On Saturday, the Lebanese foreign minister told reporters that a deal with Israel regarding the two countries’ maritime borders is “95-percent” complete. The deal, brokered by the U.S., would allow both countries to explore their offshore natural-gas supplies without conflict. Meanwhile, Hizballah—the Lebanon-based terrorist group with tens of thousands of missiles aimed at the Jewish state—has threatened to attack Israeli gas rigs if Jerusalem starts drilling in the Karish gas field before reaching an agreement with Beirut.

Both the threats and the negotiations, argues Tony Badran, must be understood in the context of a broader American strategy of propping up Lebanon, and its military, in the name of an illusory stability:

Lebanon is explicitly an Iranian holding, an economic basket case whose “government” and “army” are fronts for the Hizballah militia that is run directly from Tehran. . . . Yet the Biden administration has made it its mission to throw whatever money and resources it can muster in order to prop up and stabilize the Hizballah-controlled order in Lebanon—while involving itself at a . . . granular level in the micromanagement of Lebanon’s hopelessly mismanaged, Iranian-dominated energy and security sectors. In its obsessive pursuit of these priorities, the administration has pressured and cajoled U.S. allies, encouraging some to violate U.S. sanctions, concocting mechanisms to allow for the circumvention of U.S. laws, and destroying the integrity of U.S. foreign-assistance programs that must certify, among other things, that U.S. taxpayer funds are not being used to fund terrorists and terrorism.

In addition to entangling America’s Arab allies, the administration has also enmeshed Israel with its energy scheme, [so as] to turn Lebanon (that is to say, Hizballah) into an energy producer and perhaps exporter. The United States decided that the pathway to this nirvana . . . is the demarcation of Lebanon’s maritime border with Israel, which Washington therefore resolved to broker.

Should the Israeli government cave, as appears increasingly likely, team Biden’s gambit will have set the precedent of extracting concessions from Israel under the threat of attack leveraged by the United States on behalf of Iranian assets. Moreover, the gambit, by design, will turn Hizballah, and consequently Iran, into a player in eastern Mediterranean energy.

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.