Every year on Israeli Independence Day the Central Bureau of
Statistics publishes figures on the demography of the State --
the balance between Jews and non-Jews in Israel. This year
the balance was 81 percent Jews and 19 percent non-Jews.
But Dr. Asher Cohen of Bar-Ilan University's political
science department maintains the statistics are inexact and
the Jewish majority is actually only 72 percent of the
nation's population.
In the past year, Cohen has been researching a phenomenon he
calls "Israeli assimilation" -- the absorption of non-Jews
into Israel's Jewish majority.
"The Statistics Bureau examines the 'balance' only among
those officially identified as citizens of the country,"
Cohen says.
"But such a study does not reflect the true state of the
society, in which there are masses of foreign workers who are
not citizens but are permanent residents, as well as some
150,000 Palestinians who are also living in Israel on a
permanent basis, illegally and without citizenship."
Cohen discovered the true figures in the research of Prof.
Arnon Sofer of Haifa University.
According to these statistics, updated as of the end of 2001,
only 72 percent of the residents of Israel are Jews according
to halakha, 5,000,000 people in all. Another 270,000,
or four percent, are non-Jewish immigrants granted
citizenship under the provisions of the Law of Return.
Arab citizens of Israel account for another 18 percent, or
1.25 million. An additional two percent, or 150,000 people,
are Palestinians illegally living in Israel.
There are as well 280,000 foreign workers, representing
another four percent of the total population. These figures
were among a range of other data Cohen presented at the
opening of a conference he initiated on the topic of "Israeli
assimilation."
Conspicuous among the statistics Cohen presented, is the rate
of intermarried couples among immigrants from the former
Soviet Union.
The figures show that there are about 120,000 couples in
Israel in which at least one member of the couple is not
Jewish. This represents some 10 percent of all married
couples in Israel, exclusive of the Arab sector.
In more than a quarter of these couples (33,500), neither of
the members of the couple is Jewish. The wife is a non-Jew in
about 50,000 others, such that the children of about 84,000
couples are non-Jews under halakha, which recognizes
the children of a Jewish mother as Jews.
Interior Minister Eli Yishai said last week that in view of
the statistics, there is a need to establish an "immigration
police" -- a body that would enforce existing immigration
laws.
Last month, an inter-ministerial committee recommended that
all authority regarding the affairs of foreign workers be
concentrated within the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, in
addition to the creation of an agency that would become the
kernel of an Immigration Authority.
As a result of his research, Cohen has operative conclusions
of his own.
"First of all, there is an urgent need to narrow the purview
of the Law of Return. We should see to it that families that
are completely Christian do not come here -- including people
who go to church on a regular basis."
Last year there were hundreds of new Israel Defense Forces
soldiers in basic training who took the oath to the State and
to the army on the New Testament, rather than the Bible.
