In sum: By double-counting the Jerusalem Arabs and counting Arabs living abroad, the Palestinians inflated their base data for 1997 by 648,000. By predicting unrealistically high rates of natural population growth, the number was inflated by an additional 276,000; and by falsely predicting massive immigration to Gaza and the West Bank, and ignoring the significant net emigration of Palestinians from the territories, the PCBS further inflated the numbers by another 415,000. If we add these figures together, by 2004 the PCBS figures had managed to inflate the population in the West Bank and Gaza by some 1.34 million people-more than 50 percent. When the PCBS’ numerous errors are corrected, the Palestinian Arab population for Gaza and the West Bank drops to 2.49 million people, with 1.42 million in the West Bank and 1.07 million in Gaza in mid-2004.

We should emphasize that these corrected figures are not simply based on alternate, and in our view superior, demographic assumptions; they are based on the Palestinian authority’s own government records from ministries outside the PCBS, such as the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education, agencies that tracked actual demographic activity since 1997. The figures cited here should thus be considered far more reliable in all discussions of Palestinian demography—decisively so. The PCBS predictions of 4.4 and 4.9 percent growth rates for the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, are also dramatic overstatements in comparison to the observed rates of 1.8 and 2.9 percent.

Beyond the question of the Palestinian population living in the West Bank and Gaza, however, there is a no-less-important question of the number of Arabs living within pre-1967 Israel. Many Israeli Arabs identify as Palestinians; and it is the combined total of Arabs living on both sides of the pre-1967 border that forms the basis for the “demographic time bomb” theory. Here too, however, we discover a number of fundamental errors in describing the growth rate of this population, and where it stands in comparison to that of the Jewish population.

During the years 1997-2003, while the overall Jewish growth rate (including both natural growth and net immigration) was 2.1 percent per year, the Israeli Arab growth rate was significantly higher, at 3.3 percent—the highest for any group in the present study—partly a result of immigration from the West Bank and Gaza. Indeed, the Israeli Arab population grew from 10.5 percent of the regional total in 1967 to 14 percent by 2004, which is the main cause of the Jewish majority’s falling during that time from 64 percent to 59 percent. Yet even these numbers are subject to manipulation: Some demographers, for example, have artificially lowered Israeli Jewish figures even further by removing some 300,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not halachically recognized as Jewish from the “Jews and Others” category, despite the fact that many of them identify with Jews and Israel, have Jewish familial links, or consider themselves Jewish.¹⁰ (The ICBS, by contrast, places them in the “Jews and Others” category, and reserves the “Arabs and Others” category for groups such as the Druze, who are of similar ethnic and geographical origin to their Arab Muslim neighbors.)¹¹ It is clear that Israel has become more demographically complex and multicultural, but not necessarily more Palestinian Arab. The demographic results from the Territories were mixed: While Gaza’s ratio increased from 9.5 percent in 1967 to 11.5 percent by 2004, the West Bank’s share fell from 16 to 15 percent.

Taken together with the corrected Palestinian figures for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it emerges that while both Arab and Jewish population groups have grown markedly during the past four decades, their relative ratios have not changed all that dramatically. In fact, Jews remain in a fairly strong majority position: In the combined territories of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, the ratio of Jews to Arabs is 3 to 2. If we discount the Gaza Strip—which is no longer under any kind of Israeli rule, and therefore is of questionable relevance when speaking of a demographic threat—then the proportion is 2 to 1. And in pre-1967 Israel including Jerusalem, the ratio is 4 to 1.

While many demographers and commentators are inclined to downplay the significance of these corrected figures, saying that they merely delay the date when Arabs will outnumber Jews, this is often the product of habituated thinking rather than a hard look at the numbers. They argue that as the disproportionately young Arab population reaches childbearing age, its demographic momentum will propel it to majority status. But that scenario, too, is somewhat far-fetched, particularly as the demographic outlook for Israeli Jews has begun to improve. Indeed, while the number of children a woman is likely to bear over her lifetime (known as the Total Fertility Rate, or TFR) has been steadily rising in the Jewish sector, it has been dropping among the Arabs. Between 2000 and 2005, the Jewish TFR gradually increased to 2.7—the highest rate in any advanced industrialized nation—and the number of Jewish births grew from 80,000 per year in 1995 to 96,000 in 2000 to more than 104,000 by 2004.¹²

By contrast, Arab fertility rates have been declining. Within Israel, the overall fertility figure for the Arab grouping (including Muslims, Christians, and Druze) declined from 4.4 in 2000 to 4.0 in 2004. Meanwhile, the number of total births, which has increased among the Jews, has been stabilizing among Israel’s Arabs: While births among Israeli Arabs grew from 36,500 in 1995 to 41,200 in 2000, they have leveled off over the past five years. In fact, the absolute number of Israeli Arab births fell for the first time in 2004, possibly the result of new government policies affecting high-fertility sectors of the Israeli population, notably the reduction of child allowances.¹³ And in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well, there has been a similar lack of momentum in Arab births. In the West Bank the fertility rate has dropped from 5.7 in 1999 to 5.0 in 2003, and in the Gaza Strip from 6.6 to 5.7, respectively.¹⁴

One of the pitfalls of predicting population sizes is that demographers often apply yesterday’s or today’s fertility rates to tomorrow’s forecast. By assuming Israeli Arab fertility rates from the 1960s (which averaged between 9 and 10 births per woman), Israeli demographers projected that Israeli Arabs would overtake Israeli Jews before 1990. When the Israeli Arab fertility rate dropped to 5.4 in the early 1980s and to 4.7 in the second half of that decade, demographers applied the new rate to their next series of forecasts. However, by 2005, the Israeli Arab rate had dropped even further, to 4.0, reflecting the progressive economic development in the Arab sector, and echoing the more dramatic drops reported throughout the Middle East. To date, however, Israeli demographers have not readjusted their forecasts in light of changes in fertility level. This consideration—the forward-reaching effects of changing cultural attitudes or economic conditions—is vital to any demographic forecast.

Adding to the demographic pessimism, moreover, most forecasters have dismissed the possibility of significant future Jewish immigration. In this, they repeat the errors of the 1980s, when a leading Israeli demographer maintained that Soviet Jews would never come to Israel in significant numbers—just one decade before almost one million did.¹⁵ After all, the American Jewish community—the largest outside Israel—has a burgeoning Orthodox sector that is deepening its ties with Israel and has markedly increased its rate of immigration to Israel, in part as a result of improved economic conditions in Israel. Furthermore, rising hostility toward Jews in Western Europe is fueling immigration to Israel, as well, especially among French Jews, for whom the desire to move to Israel has never been more acute. Finally, among those consistently excluded from Israel’s census are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who live abroad, many of whom possess a powerful loyalty to Israel and end up returning when economic times improve. For instance, when Israel’s economy resumed its high annual growth in 2003, the rate of returning Israelis jumped 20 percent in 2004 and 50 percent in 2005.¹⁶

What, then, does a more factual approach to demographic trends portend for Israel’s demographic security?

In a further study undertaken by the authors, Forecast for Israel and West Bank 2025, we used corrected population data for the West Bank to update the forecasts provided for both Israeli Arabs and Jews recently released by the ICBS for 2000-2025.¹⁷ It is important to take note of a methodological shift we undertook in considering forecasts into the distant future. For the purposes of calculating the past and current populations of the region, it was important to expose the faulty demographic figures widely cited with regard to the entire region—Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Yet it is still the case that Israel has withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, rendering its population figures of questionable relevance when considering the “demographic time bomb” theory. After all, if Israel no longer rules over Gaza, and has no intention of ever ruling over it again, then the very inclusion of Gaza’s population into the “demographic question” is itself an act of distortion: Whether Israeli democracy is compromised by the prospect of a minority ruling over an Arab majority, for example, only matters in the area in which Israel is ruling today or may be ruling tomorrow. And whereas the political arrangements which will govern the West Bank in the long run are still very much an open question, it seems that those regarding the Gaza Strip are not, at least as far as Israel is concerned. Thus, the entire “demographic time bomb” theory must be re-examined in light of the respective long-term demographic prognosis for Israel and the West Bank, to the exclusion of Gaza. More significantly, with no reliable border data available since Israel transferred the Rafah border crossing to the Palestinians, a Gaza forecast based on recent demographic events would lose relevance against any, even dramatic, changes in population that might accompany recent political changes.

The study used corrected population and growth figures for Israel and the West Bank, and postulated a range of scenarios of possible growth in all the respective population groups. In the mid-growth scenario developed in the study, Israeli Jews maintain the current fertility rate of 2.7, and net immigration (aliya plus returning Israelis, minus Israelis who leave) stays at its recent 2001-2004 average of a net 20,000 per year.¹⁸ Likewise, Israeli Arab fertility rates continue their downward trend from the current 4.0 to 3.0 by 2025. Even if we use United Nations data, which show fertility rates above those issued by the PCBS, the fertility rates of Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank still fall gradually from 5.4 to 3.24.¹⁹ Within these parameters, in 2025 the Jewish population would form a 63 percent majority in Israel and the West Bank—down slightly from the current level of 67 percent. Moreover, in a scenario adjusted for greater Jewish immigration and fertility rates boosted by rising Orthodox birthrates, the proportion of Jews would instead grow to a 71 percent majority of the total population. This situation is hardly unfeasible: Jewish fertility rates over the past five years are now above the highest level predicted by the ICBS, while the Israeli Arab sector is approaching the lowest fertility levels of the ICBS forecast. The only possible challenge to the Jewish position, barring unforeseen events, would be from large-scale Arab immigration into a provisional West Bank Palestinian state from the Gaza Strip or abroad.