The War of the Wombs Revisited

Rethinking the past, present, and future of the land’s demographics

Over at the ‘NonZionism’ Substack, I discovered a very interesting point about the demographic history of the conflict. In 1900 the non-Jewish population of Palestine was around 550,000, about 94 percent of the total. The global Jewish population was around 8,000,000. This means that had just twenty percent of the world’s Jews moved to Palestine during that period, there would have been a 75% - 25% Jewish majority, similar to the demographics of Israel today. Instead, most Jews didn’t move to Palestine, while the Arab population outgrew Jewish population growth, meaning that, although on the eve of the War of Independence Jews numbered around 650,000, this was still only one third of the total population.

These figures have led to the persistent myth that Arab population growth prior to 1948 can be explained by immigration from elsewhere, but this covered at most twenty percent. The main reason is the same as elsewhere in the colonial world: As Western technology and medicine spread, fewer people died of diseases (in Palestine’s case Zionist efforts to drain the swamps and defeat malaria played a key role), babies were more likely to survive infancy, and life expectancy grew. None of this would have seemed likely in 1900, though. The global Jewish population had doubled between 1700 and 1800 and tripled between 1800 and 1900 (almost entirely due to Ashkenazi growth), while Palestine’s population had remained relatively static.

Zionism wasn’t popular enough among Jews to change this equation. That’s not to say that Jews were anti-Zionist – only a minority were. In practical terms, most were non-Zionist. They had no strong objections to Zionist activities and sometimes supported them to varying degrees, but they weren’t going to move to Palestine. If they were going to move anywhere, it would be to the United States. The First and Second Aliyot were relatively small affairs, and in any case most of those who came on the Second Aliyah returned to Europe, leaving behind the Labor Zionist vanguard that would eventually shape Israel in its image.

Jews came in larger numbers to Palestine in the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Aliyot, but all of these were primarily prompted by push factors. This was also the case for the mass exodus of Middle Eastern Jewry and the later aliyot from Ethiopia and the Former Soviet Union. The latter included around one million people, by far the largest of all the aliyot, but it still didn’t achieve a solid Jewish majority between the river and the sea. Today, the precise numbers of each side are fiercely debated, but Israel’s population is now roughly ten million, of which 7.4 million are Jewish. This means that the number of Jews and Arabs between the river and the sea are more or less equal, although of course this includes just over two million Arab citizens of Israel, the vast majority of whom don’t want to live in a Palestinian state.

Despite occasional hype to the contrary, and occasional spikes like the increased numbers of French Jews moving to Israel over the last decade or so, the age of mass aliyot has surely come to an end. In 2023, only 42,700 people made aliyah. Ironically, though, this comes at a time when Israel has by far the highest, and most stable, birth rate in the OECD (currently 2.89 births per woman). While the fastest-growing group is the Ultra-Orthodox, who are expected to make up 16% of the population by 2030, secular Jews consistently have more children than their non-Jewish Western counterparts.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian birthrate is currently 3.44 births per woman, but it was nearly seven in 1990, and it now declining as rapidly as it is throughout the Middle East. One can’t predict the future with demography, as trends often shift, but at current rates it looks like the pendulum has shifted in Israel’s favor. Certainly in our lifetimes – barring unanticipated disasters - there will be more Jews in Israel than everywhere else in the world combined. Speaking of which, the fallout from the war has already had a demographic impact. In 2024, 82,700 Israelis were registered as having left the country, up from 55,000 the year before, and a big increase from the previous decade, where the average figure was 35,000. This contributed to a drop in Israel’s population growth to 1.1%, having been 1.6% a year earlier and 2.2% in 2022. On the other hand, there has been a 10-percent jump in births during the final months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, which is also clearly in response to the war.

Nonzionism explains the history of Zionism as follows:

The history of the Zionist movement as it has unfolded has been a series of attempts to deal with the basic failure to constitute an overwhelming majority of the population of Eretz Yisrael, upon which the success of the project as originally conceived was based. First, self-defense militias were formed to deal with attacks from the growing hostile Arab population. Then, when partition came, 800,000 or so Arabs were expelled or otherwise pressured from fleeing from their homes. Then, when the Gaza Strip and West Bank were used by these expelled population as bases for constant raids on Israel, they were occupied, and so on to the Lebanon, and here we are today.

It would be wrong to think that the current demographic trends will permanently solve this problem, although in the short term they will probably reduce pressure on the government to withdraw from the West Bank. The comparisons between Israeli attempts to retain a solid Jewish majority and, for example, nativism in the United States are extremely facile. Despite our impressive efforts in the bedroom, Jews remain approximately 0.2% of the world’s population, and outside Israel, other than the religious population, our numbers are falling. One cannot engage fairly in the demographic question without acknowledging this problem. However, one cannot rely on demographics forever. For most modern states, demographic fears are less relevant because they are (at least mostly) able to successfully assimilate immigrants. Israel offers no such path to its non-Jewish citizens. Until this problem is addressed wisely, Israel will never be truly secure, even if we begin to win the war of the wombs.