On Monday, a carving of Elie Wiesel was unveiled at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, where it stands alongside depictions of Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others. While expressing his appreciation to this church for honoring his father not just as a great humanitarian but also as an “observant Jew,” Wiesel’s son Elisha voices his concern over the way his father’s legacy has been obscured or misappropriated:

[T]he hardest thing for me is when I come across people who invoke his protests, read his books, and cry for the dead Jews—then condemn in unforgiving terms the 6 million Jews living in Israel who refuse to depend ever again on others to rescue them. So I remind the world that my father didn’t advocate just for the people of Kosovo, Darfur, and Cambodia. He also supported Israel and defended her right to exist in peace and security.

My father understood what it meant to live in a world without a Jewish state, and he saw the anti-Zionist movement for what it was: an extension of millennia-old anti-Semitism, which unfortunately is becoming more common and acceptable today.

Today my father is being honored as a friend of the church. But as a child, he would cross the street to avoid one, and the beatings from the worshipers within; on Christmas Eve he knew to stay off the streets altogether. My great-grandmother sang him mournful songs about Jewish communities decimated over outrageous lies that they murdered Christian children to make matzah with their blood. How do I help our Christian friends understand that the Jewish people still face blood libels today?

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.