63.Fertility as a Political Weapon in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Population Council 2000. 3 pages. report

demographic growth could be the Palestinians' most potent weapon. The article explains the region's population dynamics as a contest between Jewish immigration and Palestinian fertility. Nowhere else in the world are populations at the two extremes of fertility transition found side by side in such a small territory. to the highest level recorded in today's world among Palestinians of the Gaza Strip (7.73 in 1991-95). These extreme contrasts of fertility are a corollary of the long-lasting state of belligerence between Arab Palestinians and Jews that began in the wake of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. At the end of World War I, a small Jewish nucleus of about 60,000 people lived in Palestine.. The extremely high rate of overall Jewish population growth (averaging 7.94 percent per year in 1918-48), because of the decisive migratory component. Without migration, the 60,000 persons constituting the Jewish community residing in Palestine at the end of World War researcher might have numbered only about 250,000-260,000 by the year 2000. However, by 1948 the Jewish population numbered some 650,000; the population of Israel is 6.1 million today. The creation of a Palestinian state in part of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—where 1.3 million people live—could defuse the Palestinian "demographic bomb" that threatens to overtake a Jewish majority. the fertility rate is likely to follow that of the neighboring Arab countries, into rapid decline.