My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

He talks me through a series of multicolored graphs and charts on his computer screen. “What makes all this much worse are demographics,” he says. “As you can see in these charts, over the last thirty years Israel went through a demographic revolution. During these years, the percentage of school-aged children attending ultra-Orthodox schools has risen from 4 percent to nearly 20 percent. The percentage of school-aged children attending Arab schools has risen from 20 percent to 28 percent. So today, 48 percent of all school-aged children are enrolled in either ultra-Orthodox or Arab schools. An additional 14 percent are modern Orthodox. Only 38 percent are secular. That means that by 2030, Israel’s shrinking secular Jewish majority will become a minority. Israel’s cultural identity will change, and so will its socioeconomic profile. Secular Israelis are the ones working, producing, and paying taxes. Once they are outnumbered, Israel will be a backward nation that will not be able to meet the challenges of the third millennium.”