Quotation from Menachem Begin “Is that the demographic problem? A people that lives for 7 years?"” — Dec. 6 1968

" "Labor] tells us that more than a million Arabs will be added to the 320,000 Arabs and Druze in divided Israel if we refuse to share the western land of Israel [Mandate Palestine].... But when we talk about the Gaza Strip, which has a population of 340,000 Arabs, they all say to us today: It was ours and it was taken from us, but we will stay there forever... When we talk about the Golan Heights, they tell us: it will be ours, and we will not let it go. When we speak of the unified Jerusalem, where 70,000 Arabs live, they say, all of them, it has been unified and will never be divided again. When we speak of al-Khalil, mount al-Khalil and its inhabitants, who are more than 80,000 Arabs, they say, it is ours. When we speak of Qalqylia and its 9,000 Arab inhabitants, they say, it is ours. Tel Aviv was bombed from this city."
Then Begin performs a very simple calculation, to conclude that the Labor Party map includes almost one million Arabs, but excludes only 440,000 Arabs, who "because of them, they make us fear the demographic danger."
He adds, "If this assumption is correct, to say that with the figure of one million, we will have an equality between the number of Arabs and Jews, after 20 years, without the 440,000, we will get there, let's say, in 27 years. Is that the demographic problem? A people that lives for 7 years?"

Translated from French "