The Palestine Authority has been supported by the U.S. since 1997. The support is based on population. Recent census counts have disclosed that the Palestinian population have been significantly overstated, at a significant cost to the U.S. taxpayer.

Former AmbassadorYoram Ettinger reports:

1. Annual US foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority and to International organizations, which support Palestinians, has been based – since 1997 – on a more than 50% inflated number of Palestinians. (Shouldn’t US foreign aid be reduced accordingly? )

2. Only 2.5MN Palestinians reside in Gaza (1.1MN) and Judea & Samaria (1.4MN), and not 3.8MN as projected by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) in 1997.

3. The 2.5MN total is corroborated by documented births, deaths, school and voting registration, as documented annually by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education and Palestinian Election Commission. They depart substantially – each year – from projections made in 1997 by the PCBS.

4. A 170%(!) population growth during 1990-2004 was assumed by the PCBS!

5. The significant gap between the service-rendering Palestinian agencies and the donations-seeking PCBS has been exposed by a US-Israel research, published in February 2006 by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies: “Arab Population in the West Bank and Gaza: The Million Person Gap.”

6. The research exposed a series of Palestinian gross errors, which have inflated US and international aid to Palestinian NGOs and to the PA, as disclosed at PA Demographics :

I. 325,000 non-resident Palestinians included in the 1997 PCBS projection;

II. 105,000 Palestinians who received Israeli ID cards since 1997, and 210,000 Jerusalem Arabs have been double-counted by Palestinians and by Israelis;

III. 310,000 Palestinian babies, who haven’t been born since 1997, are included;

IV. 236,000 unrealized net positive migration, since 1997, is included;

V. 74,000 realized net negative migration, since 1997, is excluded.

7. The demographic establishment tends to severely inflate the number of Palestinians by ignoring the decrease in Muslim and Arab birthrate (Iran –1.98 children per woman, Egypt – 2.9) and the increase in Israeli Jewish birthrate (2.7 children). It has traditionally overlooked Palestinian net negative migration (10,000 annually since 1950) and the sustained annual Jewish Aliya (immigration) to Israel (since 1882).

8. Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, a leading US demographer (January 23, 2006): “The conclusions of this [American-Israeli] report are not only plausible but quite persuasive…They caught the demographic profession asleep at the switch. There are some fairly significant discrepancies in the PA’s own internal population estimates…There are also fairly important discrepancies between the estimates of the US Census Bureau and the UN Population Division…”

For a complete presentation of the American Enterprise Institute analysis of January 2005, with documented support go here.

Should the U.S. continue to pay the PA for a phantom population of 1.5 Million missing people?

Should the U.S. be supporting a regime whose avowed intent is the destruction of its neighbor?

Just food for thought.