remained inside Palestine. Less than one-third are “citizens” of the state which now controls all of their national territory. The remainder have the ambiguous status of “conquered subjects” whose numbers are being steadily and systematically depleted, whose land is being taken from them (some 60 percent of all land on the West Bank has already been confiscated), whose villages are being bulldozed or “starved out” through water deprivation, and whose age and sex structure has been increasingly distorted through selective forced/induced emigration and imprisonment.
Palestinians in Exile
From the above it is clear that most Palestinians now live in what has increasingly been referred to as “the Diaspora.” Table 4 shows where the 57.5 percent of Palestinians outside Palestine by the end of 1984 were estimated to be living. By then, Palestinians in the Diaspora numbered some 2.65 million. We distinguish in that table between “core Arab countries,” that is, those directly adjacent to Palestine (to which most Palestinians were driven in the initial stages) and other places to which Palestinians later went as they sought ways to live in exile.
The series of expulsions that caused this dispersion began in 1948 when some 780,000 Palestinians were driven out from the territories occupied by Israel during that war. Most of the refugees, however, remained within Palestine. By 1950, close to a quarter of a million Palestinians were in the Gaza Strip and another 765,000 were on the West Bank, but about 122,500 had already moved across the Jordan.22 At that time, therefore, almost all Palestinians were either still inside historic Palestine or were poised on the borders to it, hoping to return. Few had migrated to non-adjacent countries.
But gradually, as hope faded, livelihoods had to be sought even if far from home. The dispersion had begun. Table 5 shows how the waves of dispersion expanded to encompass other Arab countries and eventually the West as well. To graph these pulses—always propelled first from within but eventually reflected in wider circles—is to summarize what has happened to the Palestinians since their history of expulsions began in 1948.
The Bottom Line
If we put the trends together and project to the future, what do we see as the next phase of the demographic struggle for Palestine? Figures 1 and 2 summarize what has happened up to now. Figure 1 shows the changes in the size of the Arab and Jewish populations in historic Palestine between 1914 to 1984. The major increases in the Jewish population coincide with the peaks of net immigration from abroad. The major drops in the Arab population coincide with the two wars waged by israel not only to gain territory but to expel the Arab inhabitants. The joint effects of migration and natural increase are shown in Figure 2 [see page 12 in PDF version] which graphs the relative proportions of the population of historic Palestine between 1944 and 1984 who have been Jews and Arabs.
It is obvious from these last illustrations why the greatest fear today in Israel is that, despite herculean efforts to ingather Jews from all over the world and despite the periodic decimations/expulsions of resident Palestinians, Israel appears to be losing the demographic war for Palestine. Prof. Roberto Bacchi, head of the Hebrew University Center for Demography, recently presented the findings of his new study to the Israeli Cabinet on May 11, 1986. He forecast that by the year 2000 (only 14 years away now), there would be 4.1 million Jews and 3.1 million Arabs living in historic Palestine. By then, Jews would constitute only a simple majority of 57 percent, and this situation would be only temporary until the higher Arab natural increase brought the Arab population to parity.23
Some Israelis, considering this prospect, argue strenuously for “giving up” the West Bank and, with it, the population that threatens the Jewishness of their state. Others, however, have reacted with fear and heightened hostility. Their panic at the prospect of being “outbred” has led to extremist reactions, such as those of Meir Kahane and his followers who advocate the forced “removal” of the Arab population from all parts of historic Palestine. That a further attempt to do so is not an unlikely scenario can be seen from Figure 1. There have been two mass expulsion wars in the past, waged 19 years apart. With each war the number of Palestinians has dropped precipitously and the trajectory of Palestinian growth within the country has been sharply deflected. It is now almost 20 years since the last one. One hopes that history will not be repeated.
On the Palestinian side, there are many who believe that large families may be the way to regain their homeland. Certainly, significant segments of the Palestinian population believe this and have been acting upon it. However, here too there may be an irony. The Palestinians are now the “best educated” community in the Arab World, and education, as previously mentioned, is one of the strongest inhibitors to high fertility. The natural increase rates which sustained the Palestinian community in exile for close to 40 years are already beginning to decline. The trajectory of Palestinian natural growth is beginning to taper off.
Thus, the demographic war for Palestine may prove to have been only temporary. The war remains, but it is not likely to be played out much longer in the tables of statisticians.
Israel can no longer count on net immigration to continue to swell its numbers. It has already “ingathered” the non-European Jews (the Ethiopian Falasha were a last gasp) and, outside of the Soviet Union, there are few communities seeking exit. According to the Bacchi report, the total number of Jews in the world is steadily declining due to conversion, intermarriage, and a very low rate of natural increase. Furthermore, in recent years, departures from Israel have greatly exceeded entries. Not only have few American Jews chosen to emigrate to Israel (perhaps 50,000 in total) but the United States has become the preferred destination for emigrating Israeli Jews. According to Thomas Friedman’s recent article in the New York Times, there are now at least 170,000 and possibly as many as 300,000 Israeli Jews who have settled more or less permanently in the United States, and it does not appear that this trend will be reversed.24 Deprived of immigration, its chief weapon in the demographic war for Palestine, the Jewish state has only natural increase, likely to decline, and further expulsion of Palestinians left in its arsenal.
The weapon of Palestinians—high fertility—is also likely to grow more blunted with time. Natural increase rates, which peaked as high as 3-4 percent per year in the 1950’s and 1960’s, are now beginning to decline. While they remain considerably above those in most developed nations, they have been following the secular decline experienced in most other parts of the developing world. Roof and Kinsella suggest that they have now dropped to about 2.6 percent per year, which may underestimate current growth. But regardless of their present level, it is easy to predict that they will never again reach the highs of the past.
Nor will the Arab population within Palestine be able to grow indefinitely. Some outmigration, even in the absence of forced expulsion, is inevitable. The tiny Gaza Strip is now one of the most densely settled areas of the world, and there is a limit to its ability to contain more people, even at the appalling levels of subsistence that now prevail. If economic development programs can be instituted in the West Bank, that area can continue to absorb its natural growth for a while, but for how long in the face of Israeli opposition?
And finally, Palestinians have in the past two generations begun to sink roots in those countries of their exile—especially Jordan. The United States now hosts a Palestinian population of about 100,000, to which must be added perhaps 30-35,000 Israeli Arabs who have apparently emigrated over the past few decades. The rates of immigration to the States have been inhibited only by immigration laws, but the effects of these restrictions decline as the base population increases. On the other hand, many of the Palestinians who went to the countries of the Arabian Gulf when their economies were booming are no longer as welcome, now that a downturn has already begun. The destruction of Lebanon in the Israeli invasion in the summer of 1982 and the cruel internal war that has persisted beyond it closed off an important area of Palestinian refuge which is unlikely to appear elsewhere.
The bottom line, then, looks demographically indecisive for both communities, if exclusive victory remains the goal.
What Can the United States Do To Help
United States policies are involved not only in the hot political war for Palestine but in the demographic one as well. Quite unwittingly, the U.S. has become a demographic force in its own right, since it is, by far, the preferred destination of Israelis who voluntarily leave their country and at least one of the many places offering refuge to displaced Palestinians. To date, there are possibly as many as 300,000 Israeli Jews and close to 130,000 Palestinian Arabs living in the U.S.
Welcoming voluntary migrants has been a long-standing and admirable characteristic of America which needs to continue. However, there has been certain irony in recent years. In response to Israeli demands, the United States has pressured (and sometimes even tried to “blackmail”) the U.S.S.R. into facilitating the emigration of large numbers of Russian Jews and has even offered direct assistance through reception “camps” that transfer emigres to Israel. While the intent is to increase the Jewish population of Israel, in fact, an extremely large proportion use Israel as a base from which to continue on to the States. (It is impossible to estimate how many, since the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which keeps such records no longer publishes information on immigrants by place of birth but only by place of most recent residence.) Furthermore, there has been a concerted campaign within the United States to harass and even deport Palestinian “refugees” from the most recent wars, even though they may have no place to return to.
Such policies contribute little to a resolution of the ongoing conflict which has given rise to, and continues to result in, these migratory movements, both voluntary and forced.
If indeed a better demographic “balance” in historic Palestine could create the preconditions for a real and lasting resolution of the conflict--via either a united secular democratic state of a bi-state solution, depending on the preferences of the parties concerned—then American policy should be directed toward achieving that balance. Opening the door to further Jewish immigration, where that is sought by the individuals concerned, would be one part of that approach. Pressuring the Israeli Government to cease its harsh treatment of Palestinian Arabs, which forces them from a country they do not wish to leave, would be the second part.
Combined, the two policies would be fully consistent with a major value of American society, namely, compassion for the wishes of individuals. And, what is even more important, America would be contributing not to the war but to the peace it values even more. Demographic weapons may not be the way to peace, but they can be beaten into ploughshares in the interest of “resolving” rather than “winning” the underlying conflict.
Janet Abu-Lughod, a demographer, is Professor of Sociology, Geography, Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University. She has written widely on the Middle East.
Notes
1. A footnote to the Census of 1922 cites him for this early estimate.
2. See the unpublished paper by U.O. Schmelz, “Demographic Aspects of Jewish Refugee Immigration to Israel,” prepared in 1982-83 for a book on Middle Eastern refugees that was being edited by Justin McCarthy, p. 5; his figure of 85,000 in 1914 is patently incorrect, given that the first British census in Palestine counted fewer than 84,000 Jews as late as 1922!
3. See Table 2 in statistical appendix to the Schmelz article cited above.
4. Or slightly less if one adjusts for the undercount of Palestinian Arabs that undoubtedly occurred. In the Census of 1931, demographers acknowledged that a minimum of 4,000 Arabs had not been counted in the earlier census, but internal evidence from the age distribution of Palestinians in that year suggests that there was an even greater undercount of young men fearing enumeration for conscription.
5. While it seems illogical to accept this equivalence, it must be remembered that high rates of natural increase are consistent with high or low birth rates, depending upon differentials in mortality. Furthermore, high crude birth rates can arise from a concentration of population in the child-bearing years, even in the absence of high age-specific fertility for individuals, whereas abnormally low death rates can also be expected for this age structure. Given the extreme concentration of Jewish immigrants in the young adult ages, it is conceivable that the Jewish population might have grown at so high a rate of natural increase, but only for that relatively brief historic moment.
6. See Table 1, entitled “Estimated Population of Palestine, up to March, 1947,” in Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics, General Monthly Bulletin of Current Statistics, Vol. XII, No. 12 (Jerusalem: Government Printing Office, December, 1947), p. 686. The figures in this next section, unless otherwise noted, have been taken from this critical source.
7. One should call attention to a number of discrepancies that occur due to misuse of these official figures. We have noted above that Israeli sources purporting to reproduce official British figures give a substantially higher number of Jews and a substantially lower number of Arabs. These discrepancies arise, to the best of my knowledge, from two not unmotivated changes: first, the Jewish Agency figure for Jews is substituted for the lower number included in the British official documents whereas no similar reestimation of the Arab population to compensate for underreporting is made; and second, the figure for Arabs which is adopted is for the “settled” population only and therefore fails to include the estimated 66,553 Arab bedouins who are omitted from the British tables of “settled population.” See footnote (a) to Table 1 (1947) as cited above. Thus, the figure usually found in the literature, that is, that Jews constituted some 31.4 percent of the total population of Palestine in the mid forties, is somewhat higher than the official figures show. The estimate for bedouins is not accurate, of course. Nevertheless, in the one part of the British Vital Statistics report which shows total population including bedouins for the years between 1922 and 1931 when the bedouin population was not excluded, they numbered 70,860 in 1930. See footnote (b) to Table A2 (p. 2) in Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics, Vital Statistics Tables, 1922-1945 (Jerusalem: Government Printing Office, 1947), which gives the total Muslim population, including bedouins, as 733,149 in midyear 1930, as compared with 662,289 settled Muslims in that year. I have simply subtracted to get my estimate of bedouins.
8. I have depended in this section upon the data assembled by U.O. Schmelz, op. cit. He inflates the officially estimated Jewish population total by about 50,000 here.
9. I have, as in Tables II and III, taken these figures from the article prepared by Israeli demographer U.O. Schmelz, as cited earlier. These figures also allow us to estimate the rate of natural increase between 1948, which dropped from 2.3-2.4 percent per year in the early fifties to 1.6 percent per year since 1960.
10. See Statistical Abstract of Israel (Jerusalem, 1985), Table IV/3, p. 127, for the lower figure, which excludes residents of East Jerusalem leaving via the Allenby Bridge, and Table IV/a, p. 125, for the higher figure which includes them. The latter table shows a net outmigration of 413,389 residents between 1948 and 1983, of which only some 380,000 were Jewish. From this we can determine that some 34,000 Arab residents departed between 1948 and 1983.
11. Indeed, Table IV/2 reports close to 2 million entries and a similar number of exits in 1983, of which more than half consisted of tourists coming and going. Of all these entries, only 693 were immigrating citizens and another 13, 369 were “immigrants and potential immigrants.”
12. Janet Abu-Lughod, “Demographic Characteristics of the Palestinian Population: Relevance for Planning Palestine Open University, in Palestine Open University Feasibility Study: Part II, Annexes (Paris: UNESCO, June 30, 1980), pp. 1-91. These earlier findings are incorporated here without the technical explanations of the methods used and the sources examined to reach the conclusions. I have also drawn freely on two earlier articles: “The Demographic Transformation of Palestine,” pp. 139-163, in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, ed., The Transformation of Palestine (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971) and “The Continuing Expulsions from Palestine: 1948-1985,” pp. 17-45, in Palestine: Continuing Dispossession, Glenn Perry, ed. (Belmont, MA: AAUG, 1986).
13. Censuses were conducted by the Israel Defense Forces shortly after each of the two wars (1948 and 1967) which added territory to Israel’s control. I have depended upon these to establish bench marks for those two dates and to estimate the number of Palestinians displaced by the wars. I have also consulted the information on the “Administered Territories” presented in successive statistical abstracts and surveys.
14. Palestine Liberation Organization, Economic Department, Central Bureau of Statistics, has issued the Palestinian Statistical Abstract out of Damascus since 1978. I have consulted No. 5 (1983).
15. See Michael Roof and Kevin Kinsella, “Palestinian Population: 1950 to 1984” (Center for International Research, U.S. Bureau of Census: March 1985)
16. I have added to the Arab base of 1922 the 4,000 persons assumed to have been undercounted in that year, according to retrospective corrections made in the 1931 census. My own judgment is that the undercount was even higher, but I have not revised any of the figures accordingly.
17. If the census figures are roughly correct, it appears that there may have been, as claimed by Jewish writers, some modest net migration into Palestine during this nine-year period, but it could well have been due to the return of previous emigrants since, throughout the world, migrants tended to return “home” during the years of the “Great Depression.”
18. See Vol. XII, No. 12 (Jerusalem: Government Printing Office, December 1947), Table I, p. 686.
19. Since I did my earlier computations, a new source has been made available which permits a more detailed, accurate, and in fact larger enumeration of the population displaced by Israel. See Basheer Nijim and Bishara Muammar, Toward the De-Arabization of Palestine/Israel, 1945-1977 (Dubuque: Kendall Hunt, 1984).
20. See the computations shown in Janet Abu-Lughod, “The Demographic Transformation of Palestine,” in op. cit., pp. 160-161. I have not revised these to take into account the finding of Nijim and Muammar.
21. This figure is from Roof and Kinsella, op. cit. According to the West Bank Data Base Project, the Gaza population had reached 510,000 by the end of 1984. See Meron Benvenisti, 1986 Report: Demographic, Economic, Legal, Social and Political Developments in the West Bank (Jerusalem: WBDBP, 1986, distributed by Westview Press), p. 1.
22. Roof and Kinsella, op. cit.
23. Reported by Dalia Shehori in Al-Hamishmar, May 12, 1986, translated in Israel Press Briefs, No. 45, May-June 1986, pp. 14-15.
24. See Thomas Friedman, “America in the Mind of Israel,: New York Times Magazine, May, 1986, p. 22, especially where he reports the lower figure as the official estimate of Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption. He notes, however, that unofficial estimates put this number at 300,000 or above.