By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
July 14, 2016 8:37 a.m. ET
JERUSALEM—Israel’s peace camp and its international backers have long used one crude but powerful argument: Arabs make more babies than Jews and unless a separate Palestinian state is created, a demographic time bomb will turn Jews into a dwindling minority akin to white South Africans.
That prospect certainly seemed real when the Oslo peace process began in the 1990s. Fertility among Israeli Jews stood at an average of 2.6 children per woman, compared with 4.7 among Muslims in Israel and East Jerusalem and 6.0 among Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Yasser Arafat at the time famously declared that the womb of the Palestinian woman was his people’s most potent weapon.
Yet over the past decade, a demographic revolution with long-lasting political consequences has occurred. Jewish birthrates in Israel have spiked while Arab birthrates in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere in the Middle East have declined. …
The Jewish fertility rate in Israel was 3.11 per woman in 2014, the last full year for which data is available, while among the Arab citizens of Israel and East Jerusalem residents it was only a notch higher at 3.17, according to Israel’s statistics bureau. Palestinian fertility rates have fallen to 3.7 in the West Bank from 5.6 in 1997, and to 4.5 from 6.9 children in the Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian statistics bureau.
Regardless of its political implications, Israel’s baby boom represents a puzzling exception to the world’s demographic trends. Usually, as countries become wealthier and as women become more integrated in the workforce, fertility rates plummet—sometimes well below the natural replenishment level—as happened in nations from Japan to Italy.
But in Israel, even as per capita income soared above the European Union’s average over the past decade, families began having more children. This gave the country by far the highest fertility rate among the world’s advanced economies. Israeli Jews nowadays have more children, on average, than Egyptians, Iranians or Lebanese.
“This is the uniqueness of Israel that you will not find in any other society in the world. It’s a fact of life—we are different,” said Arnon Soffer, a professor at Haifa University and one of the country’s leading demographers.
Remarkably, this baby boom is happening mostly among the secular and moderately religious Jews: Over the past decade, fertility rates have declined in the ultraorthodox community.
COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER:
* Doesn’t Israel have a border fence (or wall)? And, doesn’t Israel have a fairly low rate of immigration? Especially compared to Western nations? Like, how many Syrian refugees and peoples from Islamic nations (and Sub-Saharan nations) has Israel taken in over the last fifteen or so yrs?
