The March issue of The Atlantic Monthly includes a summary of the study of the population of the West Bank Gaza
For some time now
has been haunted by fears of demographic doom — fears that a swelling Arab population, both in the Palestinian territories and in Israel
itself, will make the Jewish state politically untenable. Now a team of American and Israeli researchers insists that those fears are based on dramatic overestimates of present-day Palestinian population size and birth rates. Israel
These overestimates, they argue, are derived from 1997 projections of the Palestine Bureau of Statistics (rather than from actual population counts), which predicted that the Palestinian population would grow by four to five percent a year, and that the occupied territories would experience net immigration.
In fact, judging from birth data and border entry/exit data, Palestinian birth rates have dropped far below the projected level, while the
and West Bank
have experienced net emigration. The authors estimate the actual Palestinian population at about 2.4 million — not 3.8 million, as commonly asserted. And overall, they add, the Jewish share of the population in Gaza
and the occupied territories has declined only slightly over the past forty years, from 64 percent in 1967 to just under 60 percent today. Israel
A Powerpoint presentation summary of the report provides a lot of the background and basis of the study. This chart may provide an insight into one of the rationales for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza