Much of the developed world’s population has begun to shrink, or soon will, for the simple reason that women are having so few babies.
Among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the total fertility rate (TFR, the average number of children that a woman is expected to have over her lifetime) is 1.5, well under the replacement rate of roughly 2.1 children per woman. Developed Asia is experiencing the same trend, led by South Korea with a TFR of just 0.75 last year. Several developing countries are experiencing the same phenomenon. As a result, the United Nation’s World Population Prospects predicts that the number of humans inhabiting the planet will peak at 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s. It will then decline by about 7 percent by 2100.
The one exception to the decline in the developed world is Israel. By virtually every socioeconomic parameter that demographers attribute to the decrease in fertility, Israel’s TFR should be like the others, hovering at the replacement level or falling well under it. Yet in defiance of the rules, Israel’s TFR has been rising for much of the past 30 years. Alex Weinreb, a demographer at the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, estimates that the rate in 2023 was 2.84, and that last year it may have edged higher.
Is there something that policymakers can learn from the Israeli experience?
Some would say that there is no reason to bother. They welcome population decline as a way of easing the environmental burden that humanity puts on the planet. But for many countries, the decline will be traumatic.
The U.N. estimates that nearly a quarter of the world’s countries will see their populations drop by an average of 14 percent over the next 30 years. South Korea’s population will be a third of its current level by the end of the century if these trends continue. Even where the decline is not as abrupt, social security systems based on a large and growing working population supporting a much smaller population of pensioners will no longer be sustainable. Aging societies will be sapped of the energy and innovative power of the young. Encouraging immigration to ameliorate the effects of a declining native population threatens to exacerbate social tensions. Indeed, a political backlash against it has already emerged.
To encourage more births, South Korea has spent roughly $270 billion over the past 18 years and has even staged state-sponsored dating events to promote marriage. France spends 3.5 percent to 4 percent of its GDP on subsidies, services, and tax breaks, yet its TFR was a mere 1.6 in 2024. A pro-natalist movement in the United States has the ear of the Trump administration with proposals such as increased support for families with many children and awarding childbearing the status of a national service. China, which is among the middle-income countries that are also coping with plunging TFRs, dropped its strict one-child policy in 2016 and has since adopted measures to increase the birthrate through, among other things, officials prying into women’s pregnancy plans and encouraging employers to fire unmarried staff.
But none of these policies, ranging from economic and social incentives to outright pressure, have lifted TFR more than briefly. Does Israel offer a more politically and socially palatable solution? Before that question can be addressed, it would be useful to first drill down into the Israeli TFR.
In Israel, demographers conventionally break down TFR according to religious faith (Jewish, Muslim, Druze, and Christian). Among the Jewish majority, TFR is broken down further based on the level of religious observance. The religious element can’t be easily dismissed—religiosity, or lack thereof, plays an enormous role in Israeli politics, lifestyles, education, and geography. And, of course, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has taken on an increasingly religious tinge.
Thus, the first factor to consider when trying to understand Israel’s outlier status is the country’s ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) population, which accounts for about 12 percent of the total. In 2020-22 (the latest years for which there are official figures), the Haredi TFR was 6.48 children per woman—only matched by the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where rates often exceed 5 and run as high as 6.64 in the case of Niger.
The ultra-Orthodox TFR shot up in the 1980s as government allowances for children became more generous, although even today, they are hardly enough to incentivize middle-class families to have more kids. The Haredi community’s outsized TFR is mainly a function of its unique way of life: Haredis largely live in closed communities characterized by religious fervor and a rigid system of values that includes having lots of children
Even so, the Haredi fertility rate has fallen over the past two decades from a peak of nearly 7.3, probably because, among the community’s many peculiarities, women are expected to work and support their families while their husbands pursue religious studies into adulthood. The breadwinning burden on these women appears to be having a statistical effect.
The second important factor is the TFR for Muslims and other religious minorities, who make up about another fifth of the Israeli population. The fertility rate for Muslim women in 2022 was a high 2.87, according to government figures, but that tells only half the story. Among Israeli Arabs, which include very small populations of Christians and Druze, the birthrate has fallen sharply in line with trends across the Arab world and Muslim-majority countries. Just 20 years earlier, the Israeli Muslim TFR was 4.55 children per woman. The fertility rate for the overall Israeli Jewish population, meanwhile, grew from 2.65 children per woman in 2002 to 3.06 in 2022. There was some downturn after 2018, but the total Israeli Jewish TFR is still 15 percent higher than it was 20 years ago, while the Muslim rate fell by 37 percent.
Where the Israeli situation becomes relevant is the TFR for the non-Haredi Jewish population. Non-Haredi Jewish women, a category that covers a range from modern Orthodox and traditional to secular, had a TFR of 2.45 in 2022; among that group, only Jewish women who identified themselves as completely secular had a rate below the replacement level.
The differing fertility trajectories between Israeli Jews and Muslims would seem to indicate that Jewishness is a factor. That is true to the extent that the more religiously observant a woman is, the more likely she is to have more children. But even secular Jewish women in Israel had a relatively high TFR of 1.96 between 2020 and 22. In any case, high fertility rates are unique to Israeli Jewish women; in the United States, for example, the Pew Research Center estimated that the TFR for Jewish women overall was about 1.5, albeit rising with higher levels of religiosity.
The usual collection of factors that demographers point to as deterring people in developed countries from having children applies to Israel as well—beginning with the cost of living. As a share of household income, Israeli housing costs rank in the middle of OECD countries and tends to be less spacious. At 2.5 percent of its GDP, Israeli public expenditure on child care costs is only slightly above the OECD average. Given the high birthrate, on a per capita basis, Israeli state spending is in fact below the average.
In terms of increased education and growing levels of employment outside the home, Israeli women should be no more inclined than their sisters in the developed world to have many children. Yet college-educated women in Israel have no fewer children than those with less education. Israel’s female labor force participation rates are equivalent to the United States and most of Europe, yet fertility rates have risen over the past decades even as more and more women have joined the workforce. Israeli women have also mimicked the trend across the developed world of starting families relatively later in life, which is correlated with having fewer children. And yet, the Israeli Jewish TFR has been rising.
Feminists often point to the social pressures Israeli women face to have children, but that doesn’t explain why those pressures continue to exist after they have largely receded in other developed countries. The answer seems to lie in a combination of religion and nationalism, a phenomenon that Canadian scholar Kevin McQuillan has noted in a global context. These two forces, he says, are especially powerful if a continuous conflict or competition exists with other ethno-religious groups. Another factor in Israel has been described as “familism,” the ideology that prioritizes the societal role of the family, according to Barbara S. Okun, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The nationalist component seems pretty self-evident. Years of war and a sense of beleaguerment have forged a powerful nationalism in Israel that runs across the political spectrum. The religious aspect is less obvious, as only a minority of Israelis are observant. But Okun thinks that in the Israeli context, nationalism and religion are almost inseparable.
“For most Jewish Israelis, national identity means feeling connected with the Jewish people and being a member of the Jewish majority of Israel. This idea differs from one that is strictly based in religion,” she explained in an article last year that was titled “Faith & Fertility in Israel.” She added, “This goes a long way in explaining why familism has persisted despite Israel’s transformation into a start-up nation that rewards individual achievement.”
Creating a sense of beleaguered nationalism isn’t a solution that is likely to be adopted by most democracies. On the other hand, it may sound like music to the ears of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and a host of other autocrats who have tried to leverage nationalism and (except for China) religion to reverse declining birthrates.
But it is not so easily done. The Israeli government does encourage both nationalism and religiosity, but it does so for political ends—not as a vehicle for women to have more children. In any case, its efforts are clumsy and fall mostly on deaf ears. Israeli religious nationalism is a bottom-up phenomenon, a product of historical memory and day-to-day reality. It can’t be easily manufactured.
Citing a slight decline in birthrates that occurred after 2018, some demographers had begun positing that the forces of modernism were finally on the ascent in Israel. Israelis were no longer immune to the rising cost of living and the temptations of personal autonomy over the demands of familism.
But the demographers may have spoken too soon. One of the many ironies of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel is that it has heightened the sense of beleaguerment and fanned the flames of nationalism and communalism. A post-Oct. 7 baby boom may turn out to be temporary—or it may well be sustained by a revived nationalism.
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