Israel has long taken great pride in its having the highest birth rate—even among secular Jewish women—of any country in the OECD. We take great pride that this country of some 9,000,000 people started out with 600,000 Jews in 1948.
As great as this achievement has been—and it has been truly extraordinary, like everything in life, “it’s complicated.” There are concerns about the long-term sustainability of this upward trend and the impact it will have on the country's resources, infrastructure, and economy. We’ll hear more about that today.
We’ll also hear about an array of other issues: what percentage of the Haredim don’t remain Haredi? What percentage of national religious people don’t remain religious? What about the Arab birthrate? And is the Haredi birthrate really as high as we think?
All this, and more, we learn from Professor Alex Weinreb, a demographer from Israel’s Taub Center in Jerusalem. Professor Weinreb will walk us through trends in birth rate, life expectancy and the implications of all of this on Israel’s future.
Professor Alex Weinreb is the Research Director at the Taub Center and an expert in demography. Until 2019, he was Professor in the Department of Sociology and the founding director of the Health and Society Undergraduate Major at the University of Texas in Austin. Prior to his move to UT, he was a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University.
Professor Weinreb is a social demographer whose work has focused primarily on population change in developing countries—he spent lots of time running NIH-funded research projects in sub-Saharan Africa. He has also worked extensively on cross-cultural measurement issues.
Professor Weinreb received his PhD in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, and was an NICHD Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Demography at the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago. He has a BA in Philosophy and Politics from the University of Durham (UK).
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, available specially for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
We commonly say that the urgent always takes precedence over the important. And in the midst of the crises that Israel has faced for the past two years, the judicial reform crisis that took up most of 2023, and the war that began on October 7th and still has Israel in its grips even now, it's very easy to lose sight of some of the longer-term issues that Israel and Israelis need to face and prepare for. Among them, changes in its population.
So today, we take a look at some demographic questions. What's happening to the size of Israel's population? Which sectors are growing most quickly? Are they growing more quickly or less quickly than before? And what is the fastest growing sector of Israeli society? I expect you're going to be very surprised by the answer to that question. We take great pride in the extraordinary growth of Israel's population. What's that population going to look like in 2048, when Israel reaches the age of 100? Is Israel ready for what sustaining that population is going to require? These questions and more are the questions that we directed to one of Israel's leading demographers, Professor Alex Weinreb of the Taub Center.
Professor Alex Weinreb is the research director at the Taub Center and an expert in demography. Until 2019, he was professor in the Department of Sociology and the founding director of the Health and Society undergraduate major at the University of Texas in Austin. Prior to his move to the UT, he was a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University. He received his PhD in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in Demography at the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago, and as a BA in philosophy and politics from the University of Durham in the UK. I'm delighted that Professor Weinreb agreed to speak with us today, and I'm very grateful to him for joining the podcast on Israel from the Inside.
So, Alex, thank you very much for taking the time to have this conversation. There's so much going on in Israel these days, and that's day-to-day news, and the war, and everything else, that I think we don't often enough take time to step back a little bit, look at the grand picture of what's transpiring in Israeli society. But by definition, demographers don't look at day to day. Demographers take a big step back and take a look at slower processes in society. And you at the Taub Center have become one of the primary scholars of Israeli demography. So, I am really grateful to you for taking the time.
Let's start out really 30,000 feet. Let's talk about the big trends in Israeli demography that people should be aware of to understand what are the big changes or changes of some sort that are taking place in Israeli population.
Thank you for having me or thank you for inviting me. This is excellent. My goal in life is to try to make these issues or place them at the center of public debate because too little is known about them. So, the key thing to know about Israeli demography is that I think it centers around the question of growth. In the late 1960s, we were about 2.8 million people. Now, this year, we'll pass 10 million people. This is a rate of growth, which is basically it averages close to 2% per year over a long period of time, and that means that the population doubles every 35 years. So, that's the first thing which anybody looking at Israel has to consider. Growth or population doubling every 35 years means the state has to keep on building more schools, roads, hospitals, provide more services. It's a constant struggle just to keep up with the growth before you even talk about improving the quality of those services. And in that respect, there's been this remarkable triumph because over the last 50 years, not only has Israel been able to keep on providing these services, but the quality has also improved. Like the GDP per capita in Israel has continued to rise at a very respectable level. We have very good health. Our life expectancy is higher than pretty much every other OECD country. We're always ranked in the top 10, and for men, often ranked in the top five or six. So, it's been phenomenal on those measures.
Just to give us one quick sense. You said we're doubling every 35 years. Where does that rank us in terms of countries and their rate of growth?
So, by far, we are leading the pack of developed countries. The country in second place would be Australia, and it's not even within sight of us. I mean, if the US over the last 50 years had been growing at the same rate as Israel, its population today would be about 700 million people.
Instead of the 350.
Instead of the 350. And the US is considered to be one of the fastest-growing developed countries because as we all know, there's been lots of people want to move to the US, and lots of people try to move to the US.
So, the US, though, the growth is probably immigration, right?
Yes.
Whereas in Israel, it's probably a combination of immigration and high birth rate?
In Israel, over the last 30 years, it is primarily the difference between births and deaths. So that accounts for typically 75 to 80% of growth in any given year. And yes, you're absolutely right. In pretty much every other developed country these days, there are some countries with positive growth rates. But if you look at what's called the natural growth rate, which is a difference between births and deaths, it's actually negative. What pushes them into positive is the fact that we have a lot more people coming in from outside than leaving.
Right. And so that makes us very unusual.
And that also makes us quite unusual or very unusual for a developed country.
So, in 35 years, if things stay the same way, we're going to be 20 million people.
So, the projections are, and I think in Israel's case, there's enough instability or uncertainty that I don't like doing projections more than 20 years. But it's nice to hold on to a nice round number. For example, in 2048, when, please God, the state celebrates 100 years, we will be 16, 17 million people. That's the projection. And according to a team at the University of Washington in the US, which has what's considered to be the best population projections team in the world, they project continued growth in Israel until the end of the century, at which point Israel, they think will have about 25 million people and will be larger in terms of population than Spain. Spain today is about 40 million, but it's going to come down significantly. So, Israelis will have gone in a period, basically. I have no idea if they're right…
We'll just assume that they're right for a second…
We won't know. But unless something very weird happens, a life expectancy. But if they are right, then we will have gone from a country of less than 1 million people in 1950 to a population of 25 million or so within a 150-year period, in an area which is subject to, we don't have very much water, meaning naturally. We now desalinate and we're in an area of the world, which is quite challenging, both in terms of environmental constraints and obviously also in terms of strategic issues.
Wow. They probably don't look at religion. But in 2048, if we are 25 million people, I'm guessing some 70 or 80% of whom likely to be Jewish. I don't know if that's right or it's wrong, but is that correct, more or less?
Yeah. So, in 2048, it will be 15 to 16 million. And about 70%, in the low 70s will be Jewish.
And then what percentage of the Jewish people would that be? Do we have any idea?
No. Well, it depends on how you define…
I guess it depends on what you call a Jew.
Yeah, right. We'll come back this. In terms of the traditional Orthodox definition, it would be a the majority of the Jewish population, for sure.
We're already the single largest Jewish population, but we're not yet half, right?
We're not yet half of the global population.
We would be over half, for sure. Okay. That's fascinating. So, let's talk about the various groups in Israel and birth rates. And you say we're the fastest growing, by far, country in the OECD, but we're made up of lots of different groups. We have Jews and Arabs. In Arabs, we have Muslims and Christians. Among Jews, we have Haredi, National Religious, which people can call sort of modern orthodox, even though that's not really a good parallel. But it's good enough for jazz, as they say. And then we have traditional, we have secular. Talk to us about these various groups and what are the changes and the trends that we're seeing.
Okay. So, I'll focus first on the Jewish population, which is, they're the biggest driver of all demographic parameters, which in Israel means more fertility than anything else. The biggest determination is level of religiosity. The Haredi Jews, on average, have around six children per woman. National religious, it's around four. And once you get to traditional and secular, it's in the 2-3 child range per woman. So, what that means is there's a built-in faster growth rate in terms of natural growth in the more religious communities. The problem is projecting that 20, 30 years down the line, because it turns out that when you look at kids growing up in those communities and you follow them across time, there is in every community, in every religious community, more people are leaving and becoming more secular or becoming less religious than becoming more religious.
So, the net stream in all of the religious communities is more out than in?
Yeah, absolutely. So, for example, the rule of thumb estimate is for every six children born in the Haredi world, one will leave. And that's net. That's after accounting for those who become Haredi. So, the differential rates of growth which you find in Israel across these levels of religiosity, it's very important not to rely just on the different birth rates. You have to look at the transitions which people go through.
So, one out of six Haredim are moving to some other religious community.
Exactly.
How about in the dati leumi, the national religious, what we’d call modern orthodox, kippah wearing whatever. What's happening there?
There, the estimate is about one in four. It's even higher. And the standard answer, if you ask why, how can it be, is because they live in a world where the fence between them and the secular world, that tempting world of travel and consumption and all these other…
Well, also ideas.
And of course, intellectually, they don't close themselves off. They don't close themselves off, so there's going to be some loss, some movement. Whereas in the Haredi world, at least since the 19th century, there's been an attempt to completely close borders in most of the Haredi sector. That's not true for all, but in most of it, it seems to be an explicit decision on the part of the Haredi leadership to limit the extent which you're giving tools to your children, boys in particular, to leave. We see it reflected in the fact that despite those things, about one in six leaves the Haredi world, as opposed to one in four leaving the national religious.
How about the what we call sort of masorti, traditional, meaning largely Mizrahi, not only, but largely Mizrahi people who are not punctiliously religious, but who have a deep reverence for tradition and whose families have, Shabbat is clearly Shabbat, and the kitchen is typically kosher, and the holidays are the holidays, but they're not necessarily dotting all the I's and crossing all the T's. What's happening there?
So there, there doesn't seem to be any real pattern. There seem to be as many people becoming more religious as less. And there, I think the important thing is the points, which you've pointed to. There is a reverence, there is a comfort. They seem to have found an area which is a very comfortable place to be in. So, most of them seem to stay broadly there. On my street, I know a bunch of families who are like that. And on Shabbat, there are the people who drive, and there are people who come in wearing a black kippah, and they all meet, and they have Shabbat dinner, and then they go off and do their thing. So that's, I think, a particular characteristic of the more, like you say, they tend to be more Mizrahi, and the boundaries are just a little bit less defined in terms of really trying to make people choose only one path.
Which is actually really interesting for an American audience, but not all of our listeners are American, obviously, but a good chunk are. It's a kind of a Judaism that doesn't really exist in the States, where it's not just that they're traditional, but there's a very broad range within the family, and everybody manages to do things together. And it's more out of a sense of reverence than out of a sense of theological, an if-then statement. If I believe that God said this, then I do that. That's the classic American, Ashkenazi way of thinking about things. If I don't believe that God gave the Torah at Sinai, then why should I bother keeping culture? What difference would it make? If I do, then how could I possibly not? Here, it's much less of an if-then programmatic coding thing than just a kind of a reverence which seems to allow families and of a much wider range to do things together. Is that a correct read?
I agree. Yeah, I think so. I think there would be some people who say, oh, but how can he do it? It's not intellectually consistent. But I think that misses the point of how people are thinking about these things here. Those families, they center their family rhythms around these religious periods and rituals, but there's no effort to try to make it intellectually consistent. It's just this is what we do as a family, and everybody's welcome. So, there's an open orthodoxy type of thing to it, which is very nice and very refreshing. And certainly, when I compare it to some of the things which I know in my own extended family, which is not like that, it looks lovely.
Yeah. And it's also much more transmissible, I would imagine, because one doesn't necessarily have to buy into a particular belief structure in order to still be part of it. It's about being part of something as opposed to believing something specific. Now, let's talk about the actual numbers. Let's just go from right to left. What's the specific numbers of Haredi birth rate, modern Orthodox birth rate, traditional birth rate, secular birth rate? Among Jews, then we'll come to Arabs and others.
All right. So, Haredi birth rate has come down over the last the last several years, from around 6.5 children per woman to around six children per women. The national religious has come down from about 4.4 to 3.9, secular from 2.2 to 2.0, and the traditional is, so the central view of statistics divides traditional into traditional religious and traditional not religious. The boundaries between those are very, very gray. So, I just like to consider them one group. So, it's come down from about 2.7 to 2.3 or 2.4
And replication rate is what? 2.2?
And in order for a population to replace itself, so the rule of thumb is you need 2.1 children. In reality, you need a little bit less than that, 2.05 or 2.
So, the secular community at 2.0 is very close still to being able to replace itself.
It's very close, exactly.
And the masorti are doing the traditional a little bit better. Okay, now what's happening outside the Jewish community in Israel?
Outside the Jewish community, you have two groups. And we typically think of it's not Jews, it's Arabs. But it's actually just Arabs and this third group, which lies between Jews and Arabs, and is known by central view of statistics as others. And so, the others are basically, this a group of now 550,000 people in Israel, so a significant percentage of the almost 10 million.
So, that would make it about 5%, right?
Yeah. And it's the fastest-growing subpopulation in Israel. These are largely people who came, moved to Israel from Eastern Europe under the law of return. So, they had at least one grandparent who is Jewish, or they're the partners of people. So, they live fully integrated generated with Jews, go to Hebrew schools, and serve in the army, and work, et cetera.
But they're not recognized as Jews by any part of the state.
But they're not recognized as Jews. Around 2,000 people, 2 to 3,000 people convert in Israel every year, and it's almost all drawn from that community. So, some transition into the Jewish population that way.
And they convert largely through the Nativ program in the army, I would guess?
About 40 to 50% of them through the army. So, their fertility, the fertility in the other population is what we find in European countries, which is about 1.3, 1.4, in Southern European, Eastern European countries. So, 1.3, 1.4 children per woman.
So that's not the rate that would replicate.
That is not.
But are they still coming into the country?
They are still coming into the country.
So, is their a percentage of the society growing or staying the same?
They are the fastest growing population because they have massive rates of in-migration. Last year, there are 50,000 of them. The year before, there were 70,000.
Because of the war in Ukraine, I believe.
Because of the war in Ukraine. But there are still a million plus Jews in Eastern Europe or people in Eastern Europe who could do this. Not all of them will come to Israel, obviously, but there's still a large pool of people who could come, who could make that transition. And given conditions in Eastern Europe and the educational characteristics of most of these people, they tend to be more educated and have skill sets which Israel would like. So, there are grounds for thinking that this could continue for some years.
What does that mean for intermarriage rates in Israel?
It means that intermarriage rates are, if you want to send your child here from outside Israel to find a good Jewish spouse, then the odds of doing that are lower now than they were 20 years ago.
How much lower?
I mean, still, no, it’s overwhelmingly Jewish. But I mean, tongue in cheek, intermarriage rates are going up. But I mean, marriage rates are also going down. There are more young Israelis who are choosing not to marry because they don't want to get married through the rabbinate.
So, they're just living together.
So, they're living together. Some go and have civil marriages elsewhere, which are then recognized by the state, but they're not recognized by the rabbinate.
But they're having children.
But they're having children.
Are they having children at the same rate as the others in that group?
They seem to be having children at the same rate as a secular, yes.
Interesting. Okay. And what's the percentage of couples that are, quote, unquote, cohabiting?
We don't know the percentage of couples. We know the percentage of women having children outside of wedlock. And it's in Israel, very, very low in comparison to Western countries. It's about 9% of Jewish women. In the US, about 45% of kids are born outside of marriage. In Sweden, it's about 60- 70%.
The average in OECD countries is above 40 %. So, we're still very, very low. So, for Jewish women, it's about 9%. In the Arab community, it's basically 0%, because if you do it…. things are not good for you. And so, we're much more similar to, let's say to other developed Asian societies. In Japan, South Korea, it's also very, very low.
Children out of wedlock is very low?
Children out of wedlock.
Because those are much more traditional societies.
Exactly. And much more traditional societies with much more traditional gender roles. And a child should only be in marriage. It's much more prescriptivist in that respect.
So, let's talk about Israeli-Arabs. What's happening to birth rates there and so forth?
So, they've been tracking basically what's been going on in neighboring countries, and especially in the wealthy Gulf States, where over the last 10 to 20 years, there's been a very, very rapid decline in fertility rates. And so, in Israel, it's important to divide the Arab sector, not only into Muslims, Christians, and Druze. And the Christians and Druze are very, very small groups. They each number about 150,000 people.
Which makes about 1.5%.
Yeah. Muslim Arabs are close to 2 million. So, within the Arab sector, the Muslim is the dominant. But there you have to divide the Bedouin, who primarily live in the south, but there are some Bedouin communities in the north, too, from the non- Bedouin. The non- Bedouin, their fertility is already around 2.2, 2.3.
So, non-Bedouin Israeli Muslims.
But that's basically all the Muslims who live in the center of the country and almost all of them who live in the north. Among Bedouin who are primarily in the south, like I said, their fertility is still above four, but it's been coming down very fast as well. And the main driver of this seems to be the very rapid increase in level of education for Arab girls, for Arabs boys as well. Both young Arab men and women want to do well financially, and they see that in a country with high living expenses, where they want to escape from the influence of their families, so we're also seeing movement of young Arab couples to what are considered Jewish towns.
So, they'll move out of Rahat and go to Beer Sheva, that thing?
For example, yeah. And in the north, they'll move out of Nazareth and go to Nof Hagalil, or to Karmiel. So, these are trying to escape from the constant supervision of elders because they want to do their own thing. So, this is an increasing phenomenon. So, you have again, it's an important transition which is happening. Rising education levels, and then the weakening of these old family ties, which on one hand were good because they kept things in control. And in part, the rise in crime, which we've seen in the Arab sector, is also, I mean, it's an artifact of the breakdown in that control. But in part, it's a good thing because it's like these are people long term, you want people to be making independent decisions for themselves. The conventional wisdom is for most people in liberal society, that's the way we want a society to function. So, the fact that we're seeing the rapid reduction in fertility is consistent with what we want to see rising: education, people investing in their careers, investing in building businesses, whatever it is. But it's interesting when you track Arab fertility in Israel against what's happening to fertility in Jordan, in Saudi, in the UAE, it’s just on exactly the same path down. It's as if they live in the same country.
And then all those areas, it's also because of the rising education level of women?
Yeah, exactly.
In Saudi Arabia, Jordan?
Yeah. Exactly. And costs. So, you have at the same time, there are a bunch of factors, and presumably some cultural factors as well. We live in an era where we have changing definition of what's considered the right way to raise a child. The right way to raise a child, you have to invest resources in the child. It's not only what they get at school, it's stuff which they get outside of school. They have to develop their musical skills, hobbies, sports, whatever. All these things cost money, and they cost more and more money with every passing year because the society is becoming more expensive. And then people look at their neighbors, their neighbors taking a trip to Greece or to France.
They want to be able to do that also.
So, these things all play a part in changing how people are you know “should we have that third child?” Or a third child is fine. You can still fit a third child in a normal-size car.
Talking about a van.
As I discovered, you need already a bigger car, and then things start to get more expensive. You need more housing unless you want to really cram people in. And again, changing standards. Your parents did it, your grandparents did it, but do you really want to do it? So, all these things are playing a part, and more so in the Arab population as a whole, in the Jewish population as a whole, because in the Jewish population as a whole, it may be happening in secular communities, but in the religious other concerns, they come to the fore.
So, you said one out of six Haredim is not staying Haredi. One out of four, kippah sruga, dati leumi, National Religious is not staying in that community. In the Bedouin community, which fascinates me you said, what percentage are pulling the moving from Rahat to Beer Sheva, moving from Nazareth to Nof HaGalil? What percentage of them are saying, I'm still Bedouin.I want a relationship with my parents, but I'm out of this community? How predominant is that?
Yeah. So, we don't know exactly because the data which we have through the Central Bureau of Statistics is not great for following it. It's a little different to move as a Bedouin to Beer Sheva than to say, you know what, I no longer consider myself Haredi. Haredi is you're changing your relationship to a religion, to God, maybe. It will have implications for family connections, but somebody can't change what in sociology it's called an ascribed identity. You're a Bedouin, it doesn't matter whether you're religious or secular, you're a Bedouin. You live in place X or you live in a place Y. You're still a Bedouin. So, in that respect, it's not the same transition. But we don't have good data on this in part because the data which a state collects is based on the Ministry of Interior's population register. And so, people, when they move, they're supposed to officially change their address.
There is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence saying that in the Arab community, they don't change their address because they still want to access services which are in their home place. So, in the north, for example, a young Arab family moves to Karmiel. They don't want to send their kid to the local Hebrew-speaking school, so they remain registered in the Arab town close by so they can send their child there because that's the local school. Likewise, there's some renters or people who are renting out their property, they're doing it under the table, let's say. So, we don't have good information. But if you go and speak to the mayor, you know the mayor of places like Karmiel, they'll tell you more than 10% of the residents of this town are Arab. If you look at the official figures, it's still less than 5%. So, the people who know the shetach [area], they know what's happening on the ground. They can tell you what's happening.
This isn't really so much a question for a demographer, but I'm just curious because you clearly have your finger on the pulse, as the population of a place like Karmiel becomes, let's say, 10% Arab, how is that working out in Karmiel? Are you hearing anecdotal evidence that these transitions, the changing population balance is smooth, is not smooth, there's resistance from Jews? I know it's not your field, specifically, but because you dabble in all of these changes, maybe you've heard.
I've heard different things. And in some places, it seems to be going smoothly in others less so. Actually, some of the more interesting thing which I heard was from Beer Sheva. There was a primary school in Beer Sheva, which went in a period of 10 years from being 2 or 3% Arab to being 70% Arab.
70?
70.
That's a primary school teaching in Hebrew?
A Hebrew language primary school. So, this was on the outskirts of Beer Sheva. And part of that was driven by the immigration of Bedouin families. Part of it was driven by the out migration of Jewish families. We're seeing what's happening. And so, you have a version of white flight.
Well, what we had in the States for many, many years.
Exact. But there it raises interesting questions. How does a school system go about teaching about Yom Haatzmaut, Jewish holidays, national holidays? How does it go about embedding some lessons about Zionism when you have your school going from within a decade from a very small group of minority students to the most. And those are the challenges, which we've seen nothing written on it in the Ministry of Education materials. We have one of my colleagues here has been chasing it up. But the more this stuff happens, then the more there has to be some thought going into it.
And one thing I will say is that one of the special characteristics of Israel demographically, and it's something which is also very unusual in developed countries, is we live in a society where we allow different communities to establish their own their own communities, meaning we allow different sectors of the population to establish residential areas just for them.
And schools just for them.
And schools just for them. The whole relationship of the state to integration, which in most developed societies has been this thing, you need to integrate people because that's how you create this common shared identity, which is the basis for solidarities. But if you allow communities, not only Jews versus Arabs, but secular Jews to have their communities, and religious Jews to have theirs, and Haredi to have theirs, and Arabs to have theirs, and each of those subpopulations has their own school system. So, these people are not only not coming into contact with each other in school, they're not coming into contact with each other on the street where they live.
So, some of the spontaneous and informal meeting areas which exist in any other country don't exist here, or they exist much less. In some ways, that's what makes a movement of young, primarily educated Arab couples into what we call Jewish towns, something which I welcome because what it's doing is it's establishing points of contact. Obviously, the contact has to be positive, or at least not too negative. But once you establish this, and if there are kids playing together on the street and they have memories, and I know I sound like an optimistic old hippie here, but I still do believe, whether it's Jews, Arabs, or secular and religious, or secular and Haredi, once you establish those points of contact, the state is not doing it, because it has a different developmental model, which it's allowed the various subpopulations to pursue. But this may be happening informally, and that's not a bad thing.
Well, no, it's actually a good thing, potentially. Let's talk about the Arab population, because you mentioned before we started actually speaking more formally that this decrease in Arab birth rate in Israel, particularly among the Muslim Arabs, has had a fascinating impact on the gender balance of children born. Can you say some more about that?
Yeah. So, this is one thing... I'll start off by saying that one of the things that we typically do when we're looking at a population is we look for variation of different sorts in population structure. So, differences in age structure. So, the classic example, there is the baby boom in the US, massive number of people born from the '40s to the '60s. And that shaped lots of things happening in the US for a long time. So that's a particular phase in the age structure. But you can also look at differences in the structure by sex or what today we call gender, but it's really with sex, with sex at birth. And one of the phenomena which we've seen happening in Asia over the last 20 or 30 years is as fertility came down, and it started to come down rapidly in the '70s, but by the '80s, we started noticing there were more boys being born than girls in many places which had had fertility reductions. And this was caused, people said, and this is the conventional wisdom, and I share it, this was caused by more of a cultural desire for boys, which then meant, if I'm only having one or two children, I need to make sure that at least one of my kids is a boy. And with the introduction of ultrasound technology, which allowed people to identify the sex of the fetus, so you have this combination of a preference for boys with the ability to terminate your pregnancy if the fetus was not there with a, quote unquote, right sex, if the fetus was female.
So, a couple of years ago, given the fertility transition which we saw going on here in the Arab sector, we were like, let's see if there's any signs of that happening here in Israel's Arab population, too, because there is a preference, a cultural preference for boys, not as strong as it was in China or South Korea or in India, but it still exists. So, we started keeping track of the number of boys born per girls. And the standard range, which you find across any society, and it's one of these fantastic, I mean, facts that you throw out at a dinner party. For every 100 girls born, there has to be between 104 and 106 boys born. And that's true in a small village in sub-Saharan Africa. It's true in Moscow.
It is a matter of biology.
It's a matter of biology. There are a bunch of reasons for why there are more boys born. But basically, the range across societies is somewhere around 104 to 106. And any time then you see a sex ratio which deviates outside that, and the deviation is usually above, right? You're like, somebody, something is intervening to change this. So, for a bunch of years now, the sex ratio of birth in the Israeli-Arab community has been 107 plus, like 107, 108. And in the Druze population, it's a little bit higher than that. And so, it's consistent with this fact that we’ve seen fertility come down. There is a latent preference for boys. And so, you're having more boys born than you would expect. We don't know how this is happening. We don't know where people are going to terminate. There's some anecdotal evidence they're going to the West Bank. I have no idea if it’s true. They could certainly go to a hospital in Israel and say, hey, my wife is pregnant, or the woman could not go and say, I'm pregnant, it's a girl I'd like to abort. That would not pass the committee which has to approve abortions. But they could potentially go, and after finding it's a girl, and say, for economic reasons, I don't want to have, et cetera, et cetera, or for mental health reasons. But again, I don't know. The only thing we do know is that the number is outside the normal range, and it's consistent with what we've seen elsewhere in Asia.
Wow. As we look down the road, what do you think are the most important things for people who are fascinated by Israeli society to keep their eye on? What are the trends? What are the touch point issues that we should keep our eye on for the next 5, 10 years?
The first and foremost thing is how quickly fertility is going to come down. I'm a father of four. I've done my bit as my wife says. But we are growing at a very, very fast pace and we do live in a society where 70% of our water is from desalination. We can keep on building desalination plants, but it's providing desalinated water to 9 million people, 10 million people is one thing, providing it 15 million people is another. It makes us too reliant on a whole bunch of things which could go wrong. So, I think one thing is, I think to keep an eye on is how far and how fast fertility is going to come down. It does need to come down because we need to stop growing as rapidly as we are. The rapid growth is going to put pressure on the ability of Israel to be a society which welcomes Jews from elsewhere as well. I think I foresee changes in the discourse surrounding rights of return for Jews, some little shift. And maybe we don't need to encourage so many Jews to come. Maybe there are important reasons for having a strong Jewish world outside Israel.
But we're seeing pushback against the law of return now, even in light of Ukraine. People pushing to say that it should be actually just the maternal line and not anything else. The halachically Jewish people.
So there, I think the people pushing that are people who are very, very concerned about maintaining halachic Judaism. Even amongst those people, I think we may eventually see signs of like, you know what? Israel has been a remarkable success demographically. But there may be too much of a good thing. And I don't want to rely on miracles in the future. I mean, that's something which we've done as a people, and it's worked out for us sometimes.
Sometimes better, sometimes not.
With a lot of pain. But if I was planning strategically, like 15 million is already a very large population for this area of the world, given the resources which we have. So, we're now seeing fertility come down, and that, in my mind, is a good thing.
The other thing is to keep an eye on, is demographic with a small D. It has to do with the relationships between the different subpopulations in Israel. And there, some of the things which I've talked about where we live in these divided communities, that's not demographic in terms of, I'm counting this person, that person. But how do you forge an actual, a more coalesced society out of these groups which have very, very different views about how they want society run. And doing it while minimizing contact between those groups, I think, is a recipe for disaster. It goes against the grain of what we know from social science for the last 100 years.
So again, so there needs to be effort put on changing the way that we as a country, we develop these modes of thinking of development early on in the pre-state era. We may continue to work in the first decade of the state when we were small and poor and under threat and just thinking about survival.
But now we are beyond that point. And so, we need to start thinking in a smarter way about how to forge connections between the very different groups that make up Israeli society.
The third thing is a classic what in the world of demography is called a Malthusian question, which is we have a rapidly growing society. The growth rates in the aged population is going to be even higher. They're pushing over the next decade, like 4 to 6% per year. That is the population age 70 plus is going to is going to be doubling every 12 to 15 years. And those are the people who need all sorts of health and welfare services. We're not set up to provide that right now in terms of social and economic policy, it's going to be quite a burden. At the same time that many countries, many other developed countries are facing the same thing, they're all going to be competing for the same limited supply of doctors, and nurses, and carers, and it's going to be sucking up a high and higher percentage of GDP, that is both government spending and private spending. So again, that's a challenge posed by a certain demographic structure, but we can anticipate. I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty how many people will move from being aged 69 to 70 in 2030 or 2035. Those people are not only born already, they live here in the world, and I know what their mortality rates are. And they're not likely to change very much. They come down a little every year. So, these are things which can be planned. They can be foreseen. You just need to have government and policymakers which have a little bit more, which are looking a little bit more at the medium and long term, as opposed to just trying to put out fires around them the whole time.
Well, that's a perfect way to wrap up our conversation. We're living in an era in which people of all parties, this is not a political statement, are really actually just putting out fires. And we, of course, have a terrible fire that we're trying to put out now. But a long, a projected look at demographics and society and social policy and roads and hospitals and water and all of that is absolutely, from what we're learning from you, a critical thing for Israelis to address before it's a crisis issue. And so, for helping us think about where we need to be thinking as a society, I'm just very grateful to you for sharing with us a piece of the picture that we really don't think about very much. It's fascinating. And I look forward to our next conversation.
Thank you very much, Daniel. That's great.
Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:
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