At the same time, it remains to be seen whether the numbers will affect the political landscape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The upward-trending Jewish rate of 3.16 births per woman, and the corresponding downward-trending figure of 3.11 for Israeli Arabs, can lead to more confident policy decisions by the Israeli government, said demographic expert Yoram Ettinger, who published a recent report on the issue.

“In contrast to the stated position of the establishment’s prophets of demographic doom, there is no Arab demographic time bomb; but there is an unprecedented Jewish demographic tailwind,” Ettinger, the former minister for Congressional affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., told JNS.org.

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As of September, there were 6.523 million Jews and 1.824 million Arabs living in Israel, according to the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics.

Ettinger explained that “conventional demography has been systematically mistaken and misleading” when it comes to Israel.

“In 1898, the leading Jewish demographer, Shimon Dubnov, opposed [Theodor] Herzl’s Zionist idea, contending that by 1998, there would be 500,000 Jews in the land of Israel,” he said, adding that in 1944, another renowned Jewish demographer, professor Roberto Bachi, “urged [David] Ben-Gurion to postpone declaration of independence, since 600,000 Jews were not the critical mass required to maintain Jewish majority. … He had projected that in 2001, there would be, at best, 2.3 million Jews, a 34-percent minority.”

Asked what the future holds for Israel’s fertility rates, Ettinger responded that demography is not linear, “and therefore the current Jewish edge will not increase, or be sustained, forever.”

Robust Jewish demographic trends, he said, enhance Israel’s economic and military viability, and help squelch Arab hopes to destroy Israel.

Ettinger believes that the 66-percent Jewish majority in the combined areas of Judea and Samaria (commonly known as the West Bank) and pre-1967 Israel, along with “a fertility tailwind and a huge untapped aliyah potential,” mean that Israelis will be “more inclined” to reject a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.