Earlier this year, a German music and culture festival invited the prominent Cameroon-born, South African philosopher Achille Mbembe to deliver the keynote address. A liberal German parliamentarian criticized the choice, citing Mbembe’s disturbing record of anti-Israel bigotry and anti-Semitism. Manfred Gerstenfeld elaborates:

Mbembe has written that Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians is worse than South Africa’s treatment of the black population under apartheid. Mbembe is also an academic supporter of the [movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction the Jewish state] (BDS), which demonizes Israel. . . . Mbembe was one of about 300 signatories on a 2010 petition calling for the University of Johannesburg to cut all ties with Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

[In] a travelogue Mbembe published in 1992 under the title “Israel, the Jews and Us,” [he] presented the Holocaust as an event in the history of colonialism and Israel as a massive betrayal of the Jewish experience of persecution. Mbembe claimed that Israel was “taking the place of the murderers” and called the God of the Jews a God of vengeance. In 2015, Mbembe wrote that Israel’s goal is the incremental obliteration of the Palestinians.

Although the festival, scheduled for late this summer, was canceled due to concerns over the coronavirus, the controversy continued in Germany, as over 300 artists and academics from 30 countries signed a public defending Mbembe and denying the charges. Gerstenfeld writes:

The letter’s very first paragraph contained two lies. The first was that Mbembe has never made anti-Semitic statements, an easily disproven claim. The second was that the accusations against Mbembe came from the extreme right. In fact, the exposure of Mbembe’s anti-Semitism originated mostly in mainstream sources. The letter ended with the brazen demand that the German anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, be fired, [for the crime of having] told the truth about Mbembe’s anti-Semitism.

Moreover, many signatories, when asked, confessed to being unfamiliar with Mbembe’s works. The fact of a mob—even a mob of professors—imitating American “cancel culture” called for the head of Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner for criticizing an anti-Semite is bad enough. But perhaps worse still is the possibility that Mbembe’s popularity in Germany stems from his eagerness to minimize the Holocaust by comparing it with apartheid, or to the imagined crimes of the Jewish state.

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.