By Shmuli Volkin, Jewish Breaking News
On the eve of its
78th Independence Day, Israel is not just surviving, it’s surging. The
Central Bureau of Statistics put the country’s population at 10.244 million, up
roughly 146,000 people, or 1.4 percent, over the past year.
Born out of war, tested by war, and
still absorbing the shock of October 7 and the campaigns that followed, the
Jewish state enters Yom Ha’atzmaut more populous, more prosperous and, by its
own citizens’ accounting, happier than most of the Western world.
The demographic snapshot tells a story
no adversary wants to hear. Jews and those classified as “others” make up 7.79
million residents, about 76 percent of the population. Arab citizens number
2.157 million, and roughly 296,000 are foreign nationals.
Some 177,000 babies were born in the
past year, a figure that dwarfs the birth rates of virtually every comparable
developed economy, alongside around 21,000 new olim and 48,000 deaths.
Four in five citizens are Israeli-born
sabras. More than a quarter of the country is 14 or younger; only 13 percent
are over 65. In an aging West, Israel is conspicuously young.
Today close to 45 percent of the
world’s Jews live inside its borders, a reversal of nearly two millennia of
exile that no planner in Ben-Gurion’s era would have dared predict.
Life expectancy has climbed by nearly
two decades since independence, now sitting at 81.1 years for men and 85.5 for
women. Average wages have jumped from roughly 2,300 shekels a month in the
1990s to just under 14,000 today. Car ownership, that crude but telling marker
of middle-class arrival, has climbed from 3 percent of households in 1959 to
about 72 percent now.
Despite the hostage crisis, the rocket
fire, the war with Iran, and the drumbeat of international hostility, Israelis
overwhelmingly say they’re doing fine. Ninety-one percent report being
satisfied or very satisfied with their lives. The United Nations’ World
Happiness Report ranks Israel eighth for 2026, well above the USA at 23 and the
UK at 29
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