Israel's Future: a Solid Jewish State

(nablopomo day 24)

An article on Israel National News discusses a recent demographic study in Israel of the last 15 years which indicates a dramatic rise in Jewish births and a parallel drop in Arab births.  The interesting thing is that the rise in birth rate is among secular Jewish women, while the birth rate among religious women remains consistently high.
Dr. Adam Reuter, writing on Arutz-7’s Hebrew site, presents a set of statistics showing that the dire predictions of an Arab demographic takeover of Israel that have become “common knowledge” are actually not true.
It includes eye-opening statistics, a few enumerated here, such as:

1) The fertility gap between Arab and Jewish women, which used to be 6 births in 1969, has dropped to .7 in 2009.

2) The proportion of Jewish births in Israel has grown from 69% of total births in 1995, to 75% in 2008

3) A generation ago, secular Jewish women gave birth to 2.1 children.  Their daughters are giving birth to 2.6 children

Aliyah (coming to live in Israel from other countries) has increased to an average of 16.000 in the past several years, and there are more returning Israelis than are leaving.

Retired Ambassador Yoram Ettinger of the American-Israeli Demographic Research Group (AIDRG), stated that the number of Arabs in the YESHA* area was inflated by 66%: it should be 1.55 million, not 2.5 million.  Because of this, the World Bank has documented a 32% inflation in the number of Arab ("Palestinian") births.  In addition to the decline of their fertility rate, there is an increase of Arab emigrants from the YESHA area, as well.


As Ettinger concludes in his piece, No Demographic Time Bomb (scroll down page for the article),
In 2010, there is a demographic problem, but there is no demographic machete at Israel's throat. Most importantly, the demographic tailwind is Jewish, not Arab.Refuted demographic fatalism should be replaced with well-documented optimism, thus expanding security, political, strategic, diplomatic and economic options for Israel.
This positive demographic news is critical to the survival of Israel as a Jewish State. Now it is up to the Israeli government to encourage and even financially assist those Arabs not willing to live in a Jewish state under Jewish jurisdiction, to leave.  They can return to any one of the 22 Arab countries of their choosing.  The state of Israel is here to stay.  Am Yisrael Chai*.

*YESHA: Hebrew acronym for "Yehuda, Shomron, Azza," which translates in English to Judea, Samaria & Gaza, known to the world erroneously as the 'occupied territories' or the 'disputed territories.'' 
They are actually "liberated territories," fairly won back in a defensive war.  Gaza was returned in 2005, and Israel was rewarded with Hamas' kassam rockets fired into her southern cities. Remember that. Perhaps it's time to take it back...


*Am Yisrael Chai: "The People of Israel Live." 

(hat tip for this aticle, my D. H.)

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