JERUSALEM – Israel must quickly withdraw from Judea and Samaria to ensure a Jewish majority by separating from the large Palestinian Arab population within the territories slated for evacuation, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert claimed during a speech yesterday.

Olmert and top officials from his Kadima Party have stated many times the planned uprooting of Judea and Samaria's Jewish communities is being carried out due to urgent demographic issues that threaten Israel's Jewish make up should the country retain Judea and Samaria.

But the Israeli government and the media here largely have ignored a new study recently presented to the United States Congress which contends the evacuation is based on erroneous Palestinian Arab population data (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49159) and predicts that in 20 years Jews will outnumber Arabs by two-to-one even if all territories are maintained.

The study found the current Palestinian Arab population is inflated by almost 50 percent, with some major cities even being counted twice.

"Time is not neutral. It is acting against us," said Olmert yesterday at a speech in Jerusalem at the Zionist Congress, a meeting of top Jewish leaders. "If we wish to ensure the existence and future of a Jewish and democratic Israel, we must act now, in the next few years, and shape the permanent borders of the State of Israel. This is my responsibility."

Olmert was referring to his withdrawal plan.

Judea and Samaria are also commonly called the West Bank. The territories are within rocket firing range of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Israel's international airport.

Olmert's party recently announced it is drawing plans to evacuate parts of Jerusalem as well, also stating demographic trends as the impetus.

About 200,000 Jews live in Judea and Samaria. Israel's security barrier, still under construction in certain areas, cordons off nearly 95 percent of the territory from Israel's pre-1967 borders. Olmert seeks to vacate the vast majority of Judea and Samaria – all areas that fall outside the barrier.

"It is our duty to prevent any danger of losing this Jewish majority or creating an inseparable bi-national reality in the land of Israel," stated Olmert at yesterday's event.

Israel largely relies on Palestinian Arab population data collected by the Palestinian Authority Bureau of Statistics, which claims there are 3.8 million Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, Judea and Samaria.

The number is also accepted by the U.S. and the international community.

But a new study led by American researchers, titled "Forecast for Israel and the West Bank 2025," found the actual current Palestinian Arab population in Judea and Samaria is 1.4 million, with 1.1 million in Gaza for a total of 2.4 million Palestinian Arabs.

It contended an Israeli withdrawal based on demography is groundless because Israel's Jews will more than double Arabs in 20 years and that alarming Palestinian Arab birthrates claimed by the PA and quoted by Olmert are greatly exaggerated.

The study, led by American researcher Bennet Zimmerman, has been lauded by top demographers in the U.S. and Israel and was found to be credible by members of Congress and top officials in the American and Israeli intelligence communities.

The Israeli government, though, officially states it is browsing the study. It has yet to express any conclusion regarding the study's findings.

Zimmerman's study could directly affect the Judea and Samaria withdrawal, which largely dominates Israeli news, but the country's media agencies have given it scant coverage.

The study said Jewish birthrates are far outstripping Palestinian Arab rates, and Israel's own statistics fail to account for even low levels of Jewish immigration when calculating national demographic trends.

Zimmerman's team found extreme faults in the methods used by the PA to determine its population, including counting the 230,000 Arab residents of Jerusalem twice and retroactively raising growth and birth rates, which the study contends have been declining.

The PA claims a population growth rate of 4 to 5 percent per year, among the highest in the world, but Palestinian Ministry of Health records published annually since 1996 contradict the PA's own claims by stating growth rates averaging around 3 percent.

Zimmerman's study documents the PA tampered with its own data, retroactively raising its growth numbers in 2002. The new study shows a steady pattern of growth decline leading to a natural growth rate in 2003 of just 2.6 percent.

The PA projected a net population increase of 1.5 percent per year as a result of immigration from surrounding countries. But Zimmerman's researchers found that except for 1994, when the bulk of the Palestinian Arab leadership and their families entered the territories from Tunis, Palestinian Arab emigration from the area has outweighed immigration by a net negative of about 10,000 to 20,000 per year.

The study also found a dramatic and growing decline in the number of children per Palestinian Arab mother and says Palestinian Arabs actually have been moving away from Judea, Samaria and Gaza, in contrast to PA claims of large immigration numbers.

At the same time, Zimmerman's team has shown birthrates among Israeli Orthodox Jews are at the highest rates ever, and general Israeli Jewish fertility over the past five years has risen above top scenarios first considered by Israel's Bureau of Statistics. The study states Israel did not account for a likely continuation of Jewish immigration trends over the next 20 years.

Under Zimmerman's mid-case scenario, Israeli Jews maintain current fertility rates and immigration averages of 20,000 per year or 400,000 over two decades. Israeli Arab fertility rates, meanwhile, fall slowly over a 20-year period. The result is a Jewish majority in Israel in 2025 of 63 percent.

According to other likely scenarios contained in the new data, Jews could outnumber Arabs by 71 percent if Jewish fertility rates continue to rise and immigration increases further.

"It is ironic that just as we now find Israel is in the best position ever with regard to population, Olmert announces a plan to run away and give up the West Bank, claiming Israel's Jewish character is threatened," said Zimmerman.

Zimmerman's study was presented last month to a House International Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East.

"Recent studies show that the PA numbers were grossly inaccurate," subcommittee chairwoman Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., told WorldNetDaily. "I found the new study raises a whole host of questions that must be answered."

This new study confirms the demographic figures presented in the previous study published late '04 and belies Meyer London's predictions based on his own wishful thinking that Arabs will outnumber Jews in the entire Land of Israel in 25 years time. For this matter, it also refutes ANGEL's skewed figures too. (Note that the real total of Jews in Judea-Samaria is ~200,000 whereas ANGEL constantly parroted a figure double that.)

Both Sharon and Olmert's govts have ignored the findings of the previous study, so they'll obviously disregard this study as well, unless the findings are shoved into their faces and kept there. The same is true for the mainstream Israeli media, willing lackeys for Olmert and his eclectic bunch of corrupted degenerates and yes people. The question now is, will the Israeli Right rise to the challenge and manage to garner within themselves enough PR prowess to force the Israeli media and govt to tackle the findings seriously and reach appropriate conclusions?

The official Israeli treatment of these studies makes me ashamed to be Israeli.

The importance of the Zimmerman report for the US, as noted by World Net Daily, is that

almost $3 billion in United States taxpayer funds may have been provided as aid to the Palestinians in part based on fraudulent data.

“American tax dollars and other international humanitarian aid have been based on inflated population numbers which have been accepted without question by governments and aid agencies. Our researchers pointed out that money has been spent to help Palestinians who were double-counted, never born or not present in the West Bank and Gaza,” Bennet Zimmerman, head of the new study, titled “Arab Population in the West Bank and Gaza,” told WND.

Of course, one could assume that Europe might be interested in the possibility that the Palestinians may have swindled them as well.

In an article in the Summer 5766/2006 issue of Azure entitle Voodoo Demographics, Zimmerman, Seid and Weiss lay out all the ways the Palestinian Arab population was miscounted:

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[Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics] 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.

That study was probably designed by the Society to Study Crop Circles or the Underground Flying Saucer Bases in the Mojave Desert Foundation. It seems that the head of the Israeli Government does not take it seriously. Obviously he must be a fool, unless he is on to something.

Well, at least London handles reality with humor, which is better than can be said for most other anti-Zionists. After all the Israeli PM must be a prominent specialist in the field of demographic trends who can dismiss the study's findings a priori with total authority.

It couldn't be that he has knowledgable people on his staff who told him that the "study" is a pile of horse manure, could it? Nah.

There's a noticeable difference between declaring something is a load of crap and actually proving it to be so. I have yet to see anything in the way of rational arguments refuting these two studies' findings from the Israeli govt. or you. Where's your proof?

I read extensively on the Zimmerman study when it came out, and I find it to be credible and most likely accurate.

He combined three sets of statistics:

the Palestinian Census Bureau

The Immigration Authority's data on immigration/emmigration

Palestinian Election databases

Among these he found the Palestinians had counted Palestinians living abroad, Palestinians already counted by Israel, and failed to subtract others such as Palestinians emmigrated.

the major factor in the skewing of figures appears to be an exxagerated birth rate factor that did not accurately reflect a much lower birthrate. Zimmerman just corrected these errors to come up with his new figures.

It seems that Israel has been bracing against this demographic "threat" when none really exists. And that we find, yet again, that the Palestinians are fully capable of reporting false information whether its the "eye-witness" in the street or a statement from the PA's own press releases.

Shabbat Sholom Chaverim!

Just in time back to the computer to respond.

שבת שלום חברים

I can't prove that Batman doesn't exist, that the Noah's Ark story is not true, or that refugees from Atlantis didn't found the Inca Empire. But all these theories are a pile of horse manure to anyone with an ounce of sense, and so is that ridiculous population study.

20 years from now I'll be sure to rub the reality in your faces and laugh at you in this very site or wherever you'll migrate to in cyber as I cull your dismissive comments here to magnify the effect in the very likely event the study's predictions prove true or even if the Arabs just fail to outnumber the Jews in this land. In the meantime, continue having fun deriding these findings without any ability to refute them.