Although the number of Jews in Israel exceeds the number of Palestinians, this is only the case when one limits the count to Israel's internationally recognised borders. When one counts all Palestinians living in the land from the river to the sea - including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, just as Jews living in all those territories are included in Israeli counts - Palestinians actually outnumber Jews, turning them into a minority.
Plotting population records from both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority on the same chart reveals that Palestinians have outnumbered Jews in all Israeli-controlled territories since 2014. When one considers the numbers of foreign workers, African refugees, and other folks living in the land who are neither Jews nor Palestinians, Jews have been a minority population in mandatory Palestine for more than a decade already.
Demographic dilemma
But Israeli hawks have long aspired to annex the West Bank, and once Donald Trump took office in Washington and appointed a far-right Jewish supremacist as his
ambassador to Israel, the annexationists understood that the world's single superpower would not stand in the way of such a move, no matter how many international agreements it would violate.
Now the right-wing's only fear is that were Israel to go ahead and annex all the territories, the majority Palestinian population would demand equal rights under the law. Without any constitutional text elevating Jewish national rights over democracy, Israeli government bodies may feel the need to rule in favour of equal rights for all, even for Palestinians.
Anticipating that demographic dilemma, the Netanyahu government pushed the nation-state law through this week, paving the way for continued colonisation of the West Bank and outright apartheid for Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. Declaring that the rights of Jews must always supersede those of non-Jews, Israel just came out of the closet, now proud of what it has always been in practice - a racist state.
Left unchecked, that racist state will sooner or later encompass every inch of the land.