The latest demographic survey of the Palestinian population by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics overestimates the number of Palestinians resident between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan by around 1.2 million, a leading Israeli expert on demography has told The Algemeiner.
Ambassador Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli diplomat who now works as lecturer and consultant and is well-known in policy circles for his research on Palestinian and Israeli demography, said that the Palestinian statistics, released yesterday, “are inflated by more than 1 million in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and by almost 400,000 in Gaza.”
According to the Palestinian statistics bureau, there are over 6 million Palestinians living west of the Jordan; Ettinger calculates the number at 4.8 million.
The inflated numbers are a key factor behind the current claim that Palestinians will outnumber Jews living in Israel and the Palestinian territories by 2016. Similarly false claims have been made in previous years, triggering the politically-loaded conclusion that Israel, in supposedly becoming a country where a Jewish minority rules over an Arab majority, has effectively emerged as an apartheid state.
Ettinger identified several methodological flaws in the official Palestinian count. “According to their own records, they include over 400,000, mostly in Judea and Samaria, who are abroad for more than a year,” he said. This contradicts, Ettinger said, the “international standards” which dictate that a person who lives outside his or her country for more than a year should not be included in a count of the resident population.
“The only entity that doesn’t follow this practice is the Palestinian statistics bureau,” Ettinger said.