Ynet news reports, “Thousands of Palestinians apply for Israeli citizenship.” Subtitle: “Intensive talks over division of Jerusalem has prompted its Palestinian residents to make a move once considered the ultimate treason.”

Well, yeah. I refer you to my post of the evening I spent with Mr. Bassem Eid, the only Palestinian documenting the human-rights abuses of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

In 2000, then Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to Yasser Arafat to hand over to the Palestinian Authority about three-quarters of Jerusalem - every historic quarter except, of course, the Jewish Quarter. The three quarters concerned were, and are, the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter and the Armenian Quarter. Arafat simply said no.

During my visit to Israel last month, our study group spent an afternoon conferring with an Israeli-citizen Arab, whose safety was so precarious that he asked his photo not be taken, saying, “I don’t want my picture to wind up on someone’s blog so that certain people will know what I look like.” (Hint: it was not Jews he was afriad of, nor Israeli Christians.) Though his name is well known, since he writes for the Jerusalem Post, I’ll refer to him only by his first name, Khaled.

Khaled was very candid about the difference of the lives of Palestinians living under the PA (to say nothing of those living under Hamas in Gaza) and the lives of Israeli Arabs. He did point out that Arabs are a minority in Israel, and they know it. Israel is a Jewish state, and all its Arab citiziens, whether the 70 percent who are Muslim or the 30 percent who are Christian, are not merely ethnic minorities, but religious minorities.

But Khaled also pointed out that despite the mild oppression that Israeli Arabs generally feel, they know they are the freest Arabs anywhere in the Middle East. That’s why the reverse of yNet’s headline is never printed: Israeli Arabs are neither crazy nor stupid enought to migrate into the West Bank or Gaza, where they would live under the mere facsimile of democracy in the former and outright tyranny in the latter.

yNet explains:

In the months leading up to the upcoming Annapolis peace conference talk of a future division of the city has prompted a staggering increase in nationalization requests by Palestinians seeking to escape life under the Palestinian Authority.

Some 250,000 Palestinians currently reside in Jerusalem. Only 12,000 of them have sought to obtain an Israeli citizenship since 1967, an average of about 300 new citizens a year.

But over the past four months the Interior Ministry has registered an unprecedented 3,000 applications, primarily residents of the Arab neighborhoods unlikely to remain under Israeli sovereignty according to the political initiative currently on the agenda.

But the blunt fact is that Israel is not about to receive these vast numbers of Palestinians. Several officials we spoke to, including very senior persons at Israel’s Foreign Ministry, indicated clearly that they are well aware of the demographics between Jews and Arabs in and around Israel. Almost one-fourth of Israelis are Muslims. One official said clearly that because Israel is a democracy, it simply was unthinkable that its government would allow massive numbers of Palestinian Muslims to take up citizenship and ultimately vote the Jewish state out of existence.

Regardless, the fact is that people vote with their feet when there is no other effective recourse. As the Annapolis Conference, now scheduled for next month, draws nearer, expect increasing number of requests by Palestinians for Israeli citizenship, or at least asylum.