(Also see this recent JIW posting on the subject)
...the fertility rate among young Arabs in Judea and Samaria — at an average of three births per woman — has converged with the respective fertility rates of young Israeli Arabs and Jews, while (mostly secular) Jewish fertility rates are currently trending upwards and Arab fertility rates are trending downwards.
The Arab fertility rate in Judea and
Samaria is declining at an accelerated pace as a result of modernity:
urbanization (70 percent rural in 1967 vs. 75% urban in 2012), increased
education, especially among women (most of whom complete high school and
increasingly attend community colleges), enhanced career mentality and growing
integration into the workforce among women (reproduction starts later and ends
earlier), all-time high median wedding age and divorce rate, minimal teen
pregnancy (common in 1967 but rare in 2012), family planning and
secularization.
David Goldman (“Spengler”) writes in
his book "How Civilizations Die" that
“as Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it
is converging on Europe’s low fertility. … Iranian women in their 20s, who grew
up with five or six siblings, will bear only one or two children during their
lifetimes. ... By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from
Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe."
“Demographers have identified several
different factors associated with population decline: urbanization, education
and literacy. ... Children in traditional societies had an economic value, as
agricultural labor and as providers for elderly parents; urbanization and
pension systems turned children into a cost rather than a source of income….
Dozens of new studies document the link between religious belief and fertility.
... [An] Iranian 25-year-old’s mother married in her teens and had several
children by her mid-twenties. Her daughter has postponed family formation, or
foregone it altogether, and spent her most fertile years on education and work.
... World fertility has fallen by about two children per woman in the past half
century — from about 4.5 children per woman to about 2.5. Fertility in the
Muslim world has fallen two or three times faster than the world average...
Across the entire Muslim world, university-educated Muslim women bear children
at the same rate as their infecund European counterparts. ... The only Muslim
countries where women still give birth to seven or eight children are the
poorest and least literate: Mali, Niger, Somalia and Afghanistan. ... Iran’s
secular government under the late Shah put enormous efforts into education
during the 1970s and 1980s. ... Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution slowed
but could not stop the literacy movement.”
Director of the UN Population
Division Hania Zlotnik argued that “In most of the
Islamic world it’s amazing, the decline in fertility that has happened.” Eight
of the 15 countries that experienced the biggest drop in population growth since
1980 are in the Middle East.
David Goldman (“Spengler”) states
that “the only advanced country [other than the U.S.] to sustain high fertility
rates is Israel...”
He criticizes Israeli leaders who
based their policy on erroneous demographic assumptions: “Israeli concessions in
the first decade of the 21st century [Rabin’s Oslo, Sharon’s uprooting of Jewish
communities in Gaza and Olmert’s unprecedented proposed concessions] were
motivated by fear that Arab fecundity would swamp Israel’s Jewish population. In
actuality, quite the opposite was occurring..."
In fact, the Jewish fertility rate in
Israel in 2012 — three births per woman — is higher than all Arab countries,
other than Sudan, Yemen, Iraq and Jordan, which are trending downward.
The
average Israeli-born Jewish mother exceeds three births. Moreover, Israel’s
robust demography yields uniquely promising economic, social, technological and
national security ramifications.
According to Goldman, “Israel will
have more young people than Italy or Spain, and as many as Germany, by the end
of the century, if fertility remains unchanged. A century and a half after the
Holocaust, the Jewish State will have more military-age men, and will be able to
field a larger land army, than Germany.”
Israel’s rising (especially secular)
Jewish fertility rate is in direct correlation to its relatively high-level
optimism, collective responsibility, generational continuity (roots and future),
patriotism, tradition, faith and value-driven education. Israel’s demographic
tailwind is even more powerful, when considering the potential of 500,000
Olim during the next ten
years.
The demographic, economic, military
and diplomatic resources at the disposal of Israel in 2012 are dramatically
superior to those available to Herzl in 1900, Ben-Gurion in 1948 and Shamir in
1992.
Anyone suggesting that Jews are doomed to become a minority west of the
Jordan River, that there is a demographic machete at the throat of the Jewish
state and that the Jewish state must concede Jewish geography in order to secure
Jewish demography, is either grossly mistaken or outrageously
misleading!
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