If not of “genocide,” many, also within the Catholic Church, accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing and of expelling the Palestinian population from their land. And recent reports, still unclear, of the transfer of several hundred Gazans to countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Africa would seem to confirm this accusation.
But is it really so ?
In effect, data from the latest report on worldwide migration, for 2024, from the United Nations Population Division record 272,481 immigrants and 4,233,248 emigrants residing abroad for what goes by the name of the “State of Palestine” (the West Bank and Gaza), representing a total loss of nearly 4 million inhabitants, 3,960,767 to be precise. This relative to a population of 5,495,000 residing in that state on the same date.
Which leads the demographer Roberto Volpi, author of an in-depth and far-sighted analysis of data provided by the Population Division – in a book entitled “Promised Land,” recently released in Italy by Solferino – to write that “in the ranking of the 160 countries in the world with at least one million inhabitants, the State of Palestine, with a migratory movement equivalent to 72.1 percent of its population, goes straight to the top spot, without any rivals capable of challenging it, due to the loss of inhabitants attributable to migratory movement.”
Just the opposite of what is happening in the State of Israel. Volpi writes :
“Also at the end of 2024, Israel boasted, out of a population of 9,387,000, a positive migration balance of 1,767,000 people, equal to 18.8 percent of its population. And so today the State of Israel has about 3.9 million more inhabitants than the State of Palestine, while without movements of inhabitants it would have almost 2 million fewer.”
And he continues :
“This is the disconcerting result that Hamas has produced since it has lorded it over what is called the Gaza Strip. Everyone is looking at the deaths – counted by Hamas itself – caused by the Israeli army’s completely disproportionate response to the Hamas terrorist attack of October 2023. This is undeniably just. But almost no one registers the fact that the ‘State of Palestine’ should have 9.5 million inhabitants but has only 5.5 million, while Israel, which without active migratory movements would have 7.6 million inhabitants, boasts 9.4 million : not almost two million fewer, but almost two million more than the State of Palestine.”
Palestinians who emigrated abroad at the end of 2024 almost all went to the Middle East and North Africa. Their distribution is as follows : 2,380,000 in Jordan, 615,000 in Syria, 491,000 in Lebanon, 322,000 in Libya, 132,000 in Saudi Arabia, 98,000 in Egypt, and 56,000 in the United Arab Emirates. Their presence in Europe is minimal, at 29,000, and in North America, at 13,000.
Volpi comments : “This is very short-range and therefore poor emigration, as it is unable to reach richer but more distant destinations, and it is also flexible and contingent, in the sense that it is closely tied to political contingencies. Their very heavy emigration to Jordan moreover suggests that the migratory flow from the West Bank is also intense.”
So – one might again ask – do all these data confirm that in effect the Palestinians, induced and almost forced to emigrate, are victims not only of oppression by Hamas and the violence of Jewish settlers, but also of a plan of ethnic cleansing on the part of the State of Israel ?
Not at all. Because there are still other data that cast serious doubts on this thesis.
In 1949, within the borders of the newly formed State of Israel, there were about 650,000 Jews and 160,000 Arabs, plus 20,000 who were neither Jews nor Arabs. Jews were 78 percent of the population and Arabs 19.5 percent.
In 2022, still within the State of Israel, there were 7.69 million Jews, 2.26 million Arabs, and 498,000 “others.” With overwhelming growth compared to 1949, not only in the number of Jews but also of Arabs with Israeli citizenship, who at that point accounted for 21 percent of Israel’s entire population.
The latest figures released by the Israel’s office of statistics, updated as of December 31, 2024 – and so more than a year after the October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas and the subsequent ruthless attack on Gaza – record within Israel’s borders 7,707,000 Jews, 2,104,000 Arabs with Israeli citizenship, and 210,000 “others”: these latter reduced from 5 to 2 percent of the population as they consist of foreign workers, especially Asians, who have had to repatriate in large numbers due to the war, but with Arabs remaining 21 percent of the population.
Also the nearly 5.5 million Arabs living in the “State of Palestine,” that is, the West Bank and Gaza, have not registered significant changes during these times of war. But this again does not rule out the possibility that among their emigrants there are some who left Judea and Samaria because of the violence of Jewish settlers.
But the key point is another. It is precisely those more than two million Palestinian Arab citizens living in Israel, with their representatives in parliament, governments, the supreme court, and heading up the country’s biggest bank, with prominent roles in hospitals and universities, as well as living peacefully in cities like Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, here 300,000 strong. None of them is pressured to leave. And Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence unequivocally affirms the equality of all citizens without distinction, an equality that cannot be undermined even by the highly criticized law passed in 2018 on the Jewish nature of the state.
Conversely, not a single Jew is permitted to be a citizen of the “State of Palestine.” As for Arab countries, suffice it to say that in 1947 about 850,000 Jews lived there, while today there are fewer than 10,000. Christians have also been steadily declining in the State of Palestine, starting with the 1995 Oslo Accords, which assigned administration of the territory to the Palestinian Authority. In Bethlehem, Christians, who then comprised 60 percent of the city’s inhabitants, now represent 12 percent.
In short, despite a few episodes in its support the thesis of a general Israeli desire to expel Palestinians from the territories in which they live is not supported by the data recalled heretofore.
Nor should it be overlooked that the twelfth point of the peace plan for Gaza, also accepted by Israel, states verbatim :
“No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.”
But there’s also one final aspect of the issue that must be considered. And it is the different demographic dynamics of the two populations, Jewish and Palestinian.
For a long time Israel’s fear was that in a future coexistence between the two populations, whether in two neighboring states or within the borders of a single state, the prolific Palestinians would in any case numerically outnumber the Jews.
But here the reality also says the opposite. Since 2018 the fertility of the Jewish population has surpassed that of the Arab citizens of Israel, and has since remained above the average of three children per woman, an absolute primacy among advanced countries. And this is true not only among the ultra-Orthodox but in the Jewish population as a whole.
Volpi comments and concludes, based on both the wave of Palestinian migration and these different birth rates :
“And so Israel, which viewed the differing demographic dynamics of the two countries with great concern, today, after 18 years of Hamas’s absolute power in Gaza and the organization’s policies of war and terrorism against it, can now dismiss the demographic challenge as surmounted for many decades to come, and it may be said forever. Its population is rapidly growing, while, incredibly, that of Palestine appears, despite its very young average age, as a population in grave decline – and this, let it be clear, began well before the terrible October 7, 2023.
*
Yet it should be noted that on November 19 a group of predominantly Palestinian Christians published in Jerusalem “An ecumenical witness for equality and a just peace in Palestine/Israel,” which not only rejects as “colonialist” the peace plan negotiated by the United States and approved by the United Nations Security Council, but also relaunches the accusation against Israel of “committing genocide.”
Among those who signed this manifesto are the Latin patriarch emeritus of Jerusalem Michel Sabbah, the Greek Orthodox archbishop Attallah Hanna, the Lutheran bishop emeritus of the Holy Land Munib Younan, the Jewish Jesuit and Israeli citizen David Neuhaus, and the monk Alessandro Barchi of the Little Family of the Annunciation founded by Fr. Giuseppe Dossetti, with a monastery near Ramallah.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry : traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.