UPADATE / SOVIET IMMIGRATION : Newcomers: Israel Elated, Arabs Fearful

At Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv, announcement of the arrival of a Hungarian or Polish plane sends a buzz through crowds of waiting families. Small girls in their best dresses clutch bunches of welcoming flowers. More Soviet immigrants are coming in.

What was a trickle for the past 15 years has become a running river. This year, Israeli immigration officials estimate, 150,000 Soviet Jews will pour into the country; within three years the total may reach 500,000, raising Israel’s Jewish population of 3.7 million by 14%.

But the buzz of anticipation at Ben-Gurion has been met by a roar of alarm in the Arab world, whose leaders say the Soviet Jews will tip the population balance in Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Immigration has shaken the popular adage among large Palestinian families that Israel can win the Middle East’s central conflict on the battlefield but ultimately will lose it in the bedroom.

Specifically, despite denials by Israeli leaders and the failure of statistics to show a trend, the Arabs are convinced that the wave of new Israeli Jews will move into West Bank settlements, creating “facts on the ground” that establish Israeli rights to the disputed land and displace the Palestinians.

When Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declared earlier this year that “this great immigration needs a Great Israel,” the Arabs took him at his word, interpreting a Great Israel as one that stretches to the Jordan River.

In neighboring Jordan--which only two years ago renounced its claim to the West Bank in favor of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s demand that it become the core of a state of Palestine--politicians speak darkly of the prospect of hard-liner Ariel Sharon becoming prime minister of Israel.

Sharon, the strongest voice for an expanded Israel, was sacked from Shamir’s Cabinet for his disruptive views, and few Israeli political analysts put much stock in his chances for the top job. But a West Bank-born Jordanian, who won a seat in Jordan’s Parliament in last fall’s elections, suggested Sharon would try to rally support among the Soviet immigrants.

Jordan’s King Hussein was among the first Arab leaders to sound the alarm on Soviet immigration, and he argued forcefully at this week’s Arab League emergency summit in Baghdad for restrictions on the flow.

Sharon and his supporters send shivers through Amman’s palace, where the monarch rules over a population already half Palestinian. Sharon is the man who burnished the phrase, “There already is a Palestinian state, and it is Jordan.” His followers freely speak of transfer, an explosive word in the West Bank and Gaza, explicitly meaning the deportation of Palestinians in the occupied territories to neighboring Arab countries.

At Baghdad, the wording of the final communique, promoted by Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, put the Arab concerns in blunt language, citing “the great dangers arising from the deliberate and organized Jewish immigration operation.”

The Arabs are faced with a dilemma on the broader issue: If they oppose the right of Jews to emigrate to the Jewish homeland, how can they argue that Palestinians now living abroad have the right of return to what they hope may someday be the state of Palestine?