Associated Press
RAMALLAH, West Bank - The Palestinian population in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem has reached 3.76 million, up from 2.89 million a decade ago, according to census results released Saturday.
Only 208,000 Palestinians were counted in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, which is sought by the Palestinians as a future capital, said Luay Shabaneh, head of the Palestinian Central Statistics Bureau. Demographics play a crucial role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, with higher population figures potentially bolstering Palestinian territorial demands. The unexpectedly low figure for east Jerusalem - it fell even below an estimate of 210,000 in the 1997 census - was immediately challenged by Palestinian politicians. In 1997, census-takers were barred by Israel from going door-to-door and based their result on projections. This time, census volunteers conducted an actual count, working discretely to avoid confrontations with Israeli authorities, Shabaneh said.'Population growth leveled off somewhat'
However, Hatem Abdel Kader, an adviser on Jerusalem affairs to Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, said he didn't believe the Jerusalem figures were reliable. "We doubt these numbers," he said, adding that he believes many Jerusalem homes were not visited by census-takers.
The number of Palestinians with Jerusalem residents rights may be considerably higher than those actually living in the city. With housing scarce and relatively expensive in east Jerusalem, many Palestinians with Jerusalem residency rights have settled in nearby West Bank suburbs.
In early December, some 6,200 census-takers fanned out across the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, going house to house to collect information.
Palestinians have one of the highest birth rates in the world, forcing Israel to consider the possibility that Jews, despite ongoing Jewish immigration, will one day be a minority in historic Palestine, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. In September 2007, Israel's population included 5.45 million Jews, 1.4 million Arabs and 310,000 others, according to Israeli government figures.Presenting the census results at a news conference, Shabaneh said that Palestinian population growth remains high, but as leveled off somewhat. Pre-census projections had predicted a population of 3.9 million.
According to actual results, 3.76 Palestinians live in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, the territories the Palestinians want for a future state. That includes 2.345 million in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and 1.416 million in Gaza, Shabaneh said.
Fertility
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, and probably long before, the proportion of children born to the Palestinian Arabs-their fertility-has been among the highest recorded for any population. The average number of children born to a Palestinian woman who lived through her childbearing years (the total fertility rate [TFR]) was slightly more than 7. The high fertility of Palestinians living in Palestine remained constant from Ottoman times until the late 1970s, when it began to diverge by regions. In the late 1970s, fertility among residents of the Gaza Strip actually began to rise, reaching more than an average of 7.6 children (TFR of 7.62) in 1979 before it decreased slightly. On the West Bank, fertility declined more rapidly. The Palestine Demographic Survey of 1995, found that the Gaza TFR. was 7.41, that of the West Bank, 5.44. In Israel, Palestinian fertility remained high until the 1970s, when it began to drop quickly, reaching a TFR of 4.9 in 1983 and 4.6 in 1989. The fertility of Palestinians in Israel remained at approximately that level in 2000.
There was considerable difference in the fertility of Muslim and Christian Palestinians during the British Mandate and particularly after 1948. During the Mandate period, the average Christian woman had two-thirds as many children as the average Muslim woman. In Israel, that figure was even lower. In the 1960s and 1970s, Christian Palestinian women in Israel had on average less than half as many children as Muslim Palestinian women. This differential was most likely due to cultural and economic variation. Christian women tended to marry later, thus leaving less time for childbearing. In 1931, for example, Mandate statistics show that 75 percent of the Muslim women aged fifteen to forty-four were married, but only 65 percent of the Christians. Whereas one-third of the Muslim women aged fifteen to nineteen were married, one-fifth of the Christians were. Christians were better educated and more urban: in 1931, 76 percent of Christians were urban, 25 percent of Muslims; 70 percent of Christian males over age twenty-one were literate, 18 percent of Muslim males). Both these factors traditionally reduce fertility .Christians, at least from the 1960s on, were also more likely to use methods of artificial birth control. Conversely, Muslim women married and began to have children early. In the 1970s, the average Palestinian Muslim woman had already had two or more children by age twenty-four, and an average of nearly six children by age thirty-four. Very few Muslim women used contraceptive techniques.
Muslims were a large majority of the Palestinians, so their fertility set the pattern. Fertility decline, never great, was affected by a change in Muslim marriage practices. In 1931, three-fourths of Muslim women twenty to forty-four were married, slightly more than half in 1967. Change in patterns of early marriage was particularly marked: 45 percent of the females fifteen to nineteen (Muslims and Christians) were married in 1931; by 1967 the number of married females in this age group had fallen to 19 percent on the West Bank and 14 percent in Gaza. By 1990, the number of married fifteen- to nineteen-year-old females had dropped to approximately 10 percent (Ennab, 1994). The 1995 Palestine Demographic Survey found a median age of marriage of twenty-three for males and eighteen for females.
Outside Palestine, Palestinian fertility generally remained high. Palestinian women in Syria, for example, had on average two to three more children than native Syrian women. Palestinians in Jordan experienced even higher fertility than Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza, a TFR of 7.6 in 1979 and 7.4 in 1989. In other regions, however, Palestinian fertility declined. The reasons for this varied by country. To a large extent, the fertility of Palestinians has declined when their economic status has risen, a phenomenon seen worldwide in most cultures. Palestinian fertility in Egypt was two-thirds of that in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian fertility in Kuwait initially was high (6.4 TFR in 1970), but was below 4.5 by the mid-1970s. Little is known of the demographic picture of Palestinians outside the Middle East. If they follow the pattern of other Arab migrants to Europe and the United States, their fertility probably slowly adjusted to that of their countries of residence. By 1990, their fertility would have been more similar to that of those countries than that of the West Bank or Gaza, though still higher than the European standard.
Despite changes in factors such as age of marriage, the Palestinian population will increase rapidly for generations. Even if Palestinians immediately and precipitously lowered their fertility, the population would still greatly increase.' This is due to the effect of past years of high fertility on the age structure. So many children were born in the past thirty years that the population necessarily will increase as these children have children themselves. In fact, there is little to indicate that the fertility of these children will drop precipitously. Even if Palestinian fertility in Gaza and on the West Bank were to fall very rapidly, the population would still double in less than thirty years.
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