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Column One: Time to end demographic fear-mongering
[Jpost] On Monday morning, the Deputy Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) Brig.-Gen. Guy Goldstein and the deputy head of the Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria, Col. Uri Mandes, shocked members of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee when Mandes claimed that there are three million Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria today.Committee chairman Avi Dichter noted that if their numbers are true, then the Palestinian population has tripled in 25 years. Absent mass immigration ‐ and the PA has experienced net emigration for the past 23 years ‐ there is no way that could have happened. As Dichter said, if their numbers are true, the Guinness Book of World Records needs to be alerted. Mandes wasn’t done. He said there are two million Palestinians in Gaza. Added together with Israel’s 1.8 million Arab citizens, if Mandes’s numbers are accurate, then there is population parity between Jews and Arabs west of the Jordan River. Mandes acknowledged that the Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria (which COGAT oversees) isn’t the source of his data. The Palestinian Authority is the source. What Mandes failed to acknowledge is that the PA’s demographic data was exposed as fraudulent 13 years ago. In late 2004, the American-Israel Demographic Research Group (AIDRG), an independent team of American and Israeli researchers, published an in-depth assessment of the PA’s population numbers. But that’s the thing. His numbers are inaccurate. And, in any case, as any student of history knows - such problems are solvable. Ask the Germans of the Sudetes, or the 13+ million Russians who lived in the republics before the collapse of Soviet Union. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2018-03-30 |
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