The Israeli chief rabbinate’s exclusive control over marriage and divorce has long caused discontent, even if little has come from politicians’ calls for reform. But now, argues Shmuel Rosner, the rabbinate’s monopoly may have been broken without the Knesset passing a single bill:

[S]ome things aren’t determined by legislators and ministers. They are determined by the people. . . . First, support for relaxing laws governing the marriage market is widespread. . . . Sixty percent of Likud voters support [official recognition of non-Orthodox] marriages, [as do] 94 percent of Blue and White voters. . . .

The second issue clarified in the past few weeks is that a growing number of Israelis already are voting with their feet on this issue. The Central Bureau of Statistics released new data revealing that about 35,000 Jewish couples were married by the rabbinate in 2017. In the same year, another 8,000 couples married outside of the rabbinate—some in Cyprus, some in the Czech Republic, or the United States. So, the number of ceremonies abroad is already close to one-fifth of all weddings of Israeli Jews. At the same time, the number of Israelis who don’t even bother to marry legally also has risen.

The rabbinate has a product to sell. It is the only institution legally allowed to sell this product. And yet, people aren’t buying it. If the secular half of the public turns its back on the rabbinate, all the known arguments for the exclusivity of a rabbinate-mandated route—the most common of which is the need to maintain the unity of the people—collapse. I suspect they have already collapsed.

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.