Monte's demographic masturbation, and now the truth:
Israel's Demographic Miracle
"The word 'miracle' in Hebrew does not possess the connotation of the supernatural," Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik once wrote. "Miracle describes only an outstanding event which causes amazement." Whether the term applies to Israel's demographics is a question for higher authority, but the Jewish State's population characteristics stand out as unique in the developed world.
Israel's fertility rate of three children per Jewish woman is higher than that of any other country in the developed world, and the only fertility rate substantially above replacement. Only the United States among the world's industrial nations has a fertility rate around the replacement level of 2.1; Europe and East Asia are headed for eventual population decline with fertility of just 1.5 children per woman. Israeli women, by contrast, have three children on average; non-Haredi Jewish women have an average of 2.6.
Just as remarkable is that fertility in most of the Muslim world has fallen below Israel's, while the fertility of Israeli Arabs and Arabs in Judea and Samaria has converged on the Jewish fertility rate in Israel. At present fertility rates there is no risk that a non-Jewish majority will emerge between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Not only has the so-called population time bomb disappeared in Israel; in large parts of the Muslim world, fertility has fallen below the Jewish fertility rate in Israel.
Whether the proportion of Arabs in Judea and Samaria as well as in Israel itself is growing may be the most politicized demographic question in the world.
The late Yasser Arafat can take credit for the worst demographic forecast of the twentieth century. "The womb of the Arab woman," the late Palestinian strongman averred, "is my strongest weapon." By this he meant that the Arabs of Israel and the occupied territories would outbreed and overwhelm the Jews. A generation of Israeli politicians believed him, fearing that a "ticking demographic time bomb" threatened the integrity of the Jewish state. In 2001, for example,
The Christian Science Monitor noted a report to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, which said:
In the whole area west of the Jordan—including Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza—Jews last year represented 50.5 percent of the population; the Arabs, 49.5 percent. Testifying before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Prof. Arnon Sofer of Haifa University projected that with their higher birthrate, Arabs would constitute 58 percent of this population by the year 2020 and Jews, 42 percent. Without final borders and a clear separation between states, he said Israel faces an existential crisis.
The supposed demographic threat loomed behind the late Yitzhak Rabin's celebrated Rose Garden handshake with Arafat in 1994. It motivated then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to offer the Palestinians half of Jerusalem and almost all of the West Bank in return for a peace agreement in 2007. In October of that year Olmert warned the Knesset of "a demographic battle, drowned in blood and tears," if Israel did not achieve peace through concessions of land. A month later Olmert predicted "the end of the State of Israel" by demographic exhaustion. "Mr. Olmert," reported the BBC in November, "said it was not the first time he had articulated his fears about the demographic threat to Israel as a Jewish state from a faster growing Palestinian population. He made similar comments in 2003 to justify the failed strategy of unilateral withdrawals from Israeli-occupied land which holds large Palestinian populations." Israeli concessions in the first decade of the twenty-first century were motivated by fear that Arab fecundity would swamp Israel's Jewish population.
Yet the Israeli Jewish fertility rate has risen to three children per female while the Arab fertility rate has fallen to the point where the two trend lines have converged and perhaps even crossed. A 2006 study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies claims that the West Bank and Gaza population in 2004 was only 2.5 million, rather than the 3.8 million claimed by the Palestinian authorities. Presumably the numbers were inflated to increase foreign aid and exaggerate the importance of the Palestinian population.
Most of the phantom population, the report argues, comes from births that never occurred:
[The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics] projected that the number of births in the Territories would total almost 908,000 for the seven-year period from 1997 to 2003. Yet, the actual number of births documented by the PA Ministry of Health for the same period was significantly lower at 699,000, or 238,000 fewer births than had been forecast by the PCBS. … The size of the discrepancy accelerated over time. Whereas the PCBS predicted there would be over 143,000 births in 2003, the PA Ministry of Health reported only 102,000 births, which pointed to a PCBS forecast 40% beyond actual results.
Palestinian fertility on the West Bank has already fallen to the Israeli fertility rate of three children per woman, if we believe the Palestine Ministry of Health numbers rather than the highly suspect Central Bureau of Statistics data. In 1963, Israeli Arab women had eight or nine children; today they have three, about the same as Israeli Jews. Education explains most of the fertility decline among Arabs, and it is likely that Arab fertility behind the Green Line as well as in Judea and Samaria will continue to fall.
More recent data also show that the Israeli Jewish birth rate has risen faster than predicted. Jewish births rose from 96,000 in the year 2000 to 125,000 in 2010, while Arab births fell slightly over the same period—from about 40,781 to 40,750, according to a new study by Yaakov Faitelson at the Institute for Zionist Strategies. The proportion of Jewish pupils in Israel's elementary schools is increasing, Faitelson reports:
The percentage of students in the Arab educational system out of all Israel's total first grade student body will decrease from 29.1% in 2007 to only 24.3% in 2016 and 22.5% in 2020. At the same time the percentage of students in the Jewish educational system out of the total first grade student body will reach 75.7% by 2016 and 77.5% by 2020.
While Israel's ultra-Orthodox minority contributes disproportionately to Jewish population growth, most of the increase in Jewish births comes from the secular and non-Orthodox religious categories, which average 2.6 children per woman. Faitelson notes that the ultra-Orthodox fertility rate fell over the past decade, while the fertility of the general Jewish population rose.
