Because of his role in allowing anti-Semitic legislation to remain in place following the Allied liberation of North Africa, and his near-hostility toward Israel as president during the Suez crisis, the 34th American president does not have a reputation as a great friend of the Jewish people. Yet, writes Benjamin Runkle, Eisenhower’s dealings with the survivors of the Holocaust in his role as commander of Allied forces in Europe are greatly to his credit.

On April 12, 1945, [about a month before the German surrender], Eisenhower visited the recently liberated Ohrdruf-Nord concentration camp near Gotha with Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton. . . . Eisenhower called the atrocities “beyond the American mind to comprehend,” and ordered every American unit not on the frontlines to see Ohrdruf. The next day he visited Buchenwald and sent a cable to George Marshall urging the Army chief of staff to come to Germany to see for himself. “I made the visit deliberately,” he told his boss, “in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”

Eisenhower wrote to the governments in Washington and London urging that newspaper editors and representatives of all political parties be sent to Germany immediately so that evidence of Nazi atrocities could be placed before the British and American publics in a way that would leave no room for doubt. This began the process of documenting the Shoah that proved instrumental both to the prosecution of Nazi war crimes and to gaining international sympathy critical to the eventual support for the creation of the state of Israel.

Several months later, Eisenhower received a report composed by Earl Harrison on behalf of the U.S. State Department, documenting the miserable conditions of Jewish displaced persons. Runkle continues:

Once Eisenhower was made aware of Harrison’s findings, he acted quickly. He toured the DP camps, which Rabbi Judah Nadich, who worked at one such camp, said “proved to be the single greatest factor to date in boosting the morale of the displaced persons. They knew now that they were not forgotten people.” Eisenhower issued a series of directives aimed at improving their conditions. Subordinates were told to segregate Jewish refugees, requisition housing for them even if it meant displacing Germans, and to increase their daily rations to 2,500 calories, twice that of German civilians.

Eisenhower also reversed his initial position and requested that somebody be appointed to serve as a special adviser on affairs dealing with displaced Jews, and in October Judge Simon Rifkind was given the position. . . . Eisenhower subsequently promised Rifkind “anything you need in the way of personnel or transport, or in any other type of assistance.” Rabbi Nadich, who later served as an adviser to Eisenhower, recalled that Eisenhower’s treatment of the Jews was consistently “marked by understanding and sympathy.”

Eisenhower [also] allowed David Ben-Gurion and other representatives of the Jewish Agency to visit the camps and establish contact with the Jewish DPs that enabled a mass exodus from the camps once Israel gained its independence.

Yasir Arafat was often quoted as saying that his “strongest weapon is the womb of an Arab woman.” That is, he believed the high birthrates of both Palestinians and Arab Israelis ensured that Jews would eventually be a minority in the Land of Israel, at which point Arabs could call for a binational state and get an Arab one. Using similar logic, both Israelis and their self-styled sympathizers have made the case for territorial concessions to prevent such an eventuality. Yet, Yoram Ettinger argues, the statistics have year after year told a different story:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives. Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing them, ignoring a 100-percent artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, an inflated birth rate, and deflated death rate.

The U.S. should derive much satisfaction from Israel’s demographic viability and therefore, Israel’s enhanced posture of deterrence, which is America’s top force- and dollar-multiplier in the Middle East and beyond.