Israelis have wondered at times if they'd 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 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.
Study leader Yoram Ettinger, a retired ambassador who published the study in his online “Ettinger Report,” told The Epoch Times his group doesn’t 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.
Ettinger acknowledges his group’s work lessens the impetus for Israelis to agree to a two-state solution that few of them still favor after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war.
Moshe Elad, a professor and former military officer, has extensive experience in Judea and Samaria. He served as military governor of both Jenin and Bethlehem districts and head of security coordination on the West Bank, and he has 40 years of experience in affairs there.
He said he is familiar with Ettinger’s work and does not think it supports a case for Israel annexing Judea and Samaria.
“That’s an aspiration of [some] rightists,” Elad said. “Most Israelis don’t want to see it.” About a quarter of Israel’s population is presently non-Jewish, he said, and most Israeli Jews think that’s enough.
“I know this area. I ruled it. It’s a hole in the head. We don’t need it.”
Not only is the Jewish birth rate keeping pace, but there’s evidence that Arab population numbers are significantly inflated.
The Judea-Samaria Arab population, stated by the Palestinian Authority as 3.25 million, is closer to 1.5 million, Ettinger told The Epoch Times. His group determined that by digging into what went into the original number:
According to the study, the Palestinian Authority’s figure included 500,000 people who had been away for over a year.
It included 428,000 people whose emigration the authority did not recognize. It included 380,000 East Jerusalem Arabs that Israel counts as Israelis, a double count. It double-counted 200,000 Arabs from Judea and Samaria married to Israeli Arabs, giving them permanent resident or citizen status in Israel and counted in Israel, another double count.
His group of three Americans and six Israelis does its work, he said, by looking at the numbers behind the numbers.
A 2006 World Bank study examined the number of 6-year-olds registering for first grade in Judea and Samaria. That number was 32 percent less than the number of babies the Palestinian Authority had listed as born six years earlier, he said.
Elad said he'd seen evidence of Palestinian population inflation at the time of the first Persian Gulf War when Iraq under Saddam Hussein launched missile strikes against Israel. Elad said he was responsible for distributing gas masks to Arabs in Judea and Samaria.
They had a complete list of the population, he said, and for obvious reasons, everyone wanted them, and no one declined to pick them up. “An average of a third of the population was missing,” he said.
Ettinger’s lead American collaborator, Bennett Zimmerman of Los Angeles, came from investment banking, where he‘d done due diligence studies of companies requesting investment from his employer. Zimmerman suggested to Ettinger that they audit demographic data just as he’d audited financial data for years, Ettinger said.
Ettinger focuses on the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics as responsible for questionable numbers. He said their data was impeached by the raw data from other Palestinian ministries, such as health, education, and the interior.
“We don’t just echo data issued by any government,” he said.
Much of the study’s impact, though, comes not from revealing dodgy numbers but from examining real ones: Arab birth rates have declined due to urbanization, education, and other modernization factors, while Jewish ones have risen.
That’s unique among Western societies, he said, where birth rates have generally plummeted.
“The bottom line is not only is there no demographic Arab time bomb, but in fact, unprecedented demographic momentum on the part of the Jewish community in Israel.
“It is not limited to religious Jews” whose high birth rates are well known, “but most impressively, it is [also] among secular Jews,” he said.
According to the study, the Jewish fertility rate of 3 births per woman was not only higher than the Muslim fertility rate of 2.86, it was higher than that in all Muslim countries except Iraq and Muslim countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
In 1969, two years after Israel took Judea and Samaria from Jordan during the Six-Day War, Arabs both there and in Israel proper had a fertility rate six births higher per woman than the Jewish fertility rate.
By 2015, both were 3.13 births per woman. This reflects, the study suggests, the dramatic Westernization of Arab demography: Urbanization, enhanced social status for women, expanded participation by women in higher education and the job market, older marriage ages, a shorter reproductive time, and increased use of contraceptives, all combined to drive down Arab birth rates.
He said rural people need more hands to do farm work, but people moving to urban areas don’t. Meanwhile, living space becomes more cramped when a family moves from a rural house to a small urban apartment.
The average age for marriage among Arab women in Israel, Judea, and Samaria rose from 15 in the 1960s to 24 now, and it is still rising, the study said. The reproductive period for women has accordingly diminished.
Israel’s growing Jewish birth rate, meanwhile, has been due mainly to a rise in fertility among secular Jews. The ultra-Orthodox, with the highest birth rate, saw a moderate decline, while the modern Orthodox birth rate remained the same.
“Israeli Jewish women are unique in experiencing a direct correlation between a rise of fertility rate on the one hand, and a rise in urbanization, education, and level of income, on the other hand,” the study said.
Ettinger said those factors in most Western societies have depressed birth rates.
Israel’s fertility rate is almost twice as high as that of the 37 democratic nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the study said.
Ettinger attributes Israel’s unique position to “a relatively high level of optimism, patriotism, attachment to roots, and communal responsibility, which has characterized Israel from Day One.”
