On demographics – Dani Bar On in Haaretz:

‘A professor in the Department of Public Policy of Tel Aviv University, and founder of its Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, Ben-David is a data person. Meetings with him are a carpet bombing of graphs, numbers, curves and percentages. But if one had to select just one number from among those he cites, it might well be 397,744. That’s what you get when you add to the number of senior faculty members employed by Israel’s research universities (8,142), the numbers of physicians (29,803) and of people employed in high-tech (359,799). According to the data of the Innovation Authority, 30 percent of those in high-tech are not technological staff, which brings the number Ben-David is referring to down to approximately 290,000.
If this group is pushed beyond the limits of its collective capacity, many of its members will activate the ejection seat. We will watch them land via a golden parachute elsewhere, while the plane we’re on heads for a crash. “All that’s needed to bring about ruination,” he says, “is for a few tens of thousands to get up and leave.”’

(…)

‘“The example that most resembles us is Lebanon,” he continues, “because it too had a demographic balance that was disrupted. In the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East, the jewel in the crown of the Arab world. But the Christians, who were the more educated group, fled, and today the country is in free fall. Lebanon will stabilize in the end, it will achieve a bad balance, but it will remain. It’s the same with Venezuela, Bulgaria, Russia, Hungary and Ukraine. They will survive and we will not. Because we are a thorn in the side of the Middle East. In the most violent region on the planet. If we don’t protect ourselves, it will be the end of us.” The brain drain isn’t something that started following the last election. According to the most recent figures, from 2018, for every person with an academic degree (of any kind) who returned to Israel in that year, four left. In 2014, by comparison, 2.8 percent left the country. “The numbers are still small,” Ben-David says. “The problem is the trend.”’

(…)

‘“Among the 95-plus age group, Haredim constitute 1.5 percent of the population,” he says. “In the 70-plus group, they’re 3 percent; 50 and up – 6 percent. From age zero to 4, they are 23.7 percent. Most people think in linear terms, namely how a problem grows more acute at a uniform pace. That is not the situation in regard to exponential functions. They are problems that grow more acute, surge suddenly – and we’re done for.” When, as the Central Bureau of Statistics forecast for 2026 suggests, almost half the country’s primary school students will be Haredim or Arabs, and taking into account the low marks these population groups get in international tests – Ben-David thinks that there is no reason to expect anything less than the worst of all.’

(…)

‘The condition [of the ultra-Orthodox] is: Just let us be. Don’t bother us with learning core subjects or with military service; just keep pumping money to us so as to underwrite a way of life of non-working.” In rapid succession, Ben-David he fires off examples that exemplify how prioritization went wrong in the 1970s. From the congestion on the country’s roads, which was at a European level a half century ago, and has increased threefold since then, to the acute shortage of hospital beds which, he says, is causing excessive death in Israel from infectious diseases, and “which is unrivaled in the Western world.” But Israel has a high life expectancy.
“Imagine the life expectancy we would have if we upheld normal sanitary conditions [in our hospitals]. Sixteen to 17 times more people die here from infectious diseases than are killed on the roads every year, and it flies by us, under the radar. That’s a vivid example of national priorities.” The main issue for Ben-David is the education system. In 1948, Israel had 17 senior faculty members per 100,000 residents, in its three research universities, and by 1973 that had risen to 137 faculty per 100,000, despite the exponential growth of the population. Since then, however, the number has fallen to around 80, even if one includes the senior faculty in the country’s more than 50 colleges. Ben-David is not impressed by the fact that Israel scores high internationally in average number of years of schooling and number of degrees per capita.
“Those are indices that are popular but not relevant,” he says. He believes that what’s important is not the quantity but the quality – such as what the students know in the basic subjects of reading, mathematics and science. In the last PISA test [the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment standardized exam] for which results are available, from 2018 – 15-year-olds were tested in the core subjects. Israel ranked below 24 developed countries, immediately below Hungary, Italy and Slovakia.’

(…)

‘As Ben-David sees it, the window of opportunity for change is narrow because of the rapid growth of the Haredi population, a development that will also be reflected in future elections. Actually, in recent years the number of Knesset seats won by the Haredi parties was not commensurate with their percentage in the population. Their best-ever electoral showing was actually in 1999, when Shas and United Torah Judaism garnered 22 seats, as a reaction to Shas leader Arye Dery’s conviction and imprisonment on bribery and other charges. Since then, they have generally hovered between 16 and 18 seats and in 2015 hit an all-time low of 13 seats.’

(…)

‘“The root problem,” he continues, “is that they don’t receive the tools required for work in a modern economy. We don’t need more teachers in Haredi schools or more rabbis. We need physicists. We need physicians. They need physicians! The Lubavitcher Rebbe [the late, last leader of the Chabad movement] studied electrical engineering in Paris. Who among the students in the Chabad schools is acquiring skills to study that?” We are on the campus of Tel Aviv University. Why are there hardly any Haredi students here? Are they being allowed to study here with gender separation? “No way. Just a minute, in order to help a certain group, do I have to discriminate against women? No, no, no.”’

(…)

‘There are academic institutions that allow gender separation, a practice that has been upheld by the High Court of Justice.
“That’s exactly where the problem lies. There is a group here that is intolerant of the other, that is trying, with elbows, to exploit liberal society. But you can’t compromise with people who are not tolerant, because there will be no end to it. After this, they’ll demand that your wife walk on the opposite sidewalk. Where do you draw the line? There is no such thing. No! This is a modern, liberal society” – here, Ben-David raises his voice and pounds on the table – “in which you are permitted to live. And if you don’t want to, goodbye. Go. You don’t have to stay here. Find a place where you will be allowed to behave like that without anyone bothering you. Good luck. It won’t happen. There is no such place in the world.” You are speaking in favor of economic growth, but it’s that growth that is destroying the planet.
“There’s something to that,” Ben-David says, and suddenly pauses for a moment. “But that coin has two sides. The more we learn, the more we are learning how to navigate growth, so that it will inflict the least possible damage. Of course that also requires a population that will vote for politicians who understand that the planet is getting hotter. A growth economy also will have money that makes it possible to establish a public transportation infrastructure that will reduce the numbers of people traveling in private cars.”’

(…)

‘Toward the end of one of our meetings, Ben-David pulled out his trump card, referring to a chart based on data collected from the PISA tests. “This is Israel’s DNA chart,” he said. “It shows everything that is bad in this country, and everything that is good in it. In the PISA test, the children were asked whether they understand the most difficult material in mathematics and in reading. This is the percentage of children who said yes,” and he points to the longest vertical axes among all the countries: the Israeli children are the surest of themselves in the entire developed world. When it comes to showing off, we lead the world by a large margin ahead of the next country, the United States. The Japanese and Korean children left us in the dust in the tests, but only a small percentage of them thought they had mastered the field.
“We don’t even understand that we don’t understand, we’re just living in fantasyland,” Ben-David guffawed. “That’s the Israeli arrogance. The ‘it’ll be fine.’ But on the other hand we’re not afraid to try, we’re not afraid to fail. Imagine if these children, with the highest self-confidence in the developed world, would also know the material. Where we could get to. The sky’s the limit. We still have some of the world’s best universities. We are not a third world country. We just need to open the valves.”’

Read the article here.

Yes, yes, yes, the future remains hard to predict, but demographic developments are telling.

The rise of the haredim in Israel is going to change Israeli society.

Immigrants usually tend to disappear within the majority after two or three generations, maybe four. See Italian-Americans, Irish-American, the whole Jewish experience in the US is nothing but one big disappearing act – and once again, voluntarily disappearing into the minority is what emancipation is all about – but the Haredim in Israel (and elsewhere) have less incentives to disappear into, yes into what?

The Haredim live on a mythical concept of Jewishness coming from the shtetl in Eastern Europe. They resent most aspects of what can be called modernism. One thing, they got right, forget the movie ‘Yentl’, is this: life in the shtetl was not an extremely pleasant endeavor, poverty was widespread. A way out was hard, if there was a way out, it meant mostly moving to other places, Vienna, Berlin, New York.
The irony is that the Haredim might believe that they are saving Judaism from destruction, while at the same time they are in reality destroying the Jewish state. A minority will argue that is not a contradiction.