Growing Non-Jewish Population Concerns Some Israelis

TEL AVIV, July 19 - Michelita de los Reyes is a Catholic by faith, a maid by profession and a Filipina by citizenship. She also is part of a demographic phenomenon that could make Jews a minority in Israel by the end of the next decade.

A 37-year-old mother of three from the Philippines island of Palawan, Reyes mingles easily with the Thais, Chinese, Africans and eastern Europeans who gather Sundays at Tel Aviv's Central Bus Terminal to exchange grievances, job hunting tips and experiences.

They and thousands of other foreign workers not only give Tel Aviv a cosmopolitan look, they also are changing a nation whose Zionist founders hardly envisaged a demographic explosion of non-Jews.

The kibbutz and moshav farming communities of today's Israel rely almost entirely on foreign labor, a far cry from the days when working on the kibbutz was part of the Jewish pioneering spirit and kibbutzniks were considered members of the elite.

Today even middle-class Israelis can afford to hire a foreign housekeeper such as Reyes.

Ayoub Karaa, head of the Knesset Committee for Foreign Workers, estimates this foreign work force - two-thirds of whom, Reyes included, are unregistered - may already number as many as half a million, or 9 percent of Israel's population. Others put the figure at 300,000.

"I've been warning people without success that Jews in Israel will become a minority. It could happen by the year 2020. But this is too weird a concept for Israelis to accept," said Karaa, who is not Jewish.

Arnon Sofer, Israel's leading demographer, warns that foreign workers are "only the last straw" of what he calls "a catastrophe-in-the-making." Sofer says that of the 10 million inhabitants in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, 5 million are Jews, 4 million Palestinians, 1 million Russians and as many as 300,000 foreign workers.

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