ISRAEL

Independent: Israelis Leave Their 'Promised Land' by Justin Juggler

Forced Out By A Battered Economy And Years Of Violence

Ms Max and her family are part of a growing phenomenon that has the Israeli political establishment worried. New figures from the Immigration and Absorption Ministry stunned the establishment. Those figures show 760,000 Israeli citizens now live abroad. The ministry says its figures are an informal estimate, based on research by Israeli embassies around the world.

Even so, for a country of just 6,600,000, it is a large number. But the big surprise was the growth in the number of Israelis living abroad: in 2000, it was 550,000. That increase has undoubtedly been fuelled by the suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian militants over the past three years, and by the severe recession into which the Israeli economy has been plunged.

The results of a recent study by Israeli academics unnerved even the right-wing supporters of Mr Sharon. The study found that by the year 2020, in just 17 years, Palestinians will be the majority in the whole area of Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. That raises the possibility of the Israeli right's worst nightmare: that Palestinians might stop demanding a state of their own and start asking for the vote. That could spell the end of Israel's identity as a Jewish state, something most Israelis want to keep.

The Jewish Week: Jewish Leaders Worried About 'One-State' Solution
When a delegation of young legal advisers to the Palestinian Authority were in Washington recently, they made their usual pitch about settlements and Israel's new security fence.

But not far from the surface was a new argument with old overtones: support for a two-state solution to the conflict is rapidly waning among Palestinians, they said. Instead, more and more are supporting the creation of a single, binational democratic state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

That idea has generated little interest in Washington, mostly because it is a blatant prescription for the quick elimination of the Jewish state.

But Jewish leaders are worried. In some quarters - including across Europe and on campuses at home - "it will be a seductive idea," said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

"Sie wollen keine zwei-Staaten loesung, sie wollen keine ein-Staaten loesung, sie wollen eretz israel ganz fuer sich allein"