On October 12, a girl was born in an Israeli hospital and given the name Be’ri, after the kibbutz that had so recently borne the brunt of Hamas’s onslaught. Since then, at least 44 other Israeli children have been given that name. This small fact reveals something profound about the Jewish state, writes Jacob Sivak:

On November 23, the Population and Immigration Border Authority reported that close to 18,000 babies had been born in Israel since October 7, many named after locations attacked by Hamas that day. Some might view this as a strange announcement to make in the middle of a war, a war that Hamas initiated by killing, torturing, and raping 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children, and kidnapping 240 more, but not if you are aware of what Ofir Haivry calls Israel’s “demographic miracle.”

An OECD chart for 2021 . . . shows that the disparity between the fertility number for Israel and that for other developed countries is even larger than [previously] reported. The value for Israel (3.00) is essentially unchanged from 2015, but the overall OECD average is 1.58, reduced from 1.68. The number for the U.S. went down from 1.80 to 1.66, for Canada from 1.61 to 1.43, and for Italy from 1.39 to 1.25, while South Korea’s number went down from 1.19 to 0.81, which is less than one child per woman!

Israel’s high birthrate has attracted a lot of attention and the reasons for it have been attributed to a number of factors. . . . Most importantly, however, . . . children represent survival.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].