Will Israel Become an Arab State?

Article written in 2004 by Jon E. Dougherty for NewsMax.

Some excerpts:

"Forecasts from the United States' Population Reference Bureau show Israel's population doubling in 45 years, that of the West Bank in 21 years and that of Gaza in 15 years. In other words, Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and Israeli Arabs will outnumber the Jewish population by 2020."

(...)

Arnon Soffer, a geography professor at Israel's Haifa University and a lecturer at the Israeli army's Staff and Command college, first warned of the impending Jewish demographic minority in the 1980s, but was widely dismissed. He predicted Arabs would outnumber Jews in both Israel proper and the occupied territories by 2010.

But Soffer has found favor with such Israeli notables as former Prime Ministers Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, as well as other Israel political, social and cultural leaders. And in February 2001, the night of his election, Sharon sent an aide to ask Soffer for a copy of his 1987 treatise about the demographic threat to Israel; it was the same study that had led Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to declare in the late 1980s that the "Palestinian womb" was his people's greatest weapon.

(...)

Soffer says he would give the Palestinians 85 – 90 percent of the West Bank, excluding small sections just over the Green Line where the Jewish settlements are concentrated — roughly the sections now being surrounded by the new security fence. And he would also give the Palestinians East Jerusalem, with the exception of places holy to Jews like the Temple Mount and Mount of Olives. "Who needs it? Let Arafat take it and go to hell," he said.

"If such a course is carried out, there will remain within the bounds of Israel in 2020 an Arab population of 1,300,000, [while the] Jewish population will then number six million. These are statistics that a Jewish-Zionist Israel can digest," he wrote. But, if borders don't change, the Israeli Jewish population in 2020 will be 6.3 million, compared to more than 8.7 million Arabs.

The only other hope is one that seems distant – massive immigration. Sharon's plan to entice a million more Jews to Israel before 2010 will have to be modified to coincide with some sort of truce with the Palestinians, a reduction in the violence besieging the country, and economic improvements.