The Supreme Court is expected to announce shortly whether it will hear the case of Peltier v. Charter Day School, in which a North Carolina mother of two sued the school her children attend over its policy of having different dress codes for boys and girls. In the view of a federal appeals court, charter schools, since they receive private funds, are public institutions and thus the dress code is impermissible. George Will hopes the Supreme Court will overturn the ruling. Doing so would make room for religious charter schools—including Jewish ones.

If opponents of expanded school choices would devote to improving public education half the ingenuity they invest in impeding competition from alternatives to the status quo, there would be less demand for alternatives. That demand would be strengthened by a Supreme Court decision that charter schools are not “state actors,” and hence can present pedagogical and cultural choices without being vulnerable to suffocating litigation.

Charters are so popular the public education establishment must attack them indirectly, by what [a dissenting appeals-court judge] calls “the slow strangulation of litigation.” Unless the Supreme Court rescues charters from the “state actor” designation, today’s argument that sex differences in dress codes violate “equal protection” will morph into attacks on single-sex charters, and bathroom or sports policies based on biological sex. Discussions of religion will provoke First Amendment establishment-clause challenges. Only the Supreme Court can protect charters from progressives who, ever eager to break all institutions to the saddle of government, pursue this aim while praising a predictable casualty of it, true diversity.

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.