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Population bomb ticks against Israel

Syed Maqsud Jamil
The UN partition plan of 1947 for British mandated territory of Palestine gave 56% of the land to 31% of the total population who were Jewish. Ironically, the Jewish land ownership in Palestine was less than 7%. The demography of Palestine at the time of partition was 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs and 0.6 million Jews.
After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Israel’s area rose to 77% of Palestine, but it was left with a substantial Palestinian Arab population. This non-Jewish character of the Jewish land rankled in the hearts of Israeli leadership. Its founding prime minister, David Ben Gurion, viewed the dilemma with anguish, exclaiming that a "Jewish state cannot survive being 60% Jewish."
Israel faced this problem by intimidating the Arab population with expulsion and by putting demographic facts on the ground. There are 121 Jewish settlements
in the occupied West Bank, which have 200,000 Jews and 2.5 million Palestinian Arabs.
The population ratio has been overwhelmingly in favour of the Palestinian Arabs since the times the Jews started coming to Palestine from 1880, when there were around 24,000 Jews and 4,000 Arabs.
Later, Chaim Azriel Weizmann, a noted British scientist and a Zionist leader, gained the support of the British government for facilitating Zionist settlements in Palestine. At the beginning, the Jewish-Arab relationship was amicable and the Arabs were attracted to the better skills and education of the Jewish settlers.
Later, it created tension and the Zionist design on Palestine was exposed. The first Zionist congress was held in 1897 in Switzerland under the leadership of Theodore Herzl. There, the vision of Jewish Diaspora returning to Palestine was revealed. Lord Arthur James Balfour, the British secretary of state during the
First World War, was the first to openly advocate a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The advocacy, known as Balfour Declaration, was publicly announced in a letter from Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, a business tycoon and a leader of Zionist Federation in 1916. It stated: "His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use its endeavours to facilitate the achievement of the object... I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of
the Zionist Federation."
It raised the hopes of the Jewish people but the demographic facts continued to remain overwhelmingly in favour of the Palestinian Arabs. The population of Palestine stood at 752,048 -- comprising 589,177 Arab Muslims, 83,790 Jews and 71,464 Christians.
Muslims constituted 78% of the total population while the Jewish were 11%, and the Jewish land ownership was less than 2%! There was a dichotomy between what the Zionist Federation enunciated in its avowal of pacifist means and what
its commanders said in support of their strong-arm tactics. The 12th Zionist Congress of 1921 avowed "to live with Arabs in conditions of unity and mutual honour and, together with them, to turn the homeland into a flourishing land."
Moshe Dayan, a formidable Jewish commander, bluntly defended their vicious policies saying: "We are a generation of settlers, and without the combat helmet and the barrel of gun we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home."
. When the second census was held in 1931, the total population of Palestine had grown to 1,036,339, comprising 761,922 Muslims, 175,138 Jews and 89,134 Christians. Muslims constituted 74% of the total population while the Jews were 17%. This was taking place at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs.
There was growing Palestinian Arab discontent with the increasing influx of Jewish settlers and the force they used in occupying Arab land. The outcome of this wrongful occupation of Arab lands raised the number of landless Palestinian Arabs. Riots and revolts followed as a backlash of Arab outrage, which resulted in even greater misery for the Palestinian Arabs. More than 5000 Arabs were killed and the Jewish fatalities were 400.
The British authorities confiscated 13,200 firearms from the Arabs and 521 weapons from the Jews! It led to the growing might of Jewish terrorist organisations Haganah (The Defense) and the
Stern gang. They went ahead ferociously with their plans for the demographic engineering of the population in Israel.
The 1947 UN partition plan of Palestine was so anomalous in its dispensation that, besides the Jewish population of 499,000, the state of Israel was left with a large Palestinian Arab population of 438,000. In the turmoil, and the first Arab-Israeli war that followed the adoption of the partition plan by UN General Assembly Resolution 181, between 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes that fell in Israel. They became Palestinian refugees.
The demographic picture continues to haunt Israel because the Palestinian Arabs have a higher growth rate. It can be translated into a scenario where the Arab population in Israel and occupied territories will rise to an estimated 8.5 million in 2020. This will vastly outnumber the estimated Jewish population of6.4 million.
The population bomb is ticking against Israel. When Israel's hour of reckoning comes it will find that "the conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion, or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much" (Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad).
Syed Maqsud Jamil Is a freelance contributor to The Daily Star'
***The demographic picture continues to haunt Israel because the Palestinian Arabs have a higher growth rate. It can be translated into a scenario where the Arab population in Israel and occupied territories will rise to an estimated 8.5 million in 2020. This will vastly outnumber the estimated Jewish population of 6.4 million.***