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“Israel’s Jewish women are unusual among industrialized nations for their high birth rate, while modernizing Arab women have fewer babies than in the past.
Israelis have wondered at times whether they would be outnumbered by Palestinians and become a minority in the world’s only Jewish homeland.
The fear of a “demographic time bomb” has often been cited by those who support the two-state solution, in which Palestinians would get an independent state alongside the Jewish state. An independent Palestinian state, they say, is the only way for Israel to remain majority Jewish.
The fear may be unwarranted. A 2025 demographic study by an Israeli-American group shows the Jewish population growing more rapidly than the Arab Muslim population, particularly in Judea and Samaria—Israel’s historical names for what other nations refer to as the West Bank.
The study, which has traced the population question for two decades, found that the number of annual Jewish births increased by 73 percent from 1995 to 2024, while those among Arabs in Israel increased by only 18 percent.
Jewish births in 2024, about 139,000, were 76 percent of about 182,000 total births, compared with 69 percent of total births in 1995, according to the study, titled “2025 Israel’s Demographic Update Defies Conventional Wisdom.”
Study co-leader Yoram Ettinger, a retired ambassador who published the study in his online “The Ettinger Report,” told The Epoch Times that his group does not accept the statements of either the Israeli government or the Palestinian Authority at face value. It takes hard looks at as many figures as possible to audit the official numbers, he said.
