Israel's population: the challenge of pluralism.

Describes the interplay of demographic and sociopolitical processes in Israel since the state's founding in May 1948 and projects what it might be to 2015. Heavy Jewish immigration, especially during the mass immigation of 1948-51, has balanced the high natural increase of Moslems, who comprise the majority of Israeli Arabs, so that the proportion of Jews in Israel's population at the end of 1982 was little changed from June 1948. Even with Jewish immigration now low, this proportion is unlikely to change in 2015, because Moslem fertility is now falling. But by 2015 the Jewish proportion could be less in a 'Greater Israel' if Israel annexes the Occupied Areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip where 1.2 million Arabs now live. 'Oriental' Jews from less developed North African and Asian countries with their largescale immigration to the mid-1960s and initially higher fertility, outnumbered European-American Jews by 1970. This was an important factor in the 1977 shift of political dominance from the leftwing Labor parties, supported by the better-educated, socialist-leaning European-American Jews, to the rightwing Likud bloc, espousing economic policies based on more private initiative and Israel's historic rights to Judea and Samaria. -Authors