POPULATION : Doors Slam as Israeli Census Comes Calling : Jewish settlers in West Bank threaten boycott, fearing undercount. Ultra-Orthodox worry about divine wrath. But East Jerusalem Arabs want in.

Pity the Israeli census-taker: In a nation torn by political, ethnic and religious conflict, no effort to count the population can be regarded as a simple statistical exercise.

So as about 7,000 Central Bureau of Statistics surveyors begin fanning out across the nation to conduct the first census since 1983, they are finding doors slammed in their faces by people who fear they could face calamities ranging from political disenfranchisement to the wrath of God if they participate.

“I have been doing this job for many years, and I have seen many ridiculous things,” said David Neumann, spokesman for the bureau. “But I have never seen anything as ridiculous as this.”

Neumann referred, specifically, to what he says would be the first political boycott of the nation’s census, threatened by Jewish settlers. The settlers say they fear the government will deliberately undercount them as a first step toward abandoning settlements to Palestinians.

But the bureau also is plagued by threatened boycotts from some ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects that say the Bible prohibits counting “the children of the House of Israel,” and even by some liberals who say the questions asked are an invasion of privacy.

“We are not sure exactly what the government’s intentions are,” said Yehudit Tayar, a spokeswoman for the Yesha Council, the umbrella organization representing Jewish settlers living in the West Bank. It has called on all its members and other Israelis to return blank census forms to thwart whatever plot the government may be hatching with the census.

“It is certainly a form of protest, and it is an important one, against an anti-Jewish government,” said Tayar. “We don’t know who will get this information--will it be given to the Palestinian Authority? Who knows?”

For months, Jewish settlers have been conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, protesting the just-begun redeployment of Israeli troops from towns and villages in the West Bank and the hand-over of responsibility for the security of Palestinians there to the Palestinian Authority, headed by Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat. Tayar said the census boycott is another element in the campaign.

*

The settler protest threatens to tarnish the victory the statistics bureau thought it had achieved this time with the haredi , or ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

Because of the biblical prohibition against counting Jews, the ultra-Orthodox declined to participate in the state’s last four censuses. They like to note that the Bible says 70,000 Jews were struck down by plague after King David ordered a census. But this year, two leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis endorsed participation after the bureau agreed not to ask respondents’ religion.

“A few doors are still closed for us, because some people have asked to see for themselves the letter the rabbis jointly issued,” Neumann said. “So I have made copies of the letters, and we will distribute them door-to-door.”

Other problems have also arisen. Some ultra-Orthodox lawmakers blasted the bureau for failing to make clear that residents may list birthdays using Hebrew rather than Gregorian calendar dates.

Then there is the problem with East Jerusalem Palestinians.

Because Israel annexed East Jerusalem after capturing it in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Palestinians living there are counted in the census. An East Jerusalem identity card is highly prized among Palestinians because its holder can work in Israel, even when the West Bank and Gaza Strip are sealed.

But over the years, many East Jerusalem Palestinians have been forced to move to West Bank suburbs because of a severe housing shortage in Jerusalem. Palestinian newspapers have published dire warnings that those not counted in the census might lose Jerusalem ID cards.

Some Palestinian officials claim the census is being conducted solely to try to reduce the number of Palestinians living in Jerusalem by counting them out. Worried Jerusalemites who are living outside the city are taking temporary leases on tiny apartments, at sky-high rents, to ensure they are included.

Neumann flatly denies that the census seeks to disenfranchise East Jerusalem Palestinians. Any Palestinian with a Jerusalem card who still has a relative there who can list him or her will be counted, he said. The bureau keeps all information private and will not turn over data to any other government agency, he said, adding, “The problem is that there is not trust between peoples in this country.”