Opinion | Israel’s Biggest Change Isn’t What You Think
And yet, it has revolutionized Israel over 50 years.
What is the most important change Israel has undergone in the last 50 years? That’s easy. No—don’t look for it in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This conflict, sadly, is still very much with us. Back in the 1970s, and for many decades afterward, a common saying was that the situation was “unsustainable.” And yet, it has been sustained. Not much has changed in 50 years.
No—the answer is also not peace with Egypt or Jordan, or the Abraham Accords. As important as they all were when they happened, they do not qualify to top the list of dramatic shifts. Old enemies were replaced by new ones, and Israel has had hardly any peace even after these accords were signed.
And no—the answer isn’t the rise of the Startup Nation. Israel’s economic situation has changed a lot since the 1970s, when it was still a country whose leadership had socialist ideals in mind. So that’s an important transformation, but not the most important.
Nor is it any one of the wars or other security upheavals of the last five decades—neither the first intifada (1987) nor the second (2000); neither the first Gulf War (1990) nor the second (2003); neither the first Lebanon War (1982) nor the second (2006), nor the third—if you want to consider the current war (ongoing since October 2023) as a third Lebanon war running parallel to the fourth or fifth or sixth Gaza war (depending on what one considers the threshold above which we count an eruption as a “war” versus merely an “upheaval”).
The rise of Iran is a solid contender for the most important shift, but it is not the ultimate finalist. The Iran of 1975 was still a friendly country, an ally. Today it is the most-talked-about existential threat to Israel. Tomorrow—who knows? As this column goes to press, the United States is negotiating with Iran, in the hope that some stability might be achieved once Iran’s nuclear program is tamed. But no sensible observer of Middle East affairs should expect that this will be the final word on Iran’s role in Israel’s history. Israel-Iran relations are still a work in progress. Their importance could become colossal or end up being something of less dramatic consequence than currently feared.
The most important change in Israel’s last 50 years is as visible to the naked eye as it is generally overlooked. Most people rarely stop to consider it. In 1975, Israel was a country of 3.5 million people, fewer than 3 million of them Jewish. Today, it is a country of more than 10 million, with a Jewish population of almost 8 million. In the last decade, Israel’s population grew at a pace of about 1.5 percent every year.
This is one of the highest rates of growth for a country whose standard of living and political culture is “Western.”
Israel’s population growth from 1950-2025. (Photo credit: Worldometer)
Nothing has changed Israel—materially, culturally, politically, mentally—more than this fantastic demographic growth. Consider the following numbers: A hundred years ago, in 1925, one percent of all Jews in the world lived in then-Palestine. Their number was less than 150,000 souls. Today, about 45 percent of all Jews live here, and their number is more than 7 million. New immigrants keep arriving, in numbers smaller than before but large enough, often, to compensate for the Israelis who are leaving. Overall life expectancy at birth in Israel is around 83 years—two years higher than the average of 81 years in developed countries, and one of the highest in the world. We keep fretting about Israelis leaving the country because of this or that; we keep worrying about our smallness and fragility. We have good reasons to fret: Israel isn’t an easy place. It has real social problems that remain unresolved. It has more than a few real enemies whose intentions were made clear in the recent past.
In fact, many of our current problems begin with this growth of the population. There are more mouths to feed, and this makes the social safety net more difficult to keep intact. Some groups rise, demographically speaking, while others contract; this creates tension and stirs debates about Israel’s character, culture and direction. Space becomes an issue, with the rising cost of land, and hence of housing. A once-closed unit, an almost intimate society, must readjust to less intense levels of familiarity.
If we have not yet internalized the meaning of our demographic growth, that’s understandable when one considers the challenges Israel faces and the circumstances in which it must survive. And yet, as we look back and think about seismic shifts in reality—this is it. Israel has more people than Ireland, New Zealand, Croatia, Jamaica, Hungary, Greece, Paraguay, Austria. It is still a small country, and it still suffers from what I once called “the anxiety of exodus.” But its problems are those of a normal-sized nation—not a struggling dot in the midst of a sea of enemies; not a country that can be simply erased by protesters who call for its eradication. And the sarcastic joke of my youth—“Let the last one leaving the country turn off the lights”—no longer applies.
Shmuel Rosner is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and editor of the Israel data-journalism project themadad.com.