LONDON, Dec 27: In the face of steeper Palestinian birth rates and declining arrivals of Jews from more traditional sources, maintaining the status of Israel as a Jewish majority state seems to have become a matter of a serious concern to Tel Aviv.

In the outgoing year alone immigration to Israel worldwide is estimated to have dropped by 9 per cent, according to a study published in the Times on Wednesday.

This year the Israeli population topped seven million, according to government statistics. Of its 7,026,000 citizens, about three quarters are Jewish and the rest Arab, but the Jewish birth rate is consistently lower — about 1.2 per cent annual growth compared with 3.94 per cent in Gaza, according to recent estimates compiled by Jewish Agency, the United Jewish Israel Appeal.

To supplement the Jewish population of Israel the State relied throughout the 1990s on migration from Russia and other Eastern Bloc countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Numbers from the former Soviet Union fell by 22 per cent this year, however. More than a million had arrived since the late 1980s.

So important is immigration for the Jewish state that these trends prompted the Jewish Agency to look elsewhere for immigrants. “Two years ago the Jewish Agency revised its strategic plan. From a demographic point of view it looked at where the Jews were, and where there were reservoirs from which immigration could come,” Michael Jankelowitz, a Jewish Agency spokesman, told The Times.

“It decided to place an emphasis on the ‘free world’ and encourage immigration from places such as America, where there are six million Jews; France, with 600,000; Britain with 270,000; and Canada, which has 330,000.

The agency has been concentrating on British Jewry because it felt that they had a strong Jewish identity.