Second member of Likud opposes establishment of Palestinian state

Gideon Sa’ar, the deputy leader of the Likud, the ruling Israeli party, has expressed his objection to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank. Writing in Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, Sa’ar said:

Israel is the only party to the conflict that controls the gates of the West Bank and in case Israel waives it and Palestinians have this right, we can expect Arabs from across the region to rush toward it. The number of Palestinian refugees is estimated to be in the millions. They are planning to return to the country after the establishment of the Palestinian state … this would be just few kilometres away from our population centres … this will represent an unprecedented retreat and will crush all the achievements of the Zionist process.

In addition to the loss of security control, he asserted, Tel Aviv will also face the loss of demographic control. In this regard, he explained that “the establishment of a Palestinian state is the only way to lose the Jewish majority in the country.”

The Israeli warnings against the “Palestinian demographic problem,” has been brought back to debate due to the data of the Civil Administration of the occupation Army, which pointed to the equal number of Palestinians and Jews in Palestine.

According to the 2017 report of Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, the number of Jews in the region reached 6.5 million. Yesterday, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) announced that the number of Palestinian citizens living in the occupied territories (West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip) in 1967 reached 4 million and 780,000 person and about 1.7 million Palestinians are living in the occupied territories of 1948.

Read: End of the independent Palestinian state project