abbas- not one concession

Abbas declared: "If they demand concessions on the rights of the refugees or the 1967 borders, I will quit. I can't allow myself to make even one concession." How do you negotiate with someone who proclaims his intransigence? (New York Daily News)


A Numbers Game in the Middle East - Joel Brinkley
Isn't the Palestinian population growing so fast that, soon enough, it will outnumber Jews in the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea? A team of demographers headed by Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli diplomat, conducted a detailed study and found, to most everyone's surprise, that Israeli Jews far outnumber Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. What's more, Jewish birth rates are higher now, too. The demographic threat, these demographers say, simply doesn't exist and the trend lines favor the Jews, not the Arabs.
Palestinians vastly overstated their population for their own political aims. As examples, they double-counted Arab residents of east Jerusalem and included about 400,000 Palestinians who actually live abroad. At the same time, as the West Bank grows more modern and prosperous, Palestinian birth rates are falling - while some Israeli West Bank settlers are having as many babies as they can. The writer is a professor of journalism at Stanford University. (San Francisco Chronicle)
See also More Babies Give a Boost to Israeli Jewish Demographics - Zuzana Barak
Jewish demographics in Israel are improving, Prof. Sergio DellaPergola, an international expert on Jewish demography from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said Tuesday. According to DellaPergola, the trend in Israel is towards larger families, in comparison to the birth rate among Jews in the diaspora, which has been declining due to rapid ageing and intermarriage. The Jewish birth rate in Israel averages just under three children (2.9) per family, the highest in many years.