“Usually, as countries become wealthier and as women become more integrated in the workforce, fertility rates plummet…yet in Israel, even as per capita income soared above the European Union’s average over the past decade, families began having more children”

WALL STREET JOURNAL
Jewish Baby Boom Alters Israeli-Palestinian Dynamic
by Yaroslav Trofimov
July 14, 2016

Israel’s peace camp and its international backers have long used one crude but powerful argument: Arabs make more babies than Jews and unless a separate Palestinian state is created, a demographic time bomb will turn Jews into a dwindling minority akin to white South Africans…Yet over the past decade, a demographic revolution with long-lasting political consequences has occurred. Jewish birthrates in Israel have spiked while Arab birthrates in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere in the Middle East have declined. This unlikely baby boom has made many Israeli Jews a lot less afraid of being outnumbered—one of the underappreciated reasons why the country’s voters have consistently rewarded politicians opposed to Palestinian statehood and to relinquishing land. READ MORE

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