Demographer Save Negev and Galilee now

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Demographer: Save Negev and Galilee now

Arnon Sofer warns `in three years a dictator will be needed to do it'

Prof. Arnon Sofer, the demographer-geographer who first proposed a separation fence, is scheduled to warn in a lecture today that if Israel does not take emergency action now "to save the Negev and Galilee, in three years time we'll need a dictator to do it."

In the talk at Haifa University, Sofer will say the government "must ignore the needs of the population centers along the coast to save the Negev, Jerusalem and the Galilee."

Sofer is a long-time gadfly who warns of demographic danger to Israel if it does not create some form of separation between the state and the Palestinians. He says "an emergency government is needed, as in 1967, with the national goal of a war to reconquer the territories inside Israel."

He told Haaretz: "Deterministic processes are threatening to destroy Israel. We won't succeed with democracy and pretty words. If we do not exert all out efforts in the Negev and Galilee, with an emergency regime, in another three to five years a dictator will do it."

Sofer says: "The Bedouin have won in the Negev, with an 8 percent annual birth rate and families of ten children living off the state." Some of the solutions he proposes, include a national Zionist unity government that would build some cities for Beduin, and then impose the law strictly in the Negev to move Beduin off state lands, and major investments in a transport infrastructure linking the north and south to the center of the country.

"Otherwise, in a few years there will be an Arab axis from Biranit in the north, through the Galilee, Acre, Shfaram, Jerusalem and to the Negev. Jews will drink coffee in Tel Aviv and that will be the end of the state."

_{By David Ratner}