The binational weapon

By Omar Karmi

from: the Jordan Times (used w/permission)

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM - It was perhaps, in hindsight, a much more innocuous remark than how it played out. On Jan. 8, in remarks to a Reuters correspondent, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia (Abu Alaa) said the policies of the Israeli government under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would leave Palestinians no choice but to "go for a one-state solution."

The statement was immediately commented upon in Washington, where Secretary of State Colin Powell said he was opposed to a one-state solution and reaffirmed the United States' commitment to the two-state solution with an independent Palestinian state bordering Israel.

In Israel, the comment was equally quickly, but much less diplomatically, brushed off.

"Abu Alaa has threatened to call for a binational state, but he may just as well call for a Palestinian state on the moon," an adviser to Sharon, Zalman Shoval, said on Jan. 9. "This is an empty threat that Israel is obviously not going to think seriously about."

Palestinian officials, meanwhile, say Qureia didn't really "threaten" anything.

"[Qureia's statement] isn't anything new," says Ghassan Khatib , Palestinian minister of labour. "It isn't suggesting the binational solution as a preference. What Qureia was saying was simply that if Israel's settlement policy is going to continue, it will preclude a two-state solution, and this [binational solution] is what we will be left with."

"It can be seen as a threat, but it's telling the Israelis something they already know."

The "threat" is demographic. In December 2003, a study by an Israeli demographer, Sergio Della Pergola, head of Hebrew University's Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics, projected that by 2020 the total population of Israel and the Palestinian areas would be about 14.35 million, with the Jewish population comprising 44 to 47 per cent of the total population.

By 2050, according to the projection, the Jewish share could be down to 35 to 37 per cent.

The current population in the Palestinian territories and Israel is about 9.3 million, some 45 per cent Palestinian and 55 per cent Jewish.

Such demographic projections are not new, and have for quite some time been at the heart of Israeli left-wing policies vis-