Elephant of demography

Speaking at a special Jerusalem Day session of the Knesset, Israel Kimchi, the director general of the Jerusalem Institute of Israel Studies reported the alarming news that ‘Jerusalem will lose Jewish majority by 2035’.

I haven’t managed to find the Institute’s website or any link to anything that would explain the projection methodology Kimchi deployed. But that’s beside the point.

It’s imaginable, if only just, that you’d find a comparable headline in some other country. But it may only be in Israel where the purportedly left wing newspaper of record could report on the hysteria over the demographic time bomb without mentioning the transparent racism that underlies it and without attracting a single comment drawing attention to the elephant.

In yet another triumph of the hasbarists’ art, Israel claims to be at one and the same time Jewish and democratic and has persuaded The International Community that Zionism is not ‘a form of racism and racial discrimination’.

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Update:

Roland Rance has provided this link, commenting,

Interestingly, although Haaretz quotes Kimchi as saying "in my personal opinion, the city is united", in a 2007Yediot article reprinted on the JIIS website he writes: "There's no doubt that the city is physically unified, but the question is whether it's socially unified, and there's a big question mark on that"

...But are you sure that Haaretz is quoting Kimchi accurately? His other articles on the JIIS site seem more in line with the Yediot piece I noted, so perhaps Haaretz is simplifying or distorting a more equivocal remark.