Why Israel Still Has Babies And The Western World Has Stopped

For decades, the most powerful argument against Israel's future was demographic. The claim went like this: between the Israeli Arabs who are full citizens of the state and the Arabs of Judea and Samaria living under Israeli military administration, the Arab population in Israel was growing so fast that Jews would eventually become a minority in their own land. 

Israel faced an impossible choice: either absorb all those Arabs into a democratic state and surrender the Jewish majority, or hold onto Judea and Samaria and be condemned by the world as an apartheid regime ruling over millions who cannot vote. Either way, the math would eventually destroy the Zionist project. This was called the demographic time bomb, and serious people spent decades arguing about how to defuse it.

The bomb didn't go off. It was a dud.

According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, the Jewish fertility rate currently stands at 3.09 births per woman, significantly higher than the Muslim fertility rate of 2.51. The annual number of Jewish births surged 74% between 1995 and 2025, while Arab births in the same period grew by only 21%. Jerusalem's total fertility rate stands at 4.57 children per woman, more than triple the rate of Washington, D.C. 

Ambassador Yoram Ettinger, who has tracked these numbers for decades, explains that the demographic tailwind is now blowing in Israel's favor. Israel's Jewish majority in the combined areas of pre-1967 Israel and Judea and Samaria is not threatened. It is growing.

But the demographic story doesn't end there. It gets stranger.

Israel isn't just outpacing the Arabs. It is outpacing everybody. It is the only country in the developed world with a fertility rate above the replacement level, at nearly double that of the next-highest OECD nation. Japan has recorded more deaths than births every year since 2007. France crossed that threshold in 2025 for the first time since World War II. The entire developed world is slowly dying -- but Israel is growing.

Why are Israelis still having children?

It's certainly not due to government programs. Israel slashed child allowances in 2003 and the birth rate rose anyway. IVF subsidies, for all their generosity, mostly shift when women have children rather than how many they ultimately have. Israelis on average marry later than Americans and own homes at lower rates, yet they are still having more babies.

Writing in National Review, Alexander Raikin argued that people have children because the people around them have children. A 2024 study by Israel's Taub Center found that each additional child in a person's social network predicts nearly one additional child for that person. Marriage and fertility are contagious.

In other words, Israel's birth rate is high because Israelis are surrounded by people who marry and have children, which leads them to marry and have children, which gives the next generation the same social environment. Culture is self-replicating.

But that still just describes what is happening. It doesn't explain why Israeli culture is different in the first place -- why, when other Western cultures are collapsing, Israelis are still having babies.

When American GIs came home from fighting the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II, they brought far more than war stories with them. They brought moral clarity. These men had looked genuine evil in the face, fought it, and beaten it. They knew without question that they were the good guys, that their civilization was worth something, and that the future belonged to them and to their children. That confidence produced the most dramatic birth rate surge in American history -- not because the government offered subsidies, but because an entire generation had just come home knowing exactly what it had fought for.

That is the secret behind Israel's baby boom, and it has nothing to do with IVF policy. People have children when they believe in their future -- not when the economy is good, not when the government offers the right subsidies, but when they believe their society is worth perpetuating. A people proud of who it is will reproduce. A people that has lost faith in its own goodness will not.

That clarity didn't last in America. By the time of the Vietnam War, Americans were no longer sure they were the good guys. The campus movements of the 1960s and 70s taught an entire generation that Western civilization was a crime, that America was built on oppression, and that the past was something to atone for rather than build upon. A society that loses faith in its own goodness stops having children -- not because the economics change, but because the will to continue disappears. As Dr. Viktor Frankl understood from the wreckage of the Holocaust, it is not pleasure that drives human beings, but meaning. When meaning collapses, so does everything else.

Israel never lost that clarity. We know what was done on October 7. We know what Hamas is, what Hezbollah is, what Iran is trying to do. And we know what we are: a society that, for all its imperfections, is dedicated to life, to family, to human dignity. Their side celebrates death. Ours builds maternity wards. Every Israeli, secular or religious, knows which side they're on -- and that is why we have children.

The difference between us and the America of 1945 is that for those soldiers, the moral clarity was a memory they carried home. For us, it is the reality we wake up to every morning. The evil never went away.

And here is what I find amazing about all of this: it is not a new story. For the Jewish people, it is the oldest story there is.

A family of seventy people descended into Egypt, and four centuries later numbered in the millions. Despite the brutality of Egyptian slavery, they kept having large families -- generation after generation, for over two hundred years. 

By any normal reckoning, this should not have happened. Pharaoh was terrified of the growing Israelite population, and so he instituted a policy of "population reduction." He had the tools to enforce it: crushing forced labor, systematic oppression, and infanticide. His plan was to destroy the Israelites by breaking the men, exhausting the women, and eliminating the boys. 

Pharaoh's strategy was not just to work the Israelite men to death. It was to grind down their will. A man who comes home every night broken and humiliated, who can barely lift his head, who sees no future for himself or his children, will stop building a family. 

It should have worked. But it backfired:

But the more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread out, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.

Exodus 1:12

The more the Egyptians afflicted the people of Israel, the more babies they had. How is this possible?

The women of Israel refused to let Pharaoh succeed. To counter his decrees, they went out to the fields where their husbands were laboring, bringing food and copper mirrors. Rashi explains that the women used the mirrors to make themselves attractive, to seduce their exhausted husbands who had come home from brutal labor with nothing left. "I am more beautiful than you," a wife would say, holding the mirror so her husband could see her face alongside his own. 

The mirror was not an act of vanity. These women looked at their broken husbands and decided, deliberately, to reawaken in them the joy and desire to build a family, to bring children into the world, to have a future -- even in the midst of slavery.

Years later, after the Exodus, Moses gathered donations from the Israelites to build the holy Tabernacle in the wilderness. The women of Israel brought their copper mirrors as their contribution. Initially, Moses refused them. What place did beauty mirrors have in the holy Tabernacle? These were mirrors women used to fix their hair and apply makeup -- what business did they have in the house of God?. 

But God overruled him directly: "Accept these mirrors, for these are more precious to Me than anything because through them the women gave birth to legions of children in Egypt."

Moses took those mirrors and used them to build the copper laver from which the priests washed their hands and feet before performing the sacred service. The vessel that stood at the entrance to the holy service was forged from the tools the women of Israel used to keep their people alive, multiplying, and believing in tomorrow.

The Sages teach that the redemption from Egypt came in the merit of those righteous women. Without those unlikely pregnancies in Egypt, there is no Exodus. Without the Exodus, there is no Sinai, no covenant, no Bible. Everything begins with women who looked at a broken world and decided the future of Israel was worth fighting for.

What the women of Israel did under Egyptian slavery, modern Israelis are doing today. Surrounded by enemies who have tried everything to break us, we have given the same answer: we believe our children's lives will be worth living.

If America and the West want to save themselves from demographic collapse, they won't find the answer in Israel's maternity benefits or IVF policy. They will find it in what Israel still has and they have lost: the knowledge of what is good and what is evil, and the confidence that comes from knowing which side you are on. That is what it means for Israel to be a light unto the nations. Our birth rate is the proof.

My wife and I are expecting a baby this Passover -- a blessing neither of us takes for granted. And it is, in some small way, our answer to the same question the women of Israel answered with copper mirrors in the fields of Egypt.

They looked into those mirrors and saw a nation worth continuing. Three thousand years later, we still do.

Originally published at Israel Bible