Around two months ago, the director of the Palestinian Authority’s Central Bureau of Statistics issued an unusual statement, one that in more normal times would have resonated on both sides of the Green Line. Dr. Ula Awad announced that for the first time, according to the bureau’s findings, parity exists in terms of the number of Jews and Arabs living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Each group numbers approximately 7 million people, she maintains. Among the Palestinians, some 3.2 million live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 2.1 million in the Gaza Strip, and within Israel there are 1.7 million Arab citizens.
The announcement was swallowed up amid the political and security turmoil in Israel, but it constitutes a critical issue for both societies. In a period in which the discourse on territorial separation between the two sides is waning, another discourse is intensifying: Israeli-Palestinian, intra-Israeli and intra-Palestinian debates over the “demographic genie,” an issue that has been integral to the conflict from its inception.
The demographic question has always been a central definer of the Zionist movement, which sought to move a dispersed Jewish collective to a single territory, and to forge in it a sovereign state in which it constitutes the majority. For more than a century, two currents have existed in the demographic discourse on the Jewish side, consistent with Zionism’s central tenets. One current embodies anxiety about being swallowed up into an Arab majority, with which it believes there is no possibility of a joint political entity,
— source Jews For Justice For Palestinians | Michael Milshtein | Sep 22, 2022