Overestimating the Palestinians

The April issue of The Atlantic Monthly includes a summary of the population study of the West Bank and Gaza, presented in January at the American Enterprise Institute by Bennett Zimmerman, Yoram Ettinger, and a team of others (described here):

For some time now Israel 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.

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 West Bank and Gaza 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 Israel and the occupied territories has declined only slightly over the past forty years, from 64 percent in 1967 to just under 60 percent today.

A Powerpoint presentation summary of the report provides a lot of the background and basis of the study.  The study demonstrates that erroneous starting points and inaccurate demographic assumptions can produce exponential errors when projected into the future. 

This chart may provide an insight into part of the rationale for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

A bibliography of news articles discussing the issues raised by the study is here.