While archaeologists routinely find artifacts from the biblical and Roman periods in the Old City of Jerusalem, a recent excavation near the Western Wall yielded historical items of much more recent vintage. James Rogers writes:

Archaeologists were excavating beneath the entrance lobby of the Western Wall tunnels [last] Wednesday when they found machine-gun magazines full of bullets, bayonets, and rifle parts. . . . The ammunition stash was found hidden in a cistern dating back to the period of the British Mandate in Palestine, which ended in 1948. The finds were examined by Israeli police bomb disposal experts.

“Apparently,” [said the archaeologists], “this is an ammunition dump that was purposely hidden by soldiers of the Royal Jordanian Army during the Six-Day War, perhaps when the IDF liberated the Old City.”

“This is ammunition that was produced in Britain in the Greenwood and Batley Ltd. factories in Leeds, Yorkshire,” added Assaf Peretz, of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who identified the ammunition.

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.