The ticking Palestinian bomb that Israel can't defuse

Strangely, given the strong resonance that numbers have in Israeli minds, the demographic equation has not been a major component of Palestinian strategy against Israel until recently. True, Arafat has been quoted in the past referring to Palestinian wombs as his people's best weapon, and Palestinian mothers have been known to call their children "Jihad" (Holy War), anticipating their little ones' sacrifices for the Palestinian struggle. But Palestinian birthrates are not a conscious expression of patriotism. In traditional Arab societies, "you're a better man if you have more children," explained Nusseibeh. "It has nothing to do with Israel." Even Soffer agrees: "I don't think when they go to bed, they think of Palestine. It's the prestige of having a large family that matters."

According to Goldscheider, the decline of Muslim fertility in the 20th century was actually "delayed indirectly by Israeli policies that segregated Arabs and gave them very few incentives to have fewer children. Palestinians have a very high fertility rate because they are extraordinarily poor," he said. "They have no jobs except for the work doled out by Israel, their women are subservient, the schooling system is bad and there are no benefits to having fewer children. They have children so they can work and support the family. In Jewish Israel, there are plenty of reasons to have fewer kids: You can have a bigger apartment, buy more goods, invest in your children's education."

(That said, bedrooms and politics do sometimes mix. Jewish Israeli fertility rates are notably higher than in the West due to religious and ideological factors, said Soffer. Ultra-Orthodox women, encouraged by their rabbis and husbands to enlarge their pious tribe, have an average of seven children -- just like Gazan women. Settlers, who believe it is their duty to people the occupied territories with ever more Jews, also have huge families despite the economic incentives to have fewer children in a modern society. Even among secular Jews, "you hear people say that we have to compensate for the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust or that we should have more children because we live in a hostile region," said Soffer.)

But Palestinians are starting to catch on. "More and more now, you hear people say, 'We're going to win by numbers,'" said Nusseibeh. In a Palestinian textbook published in 2000, 11th-grade students are told that "the increase of fertility rates is a demographic weapon that can be used in resisting the occupation. It plays a positive role in the Arab-Israeli conflict." Although Nusseibeh himself has used demographic arguments to pressure Israel into negotiations for a long time ("I always assumed it was a good weapon -- better than guns, certainly"), he said Palestinians were not interested in numbers and thought him crazy. "I was criticized by my colleagues after I was quoted in Newsweek in the early 1980s saying, 'Let them annex us.' I wrote: Annex us and very quickly we'll turn Israel into an Arab or bi-national state. But other Palestinians said: We don't want to be annexed, we want a Palestinian state."

According to people who knew him well, the late Faisal Husseini, Nusseibeh's predecessor as the head of Orient House, the Palestinian office representing Arafat in Jerusalem, was also fond of saying: "It's not Israel who is giving us a state, it's we Palestinians who are giving them one. If Israelis don't give us a state, they'll lose theirs."

But Palestinian calculations have gone beyond the call for an independent state in the past few years. As disaffection toward the Palestinian Authority -- a Palestinian state in embryo -- grew among ordinary Palestinians and intellectuals, some Palestinians began reconsidering their whole strategy, according to Nusseibeh, and calling instead for the right of return. "The two slogans during the first intifada were freedom and independence. Return wasn't a major concern. At Madrid [where the two-state solution was first officially proposed, in 1991] people knew return was not in the cards. But people got second thoughts when Arafat came back from Tunis and they saw what he was like, what the Palestinian Authority was like," said Nusseibeh. "Palestinians got the worst of two worlds: Aspects of the occupation still prevailed because of the limits on freedom of movement; at the same time they saw the worst aspects of the Palestinian Authority: corruption, inefficiency, instances of brutality."

While Arafat still publicly supports the idea of peace based on two separate states, the competing idea of a bi-national state and the call for the return of refugees (with the understanding that Arabs will vastly outnumber Jews) have become increasingly popular among Palestinians radicalized by the failure of the 8-year-old Oslo Accords to significantly improve their lot and by 15 months of brutal, costly intifada. People like Nusseibeh who dare speak out against the return of refugees today are considered traitors, while those who trumpet the issue become instant political heroes. The shift away from a two-state solution -- which most analysts agree is the only practical blueprint for peace -- is not final, however. "It depends on how things develop on the ground," said Nusseibeh. "If Sharon slices [the occupied territories] up and creates four bits of Palestine, Palestinians will say it's obviously not good enough," and they will demand the whole pie.

On the Israeli side, numbers have also been corralled into supporting the latest fad: the building of a country-long fortified fence that would separate Israelis from their Palestinian neighbors and protect them from the hordes of terrorists pressing at their gates. The more numerous and hostile Arabs there are, the more urgent the need for the wall, says Soffer, who apologizes for "talking about walls at the beginning of the 21st century" with the standard argument that "unfortunately, Israel isn't in Europe." While he crisscrosses the country these days, meeting with ordinary people and decision-makers, Soffer, who describes himself as "both a dove and a hawk," does more than spread alarm. Along with ambitious politicians who have jumped on the issue in the hope of challenging Sharon, Soffer has become one of the major advocates of "unilateral separation," an idea first discussed by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. "Never in my life did I get such positive feedback," said Soffer, whose monograph is now in its third edition. "People are frustrated. They feel that they are in a cul-de-sac. But I'm coming with a threat and a solution."

Combining the perspectives of Israel's political left and right, unilateral separation appeals to a majority of Israelis who feel that the idea of Greater Israel and real peace are both Utopian: Israel cannot sign an end-of-conflict deal with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, nor can it continue occupying the West Bank and Gaza and ruling over millions of Arabs. Therefore, Israel must pull out, regroup and physically protect its new borders -- a literal implementation of the "Iron Wall" against Arab hostility called for in 1923 by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of revisionist Zionism and the spiritual father of right-wing Israeli leaders from Menachem Begin through Ariel Sharon.

"I prefer to be in a very strong, small ghetto than exposed to Palestinian threats," said Soffer, summing up the feelings of many. "Of course, the ghetto can't be too small and shouldn't become smaller and smaller. I need to defend my area."

But the problem is: Where do you plant the fence? Whether Israel should carve out East Jerusalem to get rid of Arab-dominated neighborhoods, transfer pockets of land in the north populated by Israeli Arabs to Palestinian sovereignty, surrender strategic assets like the Jordan Valley and evacuate settlements in the West Bank and Gaza are still highly divisive political questions that numbers alone can't answer. Goldscheider, the American professor, dismissively sums up the arguments of those who advocate building a fence: "All the good reasons for separation and giving Palestinians their own state -- political, moral, military reasons -- don't work [in convincing Israelis to end the occupation], so you might as well try neutral statistical arguments and say: 'Watch out, they'll outbreed us.' But that's not the real issue. The real issue is statehood and empowerment, Palestinians having control over their own lives." And to address that, diplomacy, not demography, is the only answer.

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