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

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IV. What It Means to Be an Israeli Jew

Israeli Jews are a notably—some would say dizzyingly—diverse lot, marked by many stark differences in affiliation, outlook, style of life, and even attire. But on some basic things they are far more homogeneous than might outwardly appear. And there is no single aspect of life in which they are more united than in the central emphasis they place on family welfare and continuity.

On some level one could say the same of every society. But all around the world, modern cultures, groups, and whole societies, even while committed to this ideal, have simultaneously acted on the proposition that the material and even the spiritual well-being of individuals is connected to the limit they place on the number of their children. For some, indeed, especially in the most affluent European and Asian societies, the stricter those limits, the greater are the chances for happiness and self-fulfillment.

At the other extreme, many tribal or clannish societies to this day continue to count large numbers of offspring as the single best measure of success and status, sometimes even endorsing polygamy for this purpose. The downside in such societies is that children are often regarded as mere appendages of the collective wealth, with little or no consideration paid to their individual welfare and development.

Various UN and OECD studies agree on the factors responsible for falling birthrates: rising educational levels in general and especially among women, more women in the workforce, marriage and childbearing postponed till later ages, a stress on career achievement and economic advancement, and so forth. These factors apply in all societies—including in tribal ones, where even small advances in education or emancipation from tribal control are associated with a sudden drop in fertility.

The same factors exist in Israel, too, but, for most Israeli Jews, without the same effects on fertility. It thus appears reasonable to conclude that Israeli society has somehow succeeded in balancing rising levels of affluence and education with continued adherence to a family-oriented culture, thereby developing a unique and currently stable combination in which the centrality of the family has successfully withstood the full effects of the individualist ethos. Throughout Israeli society, the educational and moral welfare of children as well as the continuity of the family remains at the center of parents’ (and grandparents’) lives, not only emotionally but as a matter of almost day-to-day practice.

This peculiarly strong culture draws sustenance from and in turn informs the equally strong sense of national solidarity. Thanks to that strongly shared national identity, Israeli Jews are unusually willing to make personal sacrifices when it comes to welcoming new Jewish immigrants into the state and into their homes—and also when it comes to stoically enduring protracted periods of violence and bloodshed perpetrated by intractable enemies. As traditional communities of origin have receded in importance elsewhere in the world, the shared sense of an Israeli nation-family underlies the habitual instinct of most Israeli Jews to regard other Jews, and especially those in Israel itself, primarily as family members rather than merely as fellow citizens.

This attitude certainly has roots in Jewish tradition going back to the Bible, many of whose formative stories involve struggles with fertility and continuity. And Jewish religious practices are also notably family-centered. With the exception of Yom Kippur, virtually all major religious holidays, from Passover to Sukkot to Hanukkah, have evolved more around the family home and table than the synagogue; and as for the Sabbath table, it is a family table or it is nothing. In Israel, many of these family rituals are also performed, whether in part or in full, by most Jews who regard themselves and are commonly classified as secular.

Similarly, the shared experience of being or representing the survivors of the Shoah, or of the Jewish communities expelled from Islamic countries, and survivors as well of decades of unrelenting wars, terror, and hostility, has forged a widespread resolve to uphold the family and its continuity.

As a result, one may say that among Israeli Jews of all kinds, having children is commonly felt as both a right and a duty—an attitude that is rapidly assimilated by newcomers as well. An excellent example here is the great wave of immigrants who arrived in the 1990s from the former Soviet Union, where birthrates among Jews were some of the lowest in the world. Indeed, it was widely expected that the arrival of these immigrants, many of them highly educated and culturally Russified, would dramatically and perhaps permanently reduce the Israeli fertility rate. In actuality, both the immigrant generation and its progeny quickly adopted the regnant view, and in time their birthrates have converged with the national mean.

Nor is this the only example testifying to the pervasiveness of Israel’s pro-child culture. In Israel, second marriages are themselves regularly cemented by the arrival of new children. Moreover, it is also now a socially accepted phenomenon for successful but unmarried single women in their late thirties to have one or two children on their own, with the help of their relatives. (Whether or not this mode of  family-formation should be regarded as an unmitigated good is an issue on which analysts and others may vary.) Even among religiously observant families, where extramarital childbearing was until recently virtually unheard of, it is not uncommon for single women in their late thirties or early forties to conceive by in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and go on to raise children with the support, both financial and moral, of their strictly Orthodox kin.

An analogous trend can be observed among Israeli Jewish gays and lesbians. Although precise data are lacking, it appears that high percentages are having children and creating a much more child-oriented culture than is to be seen among their counterparts in Europe or the U.S.

Finally, Israel has become by far the world leader in fertility treatments. More than 40,000 such treatments are performed every year—adjusted for population size, thirteen times the number in the U.S.—even in cases where the chances of conceiving are quite slim. Whereas wealthy European countries with generous state-funded health services offer only up to six rounds of fertility treatments, and then only until a woman reaches the age of forty, in Israel there is no limit to the number of publicly funded fertility treatments a woman can undergo if she wishes (so long as she has fewer than two children already), and the upper age limit is forty-five. Currently, more than a third of the fertility treatments in Israel are for women over the age of forty.

Israel also performs incomparably more check-ups for pregnant women than does any other country, and has developed groundbreaking technologies for surgery on fetuses with life-threating conditions. In the words of Arnon Wiznitzer, director of the women’s hospital at Israel’s Beilinson Medical Center, “we are the superpower of fertility.”

Surely, then, the prophets of demographic doom can now retire? Amusingly, some seem so reluctant to abandon the field as to have identified a new up-and-coming danger: too many Jews. The leading spokesman for this new Malthusianism is Alon Tal, chairman of the department of public policy at Tel Aviv University and the author of The Land is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel (Yale). Forecasting a population three decades from now of 23 million and perhaps even as many as 36 million, he has embarked on a mission to break his fellow Israelis’ conviction that they must bring children into the world. (Incidentally, Tal, an American Jew originally from North Carolina, is a father of three.)

V. The Secret Zionist Victory

We can sum up the story so far:

In 2000, for each Arab child born in Israel there were two Jewish children: a ratio of 2/1.

In 2010, for each Arab child born in Israel there were three Jewish children: a ratio of 3/1.

In 2020, two years from now, if current trends hold, for every Arab child born in Israel there will be four Jewish children: a ratio of 4/1.

Absolute numbers tell the story even more starkly. In 2001, 95,146 Jewish children were born in Israel, and 41,440 Arab children; in 2015 the respective numbers were 137,708 and 41,016. In other words, within a mere fifteen years the number of Jewish children rose by more than 45 percent while the number of Arab children remained essentially unchanged.

The continued ingathering of Jews to Israel is an added source of demographic optimism. Since the turn of the century and the petering-out of the massive wave of Jewish immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union, smaller but still significant numbers have been coming both from the former USSR and from such countries as France, Ethiopia, and the U.S. In the last decade the net gain (subtracting returning Israelis and new immigrants who subsequently left) has been fairly constant at an average of about 20,000 annually or more than 200,000 additional Jews each decade.

These statistics tell a heartening tale concerning the demographic strength needed for Israel to survive and prevail in its existential struggle with its enemies. They also tell another tale—a Jewish tale—concerning Israel’s relationship to the diaspora.

Israel’s rising fertility rates, together with the continuing arrival of new Jewish immigrants, when placed against the opposite trends in most diaspora communities, mean that for some years now, Israel has been the world’s largest single Jewish community—something unprecedented since the period of the Second Temple. Even more significantly, Israel is or will soon become home to the absolute majority of world Jewry—something unprecedented probably since the period of the First Temple some 2,500 years ago.

But the sheer numbers reflect only part of the dramatic recalibration between Israel and the diaspora. Current data and foreseeable trends suggest that Israel is about to become home to roughly two-thirds of all Jewish children in the world, with close to 140,000 being born every year compared with some 70,000-80,000 in the diaspora. This last number is perhaps the most striking, for it means that within the next generation, Israel will become by far the undisputed center of gravity of Jewish life.

The new demographic reality presents new challenges as well as new opportunities. As many traditional Jewish communities in the diaspora are witnessing a period of rapid decline, and as the frequency of out-marriage among European and American Jews shows no sign of abating, there will be far larger numbers of unaffiliated people of Jewish descent than ever before. How to reach them will be a task to occupy Jewish policy planners for a long time to come.

Concurrently, however, individuals and groups around the world whose links to the Jewish people have become even more greatly attenuated than those in the affluent West are now actively seeking to regain some kind of connection with the Jewish core. Some of these seekers are descendants of people in Western and Eastern Europe who during the Nazi and Communist periods hid their Jewish identity or converted. Others are among the millions of descendants of Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in late-medieval Spain, Portugal, Italy and elsewhere, but whose families over the centuries preserved certain traditions and memories. Still others retain traditions of even more ancient lineage. For many, Israel will become the main and sometimes the only significant link to Jewish history and to a possible Jewish future.

All of this amounts to a striking if still largely unrecognized victory for Zionism’s 120-year-old goal of making the land of Israel once again the center of the Jewish nation and the Jewish story. In this respect as in others, Herzl’s dream is a dream no more.