This summer, the influential cable news network aired a six-part series on the city of Jerusalem, with each episode focusing on a different conflict—from biblical times to the Six-Day War. David Litman writes that the first five episodes were “seriously marred by factual inaccuracies and one-sided narratives omitting vital information. Many of the ‘experts’ featured in the series have clear histories of anti-Israel activism and partisanship.” Even more egregious was the treatment of the 1967 war in the finale:

CNN [routinely distorts] events to portray Arabs as powerless victims, . . . such as when the narrator tells viewers, “the [Jordanian] shelling is meant to target Jews in West Jerusalem, but it’s the Palestinian Arabs living in the area that are left defenseless.” Yes—CNN suggested that when Arabs were trying to kill Jews, it was really Arabs who were the victims.

If one were to explain the events leading to the Six-Day War based only on the CNN series, the answer would be: (1) some Palestinian terrorists placed a mine and killed three Israeli soldiers; (2) Israel responded with a retaliation raid into the West Bank that escalated into a battle between Israeli and Jordanian forces; and (3) Egypt felt it had to defend Jordan’s honor and thus responded by closing the Straits of Tiran. It should go without saying that this narrative is laughably absurd.

There are also multiple attempts in the final episode to portray the conflict as one in which Israel is a heavily armed American ally. All the while, no mention is made of Soviet military assistance to the Arab armies. . . . The reality: the United States barely provided any military equipment to Israel prior to or during the Six-Day War.

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.