A second example is the former Soviet Union. A year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Muslim population reached over 50 million. And with the Muslim population growing twice as fast as the Russian, there was a real chance that by 2025, over fifty percent of the conscripts joining the Red Army would have been Muslims. Given the reluctance of Muslims in the Red Army to fight in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 19080's, it was not surprising that Russian nationalists happily watched six Muslim Central Asian Republics break away in 1991. 

In the on going brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine, one of the less publicized problems facing Israel is that the demographics of the Jewish population are going horribly wrong for the dream of Zionism for the last 6 years. Israel has always relied on large influxes of 'Jewish' people from around the world to boost its population in relation to the Palestinians.

The best decade for Zionism was the 1990's, when following the collapse of the Soviet Union 1 million people migrated to Israel. Since 2001, however, large numbers of Israelis started emigrating to Russia, Germany and the USA. The Israeli government is reluctant to show any figures on emigration, but in 2004, the Bureau of Statistics in Israel showed that for the first time in Israel's history, there was a net loss of people through migration of over 11,000 people. The CIA estimates that 2005-6 will be zero addition to the Jewish population through migration.

The Palestinian population on the other hand is rising at around twice the rate of the Jewish, despite Israel's attempts to make life under occupation as intolerable as possible. 2004 was a critical year in the population balance as, according to a U.S. government report, the population of Palestinians living in Israel, the Gaza Strip, Occupied East Jerusalem and rest of the Occupied West Bank combined exceeded the number of Israeli Jews at the end of that year. The Palestinian population stood at over 5.3 million while the Jewish population was 5.2 million. Theses figures came from the U.S. State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The report finally showed the explosive new demographic reality that an Israeli Jewish minority now rules over a larger number of Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

The CIA estimated the Palestinian population of the West Bank was 1,443,790 in July 1994 and 1,556,000 in July 1998. It totaled 2,164,000 in July 2002, and had increased by 50 percent since 1994. It still had an extraordinarily high growth rate of 3.39%, and it was very young, with around 44% of the population aged 14 years or younger. The Palestinian population in the Gaza was 731,000 in July 1994, and 1,054,000 in July 1998. It totaled 1,225,911 in July 2002, and had increased by 68 percent since 1994. The population growth rate was 3.95%, one of the highest in the world, and 50% of the population was 14 years of age or younger.

That Palestinian population will increase according to UN estimates to 4,498,000 in 2010, 5,250,000 in 2015, 6,891,000 in 2025, and 11,055 in 2050. The World Bank estimates that the Palestinian population of both the West Bank and Gaza will increase from 3.1 million in 2001 to at least 4.8 million in 2015 – an increase of 55%; even if the current rate of Palestinian emigration continues, birth rates drop sharply in the near future, and no Palestinians refugees return. The survey estimated that Jews would account for 6.4 million (44.4 percent) of the population by 2020, against 8.2 million Palestinians.

Israeli demographers have long warned that Palestinians would once again become a sizeable majority in all of historic Palestine by around 2010. Israel would then be viewed by almost all the world as an apartheid state where an empowered minority rules over an effectively disenfranchised majority.  It is against this background that Saron decision to pull the Israeli colonies out of Gaza was born. For those even slightly familiar with Sharon's track record (Sabra and Shatila refugee camps) no-one could have described him as a 'man of peace' but were still puzzled by his insistence to pull all Jewish colonies out of Gaza. From Sharon's perspective, the motivation for the decision to leave Gaza is not peace, but rather trying to keep Israel a Jewish state. Sharon described the pull out from Gaza as 'vital' for the survival of the Jewish state. Few commentators analyzed this statement but it was the trend in population figures which is the key to understanding this comment.