Last week, Israel approved Egypt’s transfer of the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia, a de-facto move toward normalization between Jerusalem and Riyadh. The Saudis took another step in this direction by opening their airspace to Israeli flights, and an Israeli journalist has reportedly visited Mecca, from which non-Muslims are generally barred. Jacob Magid, another journalist who came to Jeddah on the first-ever direct flight from Tel Aviv to the kingdom, spoke to several Saudis in the Haifa mall, located on the city’s Palestine Street:

“A Jew is a Jew, whether in Israel or Moscow,” said Sultan, a salesman at a watch kiosk, as Beyonce’s “Halo” played in the gleaming mall. . . . Aware he was speaking with a member of the Israeli press—I was one of three reporters for Israeli publications who joined the White House press corps for the Saudi leg of Biden’s Middle East trip—the salesman had no problem launching into a diatribe about how the Jews wanted to kill the prophet Mohammad and are “the enemies of Islam.”

Learning my name, Sultan admitted that he had never met a Jew before. “The Quran says it’s good that we’re all different,” Sultan clarified, in an impressive 180-degree turn from his original argument. Experts say a similar about-face will be needed if Israeli-Saudi normalization—a process Riyadh claims is not happening—is to see a warm welcoming of Israeli and Jews after decades of hostility and demonization.

Although Sultan was not alone in expressing this view, Magid encountered another position as well:

Out in the Jeddah night, my Uber driver, Ahmed, echoed a sentiment expressed by many others in the mall: that he didn’t have much of an opinion on the matter and that he trusted the Saudi government to act appropriately.

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.