Although the Israeli presence in the West Bank is widely considered a terrible crime against the Palestinian people, it has in fact brought health and prosperity. Yoram Ettinger looks at the statistics:

[F]rom the end of 1967 (586,000 people) until the end of 1992 (1,050,000 people), the Arab population of Judea and Samaria expanded by 79 percent, compared to a mere 0.9-percent growth during the 1950-1967 Jordanian rule. The unprecedented Arab population-growth rate was the outcome of the unprecedented Israeli development of health, medical, transportation, education, and employment infrastructure in Judea and Samaria, following the stagnation during the Jordanian occupation of the area. In addition, Israel offered employment opportunities, in its pre-1967 core, to Judean and Samarian Arabs, who preferred working in Israel to the faraway Arab Gulf states, West Africa, or Latin America.

But this rapid population increase, Ettinger explains, follows a pattern familiar from other cases when “a Third World population . . . benefits from a considerable modernization of infrastructure.” In such instances, a demographic surge is followed by a leveling out, as members of the group in question begin to have fewer children. By contrast, Israeli Jews’ fertility rates remain the highest for any Westernized population. Ettinger explains:

Jewish demography [results from] the Israeli state of mind, which is top-heavy on optimism, faith, patriotism, attachment to roots, collective responsibility, the centrality of children, and a frontier mentality in the face of costly Jewish history and contemporary existential threats in the stormy, violently intolerant, . . . Middle East. . . . Israel’s left and right, doves and hawks, secular and religious, wealthy and poor . . . consider children as a means to enrich their own lives, and secure the civilian and military future of the Jewish state.

Israel’s robust demography refutes the assertion that its Jewish majority is threatened by a supposed Arab “demographic time bomb.”

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].