Israel: The Sturdy Ship of the Jewish World

Behold the might of the 10th most powerful nation on the planet

Photo by Benjamin Rascoe on Unsplash

Israel fares astonishingly well in US News & World Report’s rankings for 2022. Tenth among the “most powerful” countries in the world, defined as those “preoccupying policymakers and shaping global economic patterns”; tenth for “strongest international alliances”; sixth for “political influence”; and—most amazingly—fourth among “strongest militaries” behind Russia, the US, and China.

The populations of Russia, the US, and China are respectively: 145 million, 333 million, and 1.4 billion. Of Israel: short of 10 million.

In 1948, the year Israel declared its independence, it was a social-democratic backwater numbering 870,000 people. Most of the American Jewish population—numbering 4.5-5 million—saw the reborn Jewish state as a poor cousin needing financial assistance. With five Arab countries launching a war against Israel immediately after it declared independence, its chief of staff rated its chances of survival at 50-50.

In 1984, when I made aliyah (moved to Israel), it was slightly less than midway between that time (1948) and 2022. Israel’s population had meanwhile soared to four million—though still far short of today’s 9.65 million. It was by then the dominant military power in the Middle East, and since its brilliant win in the 1967 Six-Day War, it had been in an ever-tightening strategic alliance with the US—though no one in his right mind would have ranked it fourth in the world in military might or anywhere near that level.

It's worth looking more closely at Israel’s current population figures. Out of a total of 9.65 million people, 7.1 million (73.6%) are Jews, 2.04 million (21.1%) are Arabs, and most of the remaining half million (5.3%) are people of Jewish descent from the former Soviet Union who affiliate with the Israeli Jewish population.

Meanwhile, estimates for the current American Jewish population—much harder to quantify because of high intermarriage rates—vary widely from 6 to 7.5 million. In other words, the poor cousin has at least caught up—and given Israeli Jews’ much higher birthrate, in another decade or so Israel will be in the lead demographically.

How did this happen?

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First, it was the poor cousin that took in—and successfully absorbed—millions of Jewish immigrants most of whom were in various forms of distress. They included Holocaust survivors languishing in displaced-persons camps in Europe, hundreds of thousands fleeing pogroms and persecutions in Arab countries, and millions more escaping poverty, oppression, social decline, and war in the Soviet Union/Russia, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Romania, and elsewhere. For a country that started out tiny and poor to successfully absorb populations many times its own size is an amazing anomaly of history.

Second, a Jewish ethos prevailed in Israel, and when, from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, it transitioned from its socialist, statist origins to a free-market economy, standards of living rose and so did birthrates—particularly among the secular-Jewish majority. The trend hasn’t lost steam since then, and today Israel is the only Western country with a birthrate far above replacement level.

Meanwhile, with the exception of Orthodox communities that are still only 10 percent of American Jewry as a whole, American Jewish birthrates—possibly as an epiphenomenon of a general American trend—have fallen to the point that many synagogues are closing down for sheer lack of congregants. With demographers’ “replacement level” standing at 2.1 children per woman, the overall Israeli Jewish birthrate is 2.9; while for American Conservative Jews it’s 1.8, for American Reform Jews 1.4, and for American nonaffiliated Jews 1.1.

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Back in 1984, when I made the move to a small, distant country that was struggling economically and mired in a nasty imbroglio in Lebanon, I was myself something of an anomaly. First, throughout the history of modern Israel, Jewish immigrants have come primarily from situations of distress; the numbers from comfortable, advanced countries have been much smaller. That’s particularly true of American Jewish aliyah: a rough annual average of about three thousand American Jewish immigrants to Israel (a significant percentage of whom end up returning to the US) works out to, at most, about one out of two thousand American Jews in a given year.

Second, in terms of religion, I came from a very nonobservant home; already by that time—and it has stayed that way—Orthodox American Jews were heavily overrepresented among the American Jewish immigrants to Israel. True, my parents had been refugees who, as teenagers, fled Austria with their families in 1938 after Nazi Germany invaded and annexed it, and a strong if subdued sense of Jewish loyalty prevailed in our home. That could be seen as a push factor for aliyah—but certainly not sufficient to explain it.

At that time, though, there was a feisty debate between, on one side, Israelis—both immigrants and natives—who argued for aliyah, and on the other, Diaspora (mainly American) Jews who argued that, as Jews, they were doing fine where they were. The most prominent immigrant Israeli taking the pro-aliyah line was Hillel Halkin (1939–), the American-Israeli writer and translator; the most prominent native Israeli espousing it was the late novelist A. B. Yehoshua (1936–2022), who launched fierce diatribes against American Jews for staying put.

It seemed to me that the pro-aliyah polemicists were right. For one thing, Israel needed Jews; but Jews needed Israel, too. Intermarriage in Israel was (and is) minuscule; because it has its own Hebrew-Jewish culture, assimilation is not a factor; to the contrary, in Israel even secular or not-very-religious Jews live in an ambience of Jewish language, culture, holidays, ethos, and national commitment. For Diaspora Jews to claim that their situation could compare to that just didn’t hold water.

Thinking that one side had better arguments does not, of course, fully explain why, on September 6, 1984, we boarded a flight from Kennedy Airport to Ben-Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv. Deep personal factors were there too, including my parents’ past fused with the (justified) feeling that the various assaults Israel was being subjected to were fundamentally a continuation of it. In any case, thirty-eight years later I view that transatlantic flight to Zion as one of the great and resounding moments of my life.

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And thirty-eight years later, propelled by a free market, continuing feats of massive immigrant absorption, a talented population, and high national morale, still-very-small Israel is a world leader in a whole slew of fields including military, intelligence, high-tech, medical, agricultural, water-management, AI, and other arenas of innovation and excellence. Demographically, compared to its own origins and to Diaspora communities, Israel keeps ascending and is projected to reach a population of thirteen million by 2040. Even more than I realized, by relocating here in 1984 I was boarding the ship of the world’s only Jewish collective that keeps sailing sturdily into the future.

That said, I can’t end this opus without some words about current political troubles in Israel you may have heard about.

To sum up as succinctly as I can: In a long career Benjamin Netanyahu made fierce political enemies, to the point that, after the November 2022 elections here, the only parties he could take his center-right Likud Party into a coalition with were those representing the farthest-right political and religious trends in the country. In the process—to cement a coalition at any price—he made strange deals with, and further empowered, extreme elements that could be destructive to Israel in the future.

Once a right-winger myself, I’m now a centrist and in the ranks of those worried and upset by these developments. But—encouraged by a strong counterresponse by mainstream Israel—I am not one of the doomsayers and believe we’ll surmount this challenge just as we surmounted all the other ones in the past. The ship will get through the rough seas and keep sailing.