Visiting an Israeli settlement in the West Bank this year, I was struck by the residents' confidence that the territory could soon be integrated into the Jewish state. They see the number of Jewish Israelis growing rapidly—the village was brimming with children—and Europe's Jews flocking to Israel. There are also, one man insisted, not as many Palestinians in the West Bank as official data suggests. Before long, Israel could annex biblical Judea and Samaria, make all residents full citizens, and retain a Jewish majority.
This view is probably unrealistic, yet it reflects a harsh truth: Numbers matter in politics and have a history of unsettling the expected course of events. In “The Human Tide” Paul Morland, a research fellow at the University of London, uses a series of historical examples to argue that the most powerful force shaping the modern world has been not ideology or economics or great men but demography—the growth and decline of national populations.
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