Jewish, Arab fertility rates in Israel on par for first time: Arab rate drops, Jewish rate rises, and women in both groups now give birth to an average of 3.13 children, highest in OECD. By the Times of Israel.

In 2000, the fertility among the country’s Arab population stood at 4.3 children per woman, while the fertility rate of Jewish women was 2.6. Since then the gap has narrowed as the Arab rate dropped off and the Jewish fertility rates steadily increased.

Jewish Demography Bodes Well for Israel, by Joesph Puder.

Back in the 1980’s, Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman, boasted that the Palestinian Arabs have a “demographic bomb” through the wombs of its women that will bury Israel. He was referring to demography that, at the time, showed an overpowering natural growth for Palestinian Arabs.

Then, in the early 1990’s, over a million Jews from the Soviet Union arrived in Israel. It helped change the demographic pattern between Arabs and Jews — in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. …

U.S. administrations and European governments have continuously warned Israel that it must divorce itself from Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and settle on the Two States for Two People formula, meaning abandoning its historical connection to Judea and Samaria, which formed the Jewish heartland throughout history.  The friendly advice from American and European officialdom to Israel’s governments was that maintaining possession of Judea and Samaria would change Israel’s character from a Jewish and democratic state to a state with an Arab majority (through its overwhelming demography), and that unless Israel gave voting rights to the Palestinians in such a scenario, it would become something akin to an “Apartheid state.”  The Israeli political-left joined the choir of those who pushed for evacuating the Jewish settlements from Judea and Samaria, and for the same reason, namely, that Israel will cease to be a Jewish state and a democratic one.

hat-tip Stephen Neil