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bwho said that even if Israel were to give up all the liberated bterritories and return to the pre-June 1967 border, the Arabs bwould constitute between one-quarter and one-third of Israel’s btotal population. One need only consider how many Arab bKnesset members would be elected and what would be their bpower in conjunction with that of the leftist Jewish members of bthe Parliament. bAll this stems from several factors. On the one hand, the bIsraeli Arab birthrate is the fourth highest in the entire world b(larger than India’s), numbering between forty and forty-five bper thousand. This contrasts sharply with the Jewish birthrate, bwhich is between seventeen and twenty-two per thousand. But bthere is more to this. For not only do the Arabs of Israel have bmany children (an average of seven or eight per family versus bfewer than three per Jewish family), but thanks to Jewish medi- bcal facilities their babies survive to become adults. Thus, their bsurvival rate is the highest in the world. This means that their bnatural increase is an astronomical 3.5 percent a year, and they bmore than double their population every seventeen to twenty byears. (The Jewish increase is a mere 1.5 percent annually.) bBut there is yet another factor, even more meaningful. The bhuge birthrate has itself produced the phenomenon of the byoungest community in the world. Nowhere does one find such ba high percentage of young people as among the Arabs. The bmedian age for Arabs in Israel is fifteen, meaning that fully half bof them are below the age of fifteen; two thirds are under twenty- bone. The implication for future generations is obvious. An ever- bgreater percentage of Arabs are now entering the childbearing byears than are Jews. The Arabs will have a huge number of bpeople of childbearing age for many decades to come as their btremendous numbers of young people grow and themselves have blarge numbers of children. bThe Jewish median age, on the other hand, is much higher b—close to thirty—and all that is implied for future Arab growth bcan be seen, in reverse, for the Jews. This, plus the fact that the bJewish death rate (7.4 per 100) is higher than the Arab death brate (5.6 per 100), prompted the Central Bureau of Statistics in bMarch 1980 to paint the grim picture of an Arab population btripling in just one generation, while the Jewish growth would bbe less than 40 percent!
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