At the Riyadh Arab-China summit on Friday, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas demanded that the UK and the U.S. apologize for the Balfour Declaration, and that Israel apologize for the nakba (i.e., the “catastrophe” that befell Palestinian Arabs in 1948). Of a piece with this rhetorical focus on past grievances was the UN General Assembly’s recent vote to mark May 15 as “Nakba Day.” Adi Schwartz comments:

Contrary to popular belief in the West (and in certain circles in Israel), Nakba Day was not intended to mark the alleged humanitarian disaster that befell the Palestinian people in the 1948 war. They do not mourn the dead, the wounded, or the exiled, but the very establishment of the Jewish state. They mourn Jews gaining independence rather than the human cost of the war.

The term nakba was coined by the Syrian Arab intellectual Constantin Zureiq in a book he wrote in the summer of 1948 titled “The Meaning of Disaster.” Analyzing the Arab response to their failure to prevent the establishment of Israel, he wrote, “Seven Arab states declare war on Zionism in Palestine, stop impotent before it, and turn on their heels.”

The thought that 600,000 Jews managed to defeat 60 million Muslim Arabs at the time was—and still is—unimaginable to the Arabs. This is the greatest humiliation, the source of the frustration, rage, and violence directed toward the state of Israel. This is the true meaning of “nakba,” the disaster of the Jews’ success to declare a state despite all the efforts by the Arabs to prevent them from doing so.

The fact that Palestinians commemorate Nakba Day on May 15 is a clear indication of this. If the occasion was truly meant to remember the casualties among Palestinians, they could have a day that had more meaning loss-wise, such as the fighting in the Deir Yassin village or the day when Arab Haifa fell to the Jews. These events had a great impact on the course of the war, and they reflect a real Palestinian loss. But on May 15, nothing happened but the very declaration of Israel’s independence.

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.