Taking Israel by the Numbers

By Broadside Managing Editor Aram Zucker-Scharff

It is hard to read about Israel and understand the situation without some grounding in the facts. Recent items in the news, by necessity, can only work with a snapshot of the information. However, without knowledge of the rest of the issue, it can be difficult to make a judgment call. With that in mind, here are a few numbers about the state of Israel you should know.

First, in the year 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat met at Camp David. Barak offered 91 percent of the West Bank, 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian control over Eastern Jerusalem and an international fund to serve as compensation for lost property. In short, almost everything the Palestinian Authority had said it wanted.

Arafat said no. The result? One month later, Palestinians began the al-Aqsa Intifada, the uprising that continues today. One month after that was the destruction of one of Judaism’s important holy sites, Joseph’s Tomb. Days later, two Israeli reservists were lynched. After another eight months began one of the worst waves of suicide bombings, starting with the Dolphinarium massacre, an incident with 21 Israeli casualties, 13 of which were under the age of 18.

Between 2000 and 2003, 80 percent of Israeli fatalities were non-combatants, 40 percent of which were women. Israel made sure that the Palestinian fatalities included far less civilians. A statistical analysis of casualties during the 2000 to 2003 period performed by Dan Radlauer, an associate of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, show a lack of regularity in the distribution of age and gender, which indicates “the degree to which these deaths were caused by random attacks on a civilian population.”

UN-OCHA statistics show that “Israeli civilians are 67 percent more likely to be killed within Israel.”

Of those Israelis killed outside of official Israel territory, the primary cause, according to the UN, has been acts of terrorism, as determined by the Forth Geneva Convention.

According to the UN, in 2002 the number of Israeli civilian casualties averaged 22 a month. Israel’s efforts have been rewarded, dropping that statistic to an average of one a month in 2007.

You may be wondering, what of the Palestinian numbers? It’s difficult to tell, conflicting reports are always being given, and sometimes no reports at all. However, the most notable statistics can be seen in the period since Israel departed from Palestinian territories in 2005. Since the Palestinians have been given ownership and responsibility over their own territory internal deaths have risen drastically. According to the UN-OCHA report, 65 percent of the total Palestinian death toll in 2007 was due to Palestinians killing each other.

That’s right, the next time you see last year’s Palestinian death toll, remember that Palestinians killed more than twice as many of their own people than were killed by Israelis. Twenty-six of the recorded deaths due to “internal fighting” were children.

What about those Palestinians who died due to an inability to reach medical facilities, one of the main issues that anti-Israel activists bring up when discussing the barrier? According to the Aug. 31 2007 UN-OCHA report, that number has been below five deaths a year since 2002.

What of the other causes of death for Palestinians inside of the Gaza Strip, some of which are attributed to poor living conditions?

According to a top Palestinian Authority official, “Hamas is preventing people from buying bread,” and “Hamas members have stolen most of the fuel in the Gaza Strip to fill their vehicles,” and he concluded, “They [Hamas] want to deepen the crisis to serve their own interests.”

The numbers support his claim. There have been 60 truckloads of Israeli fruit and vegetables blocked by Hamas from entering Gaza. The percentage of fuel, compared to the pre-2005 figures, flowing into the Gaza Strip is 70 percent, more than enough to keep running the power plant that Hamas ordered shut down.

The bigger picture?

The total Muslim population is estimated at 1.2 to 1.84 billion. There are 22 states in the Arab League and 57 nations in the UN-recognized Organization of the Islamic Conference.

According to the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, there are only 13.2 million Jews, .02 percent of the world population. The Jewish claim on the land of Israel is almost 35 centuries old.

There is one Jewish state.