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A Numbers Game in the Middle East

(San Francisco Chronicle) Joel Brinkley - Isn't the Palestinian population growing so fast that, soon enough, it will outnumber Jews in the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea? A team of demographers headed by Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli diplomat, conducted a detailed study and found, to most everyone's surprise, that Israeli Jews far outnumber Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. What's more, Jewish birth rates are higher now, too. The demographic threat, these demographers say, simply doesn't exist and the trend lines favor the Jews, not the Arabs. Palestinians vastly overstated their population for their own political aims. As examples, they double-counted Arab residents of east Jerusalem and included about 400,000 Palestinians who actually live abroad. At the same time, as the West Bank grows more modern and prosperous, Palestinian birth rates are falling - while some Israeli West Bank settlers are having as many babies as they can. The writer is a professor of journalism at Stanford University.
2010-09-08 09:05:58
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