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.”

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.