The Demographic Debate We Should Be Having

My thanks to Sergio DellaPergola, Neil Rogachevsky, and Evelyn Gordon for responding to my essay, “The Migration Debate Israel Is Not Having.” I’ll tackle their comments in order.

As Professor DellaPergola notes, there are many points of agreement between my article and his own conclusions. I would like to begin by noting these points of agreement and setting them aside. I fully agree that haredi demographics pose a major challenge to Israel’s future, and while I didn’t emphasize this in my article, it was implicit in my focus on the demographics of non-haredi Jews: their decreasing fertility accelerates the drop of the share of Israel’s currently productive sectors in the population, the consequences of which are at least as dire as those of brain drain. I’m more optimistic than DellaPergola on the effect of haredi demography on Israel’s relative standing, for example its Human Development Index ranking, because I believe that the combination of a rapidly aging native population and mass immigration from the third world portends an even darker future for Europe.

None of this, however, diminishes the seriousness of the problem of haredi integration. I believe (and have often pointed out in my other writings) that Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest failure has been his apathy toward the issue of haredi integration, so I would dispute DellaPergola’s reading of my article as a strenuous defense of the prime minister (though I’m happy to grant that I probably view other aspects of Netanyahu’s tenure, including his conduct during Israel’s multifront war, more favorably than DellaPergola—so perhaps my article can be considered a partial and qualified defense). In any case, although my article focused on the past and the present, I don’t dismiss DellaPergola’s warning about the future.