Mere Rhetoric: Fatwa Issued To Slow Massive Palestinian Emigration, Demographic Collapse

This is staggeringly important:

Alarmed by the growing number of Palestinians who are emigrating from the Palestinian territories, the Palestinian Authority's mufti has issued a fatwa [religious decree] forbidding Muslims to leave. Sources in the PA Foreign Ministry told The Jerusalem Post that some 10,000 Palestinians have filed requests to emigrate from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the year. They said the requests had been approved.

"Every day we hear about hundreds of Palestinians who file requests for emigration with different consulates and diplomatic missions... According to our statistics, there are at least 45,000 emigration applications being reviewed by different countries." The sources said most of the applicants were young men seeking work abroad

Last month we got to sit in on a One Jerusalem conference call with Bennett Zimmerman and his American-Israel Demographic Research Group (also on the call: Rick Richman of JCI and Allen Roth of One Jerusalem). Zimmerman and his group have spent the last few years outright cracking the population numbers produced by the Palestinian Authority and used by Israel and the international community. You can find a lot of their reports and press releases here.

As opposed to a demographic time bomb, Zimmerman's team showed that Israelis have already established greater momentum and were on their way to establishing a 2/3's majority.

The PA's demographic figures are not really lies as such (although, of course, statistics...) What happens is that they build in outlandish estimates for Palestinian births and - more importantly - for movement in and out of the Palestinian territories. This isn't a secret - they have to make the numbers they're using in their equations explicit otherwise technocrats will reject them. And so they do. But until now no one has bothered pointing out how unrealistic those figures are.

And so for the last decade and a half, policy throughout the world has been based on bad statistics. The most important consequence is political and ideological - the myth of a massive Palestinian presence in East Jerusalem is used to weaken the Jewish State's claim to a United Jerusalem.

Internationally, those figures are used by donors to determine levels of aid given to the Palestinians. Domestically, Israel they cause Israel to make bad policy: trying to respond to these bad demographic figures, Israel has tried to segment Jerusalem in such a way as to guarantee a Jewish majority. This in turn has caused individual Palestinians to flood into the areas reserved for Israel with fabricated Jerusalem IDs. The ironic impact: this rush - created by policy based on a fictitious demographic threat - creates a situation where Arabs really are overwhelming Jews in parts of Jerusalem, upsetting more natural and market-based demographic trends.

This was all happening before the recent non-Civil War triggered renewed Palestinian emigration. The demographic trends move dramatically over periods of years if you add or subtract 5,000 people. The Palestinians have lost 10,000 people this year alone. And those are young men who would otherwise be creating families. The effects of this dynamic are bound to cascade.

Unless, of course, this fatwa works:

Entitled "No Permission to Emigrate from Palestine," the fatwa reads: "There has been much talk in Palestine about emigration, especially among the young people, due to the difficult security and economic situation. This is being done in search of a better life abroad. Many are continuing to rush to the gates of the embassies and consulates of the Western nations with requests for visas in order to reside permanently in those countries. "We hereby declare that emigration from the blessed lands is not permitted according to religious law. The people living in these areas must remain in their homes and must not leave them to conquerors. Those who abide by this ruling will perform an honorable deed and will support the Aksa Mosque."

Let's see - giving a religious order to people sick of the Palestinian territories because they're becoming too religious and fractured. Yeah, no way this is going to fail.

References:
* Fatwa forbids PA Muslims to emigrate [JPost]
* AUDIO EXCLUSIVE :: Bennett Zimmerman on Jerusalem Myths [One Jerusalem]
* Jewish Current Issues
* American-Israel Demographic Research Group (AIDRG)

Previously:
* Shabbat Beauty - Ofra Haza: Jerusalem of Gold [Subtitled Video]
* Arab Intellectual Recalculates Jewish Demographics
* The Costs of Giving Up Jerusalem