Three Haifa University academicians warned Thursday that if Israel continues the policies it adopted in the administered territories when they were captured in the Six-Day War just 20 years ago, the result will be a fundamental change in the nature of Israel and abnegation of the basic principles of Zionism.
Prof. Arnon Sofaer, speaking at a university-sponsored symposium a day before the 20th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, spoke ominously of the “demographic specter.”
The ratio between the Jewish and Arab populations in Israel and the territories has remained constant over the past two decades because of large-scale Arab emigration from the territories and a strong Jewish immigration movement, he said.
But now, Arab emigration has almost ceased, the Arab birthrate is rising and there has been a growing phenomenon of Jewish emigration from Israel, Sofaer noted. If this continues, by the end of the century Israel will be a bi-national state, not a Zionist state, he said.
‘A NIGHTMARE’
“It’s a nightmare,” he said, as there are already more Arab than Jewish children in the territories. According to Sofaer, the Jewish settlement movement in the territories proved not to be what was promised “Even if we were to accept the Gush Emunim claim of 60,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, that was the Arabs’ natural increase there in two years. In the Gaza Strip, the entire Jewish settlement was offset by one month’s natural increase among local Arabs,” he said.
“These figures and trends demand a reconsideration of how we expend our capacities–whether Israel has the power to extend its forces over everything and everywhere, or to concentrate our efforts in the Galilee, for example, where we have international legitimation,” he said.
Prof. Sami Smoucha observed that the past 20 years of Israeli rule over West Bank Arabs has proven that they cannot be absorbed into Israel as Israeli citizens. “The option of their gradual absorption is not valid,” he said.
Dr. Gabriel Ben-Dor, rector of Haifa University, warned of the effects of the Six-Day War on Israeli society. “I feel that the state of affairs in which there are hundreds of thousands of hewers of wood and drawers of water without political rights in Israel certainly is not something which contributes to the health of Israeli society,” he said.
(In New York meanwhile, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Binyamin Netanyahu, told an overflow audience of 3,000 attending the Sutton Place Synagogue’s Jewish Town Hall lecture series that Israel’s 1967 victory was “one of the great pivotal events in all Jewish history.”
(“Until the Six-Day War, the very existence of Israel was in doubt. Today, no one can question that Israel is here to stay. Until the Six-Day War, Israel’s boundaries were an invitation to the Arab states to cut Israel in two. Today our eastern frontier has been pushed back to the Jordan River, the Golan Heights are in our hands and Israel has defensible borders at last,” the envoy said.)
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