Since the 1940s, the consensus opinion about Israel’s population growth, which has relied on projections by Israel’s demographic establishment, has been consistently wrong. As a result, the conventional wisdom that says Israel’s Jews are doomed to become a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean has created the accepted political belief that it is incumbent upon the Jewish State to give up historic Jewish land in order to maintain a majority status for the Jewish population.
Notably, in 1948 Professor Roberto Bacchi, founder of  Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, predicted that in 2001 Jews would be only 33% of the population west of the Jordan River. It didn’t work out that way. Instead, Jews have become an increasingly dominant majority in Israel (pre-1967 Israel and Judea and Samaria) and, to the surprise of the experts and their pessimistic expectations, Israel’s Jews continue to grow in demographic strength.
In 1948, Jews west of the Jordan River were 33% of the population, but today there are six million Jews there or 66%of the total population. The dynamics behind this Jewish majority are expected to persist into the future. In no small measure, the upward trend of Jewish fertility, registering 2.97 births per woman, is a key to this ongoing growth. While Jewish birth rates have continued to increase, Arab women have found themselves adjusting to a different social order and the number of births per woman has declined from the extremely high rates of previous generations. While this is pronounced in Israel, birth rates throughout the Arab world have been declining rapidly as well.
Aside from birth rates, there are other reasons that the actual numbers of Jews and Arabs between the Jordan and Mediterranean are distinctly different from those that are generally accepted.
First and foremost, the count is wrong. What is normally assumed to be a population of 2.5 million Arabs in Judea and Samaria is at least 700,000 people less than commonly believed; 400,000 Arabs who have been overseas for longer than a year are routinely included in most current numbers and Arabs who live in Jerusalem and carry Israeli ID cards are also counted as Arabs who live in Judea and Samaria. The double count of Jerusalem Arabs could probably be as much as 350,000. This over counting of the Arab population conveys a far different political meaning than an accurate accounting would.
Lastly, there is the trend of Arabs migrating from the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and the inflow of Jews into that same area. Out-migration of Judea and Samaria Arabs includes 16,500 leaving in 2010, 17,000 in 2009 and 17,000 in 2008.  At the same time Jews continue to experience net-immigration.  Periodic waves of aliya reinforce these yearly trends and are never included in official demographic projections. (Jews have experienced annual net-immigration since 1882. During the 1980’s demographers underestimated the number of Soviet Jews by 50% when over one million Russian Olim arrived)
Could there be an 80% Jewish majority in the area of the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel by 2035?  Current trends in birth rates and immigration lend themselves to that conclusion, especially if future aliya is as explosive as previous ones. None of these population inflows have to be as big as the Russian migration of the 80’s and 90’s, but a projected 50,000 person inflow annually would assure this growth. Israel’s economic health and prolific creativity also do much to stem the tide of Jewish emigration from the country, a happenstance not prevalent a generation or two ago.
Anyone claiming that Jews are doomed to become a minority west of the Jordan River and that, therefore, the Jewish State must concede Jewish geography in order to secure Jewish demography, is ignoring the facts.

Yoram Ettinger is a consultant on US-Israel relations as well as the executive director of “Second Thought: A US-Israel Initiative,” and is former Minister for Congressional Affairs to Israel’s Embassy in Washington, D.C.