IF Israel so wants it can annex the West Bank and Gaza without any qualms of conscience, and it will meet no military and little diplomatic opposition.

After all it annexed Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in violation of international law and several UN resolutions and got away with it, notwithstanding hollow protestations from America and Europe. What has prevented it from annexing the occupied territories and realising the Greater Israel dream is the demographic reality, for the dreaded hour has arrived.

Today, Israel’s population is 7.1 million, out of which the Arabs number 1.6 million. The population of Gaza is 1.5 million and that of the West Bank 2.4 million. So the total Arab population in what the Zionists call ‘Greater Israel’ comes to 5.5 million as against 5.4 million Jews. However, if you add to the Jewish population the number of settlers in the West Bank (180,000) and those in occupied East Jerusalem (177,000) the total Jewish population in the three territorial units comes to 5.7 million, slightly exceeding the total Arab population. (In its issue of Jan 19, 2009, the Time magazine says the Arabs with a population of 5.5 million are already in a slight majority against the Jewish population of 5.4 million).

The Arab birth rate in the occupied territories is one of the highest in the world — 3.4 per cent in the West Bank and four per cent in Gaza. This means by 2020 the gap between the two will widen further, with the total Arab population reaching the figure of 8.5 million as against 6.4 million Jews.

Given the demographic reality and the population time bomb, the obvious choice for Israel is to get out of the occupied territories, return the land to whom it belongs, and agree to the two-state solution as envisioned in: (1) the Declaration of Principles signed in September 1993 at Washington; (2) the two-state solution that was discussed at the failed Camp David summit in July 2000; (3) the April 2003 road map, prepared by the Quartet (America, Russia, the EU and the UN) and unveiled by George Bush — a road map which Yasser Arafat accepted immediately but which Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accepted several weeks later with 14 reservations; and (4) the Annapolis Declaration of November 2007, to which Israel, the Palestinian Authority and America were parties.

The other solution — basically a pious theory — was spearheaded by some of Arafat’s bitter critics, among them Edward Said. The critics said the two communities were so well-integrated despite mutual bitterness and were tied in so many economic and social bonds that it would be difficult to ‘partition’ them, and that a two-state solution was not workable, more so because Israel in any case was determined to hold on to the occupied territories. Instead, what Arafat’s critics visualised for the West Bank, Gaza and Israel proper was one democratic state with equal rights thrown to both Arabs and Jews, with Jerusalem as capital.

The problem with this proposal is that in such a country the Jews will be a minority, and that will nullify the Zionists’ dream of establishing a Jewish state in Greater Israel. (For the uninitiated: Israel is the world’s only country which is not a state of its citizens. It is a state of the Jews, wherever they are. One of the earliest laws made by the Knesset in July 1950 was the Law of Return, which gave Jews living anywhere in the world the “right of return” to Israel, even if they had been living as a diaspora for two millennia. The law made no mention of the legitimate right of the nearly 800,000 Palestinians who fled the 1948-49 fighting to return to their ancestral land.)

During his last meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Palestinian Authority president that he must first recognise Israel as a Jewish state before the peace process could move forward.

Israel is now on the horns of a dilemma. If it quits the occupied territories, the two-state solution becomes a reality and Israel loses prime land; if it stays on, the population bomb ticks to its disadvantage. The other option for Israel is to evict the occupied territories’ existing Palestinian populations and settle millions of more Jews in the West Bank and Gaza. The first is an impossibility, while the second a difficult task, because Jews no more fancy migration to an Israel which often appears to be living in a state of siege. There is, however, an insidious proposal which one hears from time to time and which the Knesset recently debated after an Israeli MP aired it: the West Bank and East Bank should be turned into ‘a dual state’, with free movement and a common nationality, the idea being to make the Palestinians consider Jordan as a Palestinian state.

It is against such a background that President Barack Obama finds himself in the Middle East. He is scheduled to make his historic broadcast to 'reach out' to the Muslim world today, and there is no doubt that a great deal of how the Arab-Islamic world will judge him depends upon what he says about the Arab-Israeli conflict, the fate of the Palestinian refugees, Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, the emergence of a sovereign Palestinian state and the final status of Jerusalem.

The going is not good: at their last meeting at the White House, Netanyahu came out the winner. While the American president spoke of the two-state solution and called for a halt to all settlement activity, the Israeli prime minister didn’t even mention the word “state” and made no reference to the settlements. At a subsequent press conference, Obama seemed to be relenting and justifying Netanyahu’s hard line by saying after all Netanyahu was under pressure from extremists — as if the Likud leader were not a hardliner himself.

A land-hungry Israel has no intention of getting out of the occupied territories, and its patrons in the West know this. It is now known that the Wall’ — Israel calls it ‘barrier’ and hates the word ‘Wall’ because it reminds the world of the Berlin Wall, which one day crashed — envelops a lot of West Bank territory. But what is less known is that even the Wall’s actual alignment is not what Israel has publicised, for it further eats into Palestinian land on the plea that at given places it is not possible to proceed with construction for topographical reasons.

Israel learnt its lessons well in 1956 when an angry Eisenhower put his foot down and insisted that Israel withdraw from the Sinai. Over the last five decades, it has built up a formidable lobby in the US media, think tanks, academia, Congress and state machinery. This lobby is its greatest asset, and it would be a miracle if Obama demonstrates he can stand up to this lobby.