Israel’s Demographic Miracle

Birthrates are falling across the world, especially in developed nations—except in one. How did mainstream, middle-class Israelis start having children again, and what does it mean?

By Ofir Haivri, MOSAIC

“The more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied.” (Exodus 1:12)

Many were the achievements justly celebrated on Israel’s 70th anniversary last month: the country’s prowess in matters military, its world-famous technological knowhow, its record of economic growth and stability, the rich variety of its cultural offerings, the vibrancy of its religious life, the indomitable spirit of its people.

Yet still another achievement, perhaps the most impressive but one that’s mostly unknown, needs to be added to the list: Israel’s stunning demographic success. In this essay, I hope to repair the deficiency.

To do so, it helps first to move briefly backward in time to 1998, the year of the country’s 50th anniversary. Then, too, Israel had many accomplishments to be proud of, but its future prospects seemed far less promising. Especially bleak was the population forecast.

All over the world in those years, Jewish birthrates, consistent with trends in relatively educated and affluent societies, were on a downward slope, and Israel was no exception. Moreover, in Israel there seemed no realistic prospect of a substantial influx of new immigrants. The recent great wave from post-Soviet Eastern Europe in the early and mid-90s had effectively exhausted itself, and Jews in affluent Western lands showed no intention of emigrating to Israel in significant numbers.

Meanwhile, birthrates of Arabs across the Middle East, including in Israel and the Israel-controlled territories of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza, were vastly higher than Jewish birthrates and showed no signs of diminishing.

These facts alone constituted grounds for serious worry that the Jewish majority in Israel would become so thin and attenuated as to pose a threat to the security and perhaps even the survival of the Jewish state. Thus, it was hardly a coincidence that these years also saw an intensification of ostensibly well-meaning calls on Israel to seek peace at almost any price with its Arab neighbors, evacuate the territories taken in the 1967 war, including if necessary eastern Jerusalem, and safeguard its majority within Israel’s pre-June 1967 borders before things got even worse.

And then things did get worse. In September 2000, interpreting repeated Israeli concessions to him as signs of weakness, Yasir Arafat launched the second intifada, ushering in one of the most sweeping and protracted terrorist campaigns ever directed against a civilian population. For the next four years, Israelis were subjected to almost daily murderous attacks. Economic activity declined sharply; diplomatic pressures mounted; and many professed to see only darker clouds on the horizon. Alarmed friends of Israel, prominently including former President Bill Clinton, urged American Jews to exert pressure on their Israeli cousins to reach a deal with the Palestinians before the already dire population statistics, exacerbated by rising numbers of Jews who would surely leave the sinking Israeli ship, turned demographic emergency into demographic catastrophe.

And yet, none of these forecasts was borne out. Israelis fought back and eventually defeated the second intifada both militarily and politically. The economy recovered and entered a stage of sustained growth. Simultaneously, defying all predictions, Israeli Jews started to have many more children, bringing about a complete reversal of demographic trends. Today, the Jewish birthrate has soared so high that it outpaces that of Arabs both in Israel and on the West Bank, and even in most Arab and Muslim countries.

How did this seemingly impossible turn of events come about?

I. Warnings of Demographic Apocalypse

In some ways, the entire history of Zionism is one of false prophecies of Jewish demographic doom as well as the one intimation—of a horrific fate for European Jewry—that came dreadfully true in the Nazi murder of a third of the Jewish people in 1939-45.

Around the time of the first Zionist congress in 1897 where Theodor Herzl articulated his vision of a future Jewish state—to many at the time it was less a vision than a fanciful dream—there were approximately 11 million Jews in the world, of whom only about 1 percent lived in the land of Israel itself. By the beginning of World War II, the world number had risen to almost 18 million, only to fall by the end of the Nazi genocide to fewer than 12 million. Of those, some 600,000 had ingathered in Palestine and would be present at the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, proceeding within a few years to double their number by absorbing the vast majority of Middle Eastern Jews fleeing persecution at the hands of Arab dictators.

Today, there are about 14 million Jews in the world, a number still significantly smaller than in 1939. Of these, about half now live in the Jewish state. There, as the Zionist story unfolded, a long series of dire demographic predictions would prove successively and dramatically wrong. To take one early example: in 1898, the great Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnov, an opponent of the Zionist movement, wrote that “the creation of a state with a significant Jewish population is impossible. . . . [I]n the year 2000, there will live in Palestine at most 500,000 Jews.”

Nor did such bleakness cease with the establishment of the state itself. Roberto Bachi, soon to become the founding director (1949-1971) of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), calculated in 1944 that by 1971 the Jewish population in the land of Israel would stand only at about 1,900,000 as against a majority of 2,186,000 Arabs. Bachi later corrected his figures to account for the large-scale ingathering of Jews from Arab countries and elsewhere and their temporarily high birthrates, which had boosted the Jewish majority, but he still held that the fall to minority status had only been postponed to the year 2000.

Demographic pessimism was reinforced after 1967 when the Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza came under Israeli rule and it became common for demographers to include this population in forecasts for all of the lands “west of the Jordan.” Although Israel to this day has formally annexed only the areas of eastern Jerusalem as well as the sparsely populated Golan Heights, and although in 2005 it disengaged totally from Gaza, today most demographic assessments still treat the whole area west of the Jordan River as one undifferentiated unit.

Already by the late 1980s, with the outbreak of the first intifada, it had become fashionable to predict an imminent Jewish demographic apocalypse. The new consensus was presented in an October 1987 New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, who quoted various trends and statistics to illustrate an inescapable downward Jewish trajectory:

According to [Israel’s CBS], in 1985 Israeli Jews had an average birthrate of 21.6 per 1,000 people, while Israeli Arabs had a birthrate of 34.9, Arabs of the West Bank 41.0, and Arabs of the Gaza Strip 46.6—more than double that of Israeli Jews.

Friedman’s local expert was Arnon Sofer of Haifa University, who warned that unless Israel withdrew immediately from all of the West Bank and Gaza, it would be faced with the “calamity” of an Arab majority. Another supposed expert, Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, thought that Israel might soon be forced to adopt the shamefaced method pioneered by the failing Maronite Christian rulers in Lebanon, who “simply stopped taking a census.” Both Sofer and Benvenisti stressed essentially the same point: in the battle for a comfortable majority “west of the Jordan,” Jewish demography was a losing game, a reality that in turn demanded radical changes in Israeli policy vis-à-vis the territories.

Friedman did note that some Israeli right-wingers were not so pessimistic. One prominent example was then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who declared, quoting the Hebrew Bible, that

from its inception our nation was “the smallest among all the nations,” and always faced demographic problems. Yet never did our people resort to the solution of escapism. That is no solution.

Shamir held out hope for large waves of Jewish immigration in the future—a hope that would be spectacularly confirmed when, following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, just such a wave brought more than 1.2 million Jews to Israel.

Still, as we have seen, even this great inflow did not put to rest the forecasts of demographic doom. From the early 1990s, and particularly after the beginning of the Oslo process in 1993, the mantra of a “demographic threat” was again widely repeated in the media and cited in diplomatic circles as a reason for ever greater Israeli territorial concessions to Yasir Arafat’s PLO. Yet every such concession made by Israel in those years was met by a hardening of the PLO’s demand for a complete withdrawal to the state’s pre-1967 borders and for granting a “right of return” to all descendants of the 1948-9 Arab refugees—a return that, if implemented, would inundate the Jewish state and thus thoroughly vitiate the rationale for the concessions in the first place.

To Arafat, who understood this process perfectly, the goal was to break the spirit of the Israelis, as he stated explicitly in a February 1996 speech to Arab diplomats in Stockholm:

The PLO will now concentrate on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps [i.e., for and against concessions]. . . . We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion [emphasis added]. Jews will not want to live among Arabs.

Which brings us back to the start of the 21st century and the onset of the second intifada. As the terror raged, fear of the so-called Arab “population explosion”—or what Arafat, referring to the wombs of Arab women, liked to call his secret “demographic bomb”—reached an apex. In 2003 Benjamin Netanyahu, then minister of the treasury, articulated those fears in declaring that even though Israel had relieved itself of responsibility for the Arabs in the territories ruled by the Palestinian Authority, Israeli Jews would likely still face the problem of an insufficiently large numerical majority even within the country’s pre-1967 borders: “If we have [an Arab minority of] 40 percent, the Jewish state is nullified.”

Chiming in, Arnon Sofer announced in 2004 that Israel was “in a demographic collapse; the demographic map in Jerusalem, in the Negev, and in the Galilee points to devastation.” So did the demographer Sergio Della Pergola of the Hebrew University, who foresaw that by 2020 there would be a Jewish minority “west of the Jordan” of some 6,380,000 Jews versus 8,810,000 Arabs, and that even in an Israel without the territories, Jews would still become a minority, if at a slower rate, reaching that point around the 100th anniversary of the state in 2048.

American well-wishers, including Bill Clinton, once again stepped in to call for increasingly far-reaching concessions as a means of staving off the looming demographic threat. Ever since the 1993 Oslo accords, Clinton assured one Jewish group in 2009, “the geographic or demographic facts have not changed, and the Palestinians are having more children than you can make or import.”

Under Barack Obama, this would become a constant talking point. In March 2013, during his state visit to Israel, Obama declared:

Given the demographics west of the Jordan River, the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine [through a complete withdrawal from the West Bank].

Obama’s speech was synchronized with a piece in Foreign Policy by Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official and Middle East policy expert, asserting baldly that “Israel can be Jewish, democratic, or a state in control of the Palestinian territories. Choose two.” In December of the same year, Secretary of State John Kerry echoed the presidential warning: Israel’s parlous demographic situation represented an “existential threat . . . that makes it impossible for Israel to preserve its future as a democratic, Jewish state.”

Ofir Haivry, an Israeli historian and political theorist, is vice-president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and the author of John Selden and the Western Political Tradition (Cambridge).