Israel Boasts Robust Demographic Strength

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Israel’s birthrates have seen a sustained rise in fertility. They present a stark contrast to the picture in other developed societies, where the fertility rate has been steadily sinking to or below replacement level.

New demographic data have revealed that the fertility rate in the United States, which had been relatively robust until recently, and was still holding its own as late as 2008, has just plunged to a historic low of 1.76, far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per family.

That is because, in the view of Sarah Rindner, who teaches English literature at Lander College in New York, the democratic West is ‘undergoing a deep cultural or spiritual crisis of which the demographic crisis is less a cause than a particularly severe symptom.”

Ofir Haivry, an Israeli historian and political theorist who is vice-president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, attributes this to the situation in affluent cultures, where “the material and even the spiritual well-being of individuals is connected to the limit they place on the number of their children,” whereas the situation in more traditional societies large numbers of offspring are regarded “as the single best measure of success and status.”

While the individualism now dominant in the West, a product of liberalism, is one that lauds the autonomous, rational individual, Israel’s mix of collectivism and individualism, as Haviv Rettig Gur, the senior analyst for the Times of Israel newspaper, points out, allows for a more robust demographic strength.

Its culture of camaraderie and self-sacrifice, he notes, stems from “a collectivist ethos deployed in defence of individualism, a lionizing of family and tradition alongside an underlying liberalism that ensures these traditionalist and collectivist choices are entered upon by free individuals.”

Thirty years ago, in 1988, Israel’s population was at 4.4 million; it is now at about 8.8 million. In other words, the country’s population has doubled in three decades.

With 399 people per square kilometre, Israel is certainly densely populated. Has this led to the very small country feeling “overcrowded,” with a corresponding increase in economic problems, and a decline in services and quality of life? Not at all.

As the population doubled between those years, the GDP went from $43.9 billion to $318.7 billion, a seven-fold increase; per-capita GDP has more than tripled, from just under $10,000 to just over $37,000.

Israel is now among world leaders in the percentage of people with post-secondary degrees. At 46 per cent of the population, it is far above the average of 32 per cent in the developed world, as measured by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

In 1988, life expectancy for an Israeli was 74.4 years; it is now about 82.5 years, at number eight in the world, above Canada, Denmark, France, and the United States. Not bad for a people sweating out an “aggressive, stress-filled existence.”

Now home to the majority of the world’s Jews, at almost 6.5 million, Israel’s resilience and demographic strength will probably increase that percentage, especially as in the Jewish diaspora a declining birth rate and growing assimilationist pressures may make for far smaller Jewish communities in the future.