On November 23, the Population and Immigration Border Authority reported that close to 18,000 babies were born in Israel since Oct. 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."
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World fertility rates have been dropping for decades (the current global average is less than 2.5 total births per woman), a decrease attributed to urbanization and reduced familial and religious pressures to have babies. The rule of thumb for population stability, excluding immigration, is 2.1 total births per woman, but the numbers are much lower for wealthy, developed nations. In 2015, the average for the 35 OECD countries listed was 1.68. The value for Israel was 3.1, close to twice the OECD average (and higher than the values for neighboring Arab countries). Moreover, the higher birth rate is true for all Jewish Israelis - Orthodox, as well as for secular and traditional families.
This situation is different from that of Jews in the United States where, with the exception of Orthodox families (about 10% of American Jews), birth rates for are much lower. According to Haivry, twice as many Jewish babies, (140,000) are born annually in Israel than in the Jewish Diaspora. If fertility values are to affect overall populations they have to be stable for a number of years.
With this in mind, I searched for new fertility numbers. An OECD chart for 2021 Google Image Result shows that the disparity between the fertility number for Israel and that for other developed countries is even larger than was 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!
With the exception of Israel, all of these values are very low and point to future labor shortages and difficulty supporting health care and social institutions. Canada has reacted by admitting hundreds of thousands of new immigrants per year to compensate for the falling birthrate. In the case of South Korea, a country with little immigration, Ross Douthat in a column earlier this year in The New York Times, asks - not entirely rhetorically - whether the country will disappear.
Israel is not going to disappear. A high birth rate, coupled with a consistent flow of new immigrants, has resulted in a growing population. In fact, Zvika Klein reports in the Jerusalem Post a significant increase in Diaspora interest in aliyah after the Hamas attack.
The latest population estimate for Israel is 9.8 million, including 7.7 million Jews (I am including about one half million Israeli citizens, mainly from Russia and Ukraine, with Jewish ancestry, but who are not considered Jewish under religious law). In 2014, David Passig of Bar-Ilan University predicted that, by 2048, the 100th anniversary of the state, two thirds of the world Jewish population, about 12 million, will reside in Israel, a prediction that may turn out to be accurate.
Israel’s high birth rate has attracted a lot of attention and the reasons for it have been attributed to a number of factors, including a cultural emphasis on family, advances in prenatal care and fertility treatments, a need to make up for the losses of the Holocaust, and anxiety about Arab demographic numbers. Most importantly, however, and this relates to my opening paragraph about the about the birth of almost 18,000 Israeli children since the October 7 attack, children represent survival.
Unlike other nationalisms, modern Zionism developed as a survival strategy – the only way to cope with the increasing levels of incendiary antisemitism that characterized the final decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, culminating in the Holocaust. The outbreak of antisemitism in the wake of October 7, particularly in Europe and North America, indicates that Zionism still is a survivalist imperative.
On October 10, just three days after the Hamas massacre in Israel, U.S. President Joe Biden gave a short address in which he committed the U.S. to stand with Israel. He ended by describing his first visit to Israel as a young senator, 50 years ago, when he met with then-Prime Minister Golda Meir. The visit took place during a tense period shortly before the Yom Kippur War and Golda could see that the senator was concerned. She told him not to worry, “Israel has a secret weapon; the Jewish people have nowhere else to go.”
All these decades later, that is still the case.
- Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, who taught at the University of Waterloo