Lineages--uncertainty and certainty

Submitted by Sigmund Derman (United States), Mar 4, 2012 at 10:24

Your title, "Eventually, All Humans Will Be Palestine Refugees", raises interesting and complex issues if one takes it seriously and literally. Lineages do tend to spread and become increasingly large and diffuse over time. But some lineages die out. When any one person looks backward, his ancestry seems to grow exponentially. But it generally is not quite exponential due to some overlaps. If, for example, you go back 750 years, each person has 1 billion ancestors assuming two parents (which is biologically correct) and 25 years per generation (which is approximate). The problem is there were only about 300 million people on earth at that time. So where did the rest of my ancestors (and everybody else's) go?

Leaving the above paradox for others to ponder, the near term practical effect of the UNRWA rules is to make the numbers grow close to exponentially as we go forward in time. In the same sense, it would be hard to find a Mexican citizen today who could not find an ancestor who owned land in Texas. Does that give him the "right of return"? Of course not (Some US citizens in the Mexican border states may say that some Mexicans are now imposing a de facto right of return, but that is a separate issue).

As an additional practical matter, a certain number of such "Palestinian refugees" wisely withdraw from this numbers game and get out. The numbers that really matter are those in close proximity to Israel. Those numbers will eventually show a slowed growth, one way or the other. The question is what will slow them. The two big possibilities are emigration and deaths due to war.

This is too complicated for me but here is one thing of which I am quite sure. If the Arabs do manage to destroy the current state of Israel,then the number of Palestinians will soon decline to zero and Palestine will cease to exist except perhaps as a geographical designation as it was to the Romans and their succesors. The Arabs will no longer care about this tiny bit of land. The Muslims in general will no longer care even though presently it is a painful thorn in the side of those Muslims dreaming of world domination. The Europeans, Asians, Australians, and (by and large) Americans will not care. Only one group on earth will care, the same group that has cared for the last 4000 years...the Jews. And the Jews will eventually re-establish it, even if it takes until 3048, by which time I expect all the Muslims will be gone, having killed each other.

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