JERUSALEM, Israel – In 1997, the Palestinian Authority issued a report called “Demographic Indicators of the Palestinian Territory, 1997-2015,” based on a census carried out by the PA’s Central Bureau of Statistics that year. It projected that the Arab population west of the Jordan River will by 2015 outnumber the Jewish population.

These numbers were immediately adopted by such prominent Israeli demographers as the University of Haifa’s Arnon Soffer and Hebrew University’s Sergio Della Pergola, who have both warned that by 2020 Jews will make up between 40% and 46% of the overall population of Israel and the territories. The Palestinian projections, which place the Arab population of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip at 3.83 million and the Israeli Arab population at 1.33 million, for a total of 5.16 million Arabs west of the Jordan River, put Israel with its 5.24 million Jews at the precipice of demographic parity with the Arabs.

Largely in reaction to these statistics, Prime Minister Sharon decided a year ago to adopt the Labor Party’s campaign platform and withdraw the Israeli army from Gaza and northern Samaria and forcibly remove the Jews living in those areas from their homes. In his interview with Israel’s leading daily newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, in December 2003, which was the curtain raiser for Sharon’s announcement of his policy shift later that month, Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: “Above all hovers the cloud of demographics. It will come down on us not in the end of days, but in just another few years. We are approaching a point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All we want is the right to vote. The day they get it we will lose everything.”

A new study produced by a team of American and Israeli researchers presented last week at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation in Washington indicates that the Palestinian report on which the Israeli government has been basing its policies may be largely fraudulent. The team, led by American businessman Bennett Zimmerman and Israeli strategic consultant Yoram Ettinger, compared the PCBS data to birth and death records published annually by the PA’s Health Ministry; to immigration and emigration data from Israel’s Border Police at the international crossing points into the Palestinian Authority and at Ben-Gurion Airport, and to internal migration records of Palestinians from the territories into Israel recorded by the Israeli Interior Ministry.

The researchers also compared Palestinian population data from the PCBS to voting records compiled by the Palestinian Central Elections Commission before the 1996 Palestinian elections and last week’s Palestinian elections, as well as to the Israeli Civil Administration’s population survey of Palestinians carried out in the 1990s before the transfer of authority over Palestinian population records to the P.A.

The PCBS forecast was further compared to Palestinian population surveys carried out by UNRWA and the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics in the mid-1990s, and to World Bank Palestinian population studies. All of the team’s comparative analyses led to the conclusion that the Palestinian population forecasts upon which Israel is basing its current policy of withdrawal and uprooting of Israeli communities in the territories are faulty in the extreme.

The PCBS count includes the 230,000 Arab residents of Jerusalem. Yet these Arabs are already counted by the ICBS as part of Israel’s population, which means that they are counted twice.

The PCBS numbers also project Palestinian natural growth as 4% to 5% a year, among the highest in the world and significantly higher than the natural population growth of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Yet Palestinian Ministry of Health records published annually since 1996 show that Palestinian natural growth rates in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza average around 3%. In 2002, the Palestinian Ministry of Health retroactively raised its numbers, and yet even the doctored figures never extended beyond 3.7%.The original data show a steady pattern of decrease in natural growth leading to a natural growth rate in 2003 of just 2.6%.

Indeed, the total fertility rate of Palestinian women has been trending downward in recent years. Palestinian women in Judea and Samaria averaged 4.1 children in 1999 and 3.4 in 2003. Palestinian women in Gaza averaged 5 children each in 1999 and 4.7 in 2003. The multiyear average of Israel’s compound growth rate from 1990 to 2004 is 2.5%.And even as Israel’s growth rate went down to 1.7% between 2000 and 2004, a similar decline occurred among Palestinians in Gaza, where growth decreased from 3.9% to 3.0%, and Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, where growth declined to 1.8% from 2.7%.

The PCBS also projected a net population increase of 1.5% a year as a result of immigration from abroad. But the study’s authors found that except for 1994, when the bulk of the Palestinian leadership and their families entered the areas from abroad, emigration from the Palestinian areas has outstripped immigration every year.

Aside from this, the PCBS numbers include some 200,000 Palestinians who lived abroad in 1997. This fact was corroborated by an October 14 press release by the Palestinian Central Elections Commission, which stated that “200,000 eligible voters are living abroad.” That is, 200,000 adults. Since almost half of Palestinians are under the age of 18, in all likelihood, based on the elections commission statement, the number of Palestinians living abroad and yet counted as living in the areas is 400,000. The number of Palestinians living abroad constitutes 13% of the Palestinians counted in 1997 and forms the basis of the projections of that population’s growth in spite of the fact that they don’t live in the territories.

The report also shows that while the Israeli Interior Ministry announced in November 2003 that in the preceding decade some 150,000 residents of the Palestinian Authority had legally moved to Israel (including Jerusalem), these 150,000 residents remain on the Palestinian population rolls. Parenthetically, this internal migration is largely responsible for the anomalous 3.1% annual growth in the Israeli Arab population. Absent this internal migration, the Israeli Arab natural growth rate is 2.1% – that is, below the Israeli Jewish growth rate.

The study presents three separate scenarios for calculating the actual Palestinian population in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip. Its authors prove that the first scenario, based on the PCBS numbers, minus the double-counted Jerusalem Arabs and minus the internal migrations, is not statistically plausible. Yet even this scenario places the Palestinian population at 3.06 million, or 770,000 less than the number that currently informs Israeli decision-makers.

The average of the last two scenarios, which corrected for the Palestinians living abroad and were based on base populations comprised of ICBS Palestinian population survey projections from the 1990s and Palestinian voting records in 1996 and 2004, brought the final projected number of Palestinians in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria to 2.42 million – nearly a third less than the 3.83 million figure currently being used.

The study, which has been accepted by prominent American demographers Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt and Murray Feshbach, shows that, contrary to common wisdom, the Jewish majority west of the Jordan River has remained stable since 1967. In 1967 Jews made up 64.1% of the overall population and in 2004 they made up 59.5%. Inside Israel proper, including Jerusalem, Jews make up 80% of the population.

The entire 117-page report can be accessed on-line at www.pademographics.com. The study’s authors have assembled this week in Jerusalem, where they will report the findings of their study to the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Wednesday.