Israel’s Bureau of Statistics this week announced that for the first time in the history of the modern State of Israel, the Jewish birth rate is on par with the Arab birth rate. Both Jewish and Arab women are having an average of 3.13 children.

Several years ago, the birth rate for Arab women stood at 4.3 children, while their Jewish counterparts were only having 2.6 children on average. But for around a decade now, the birth rates have been converging, with Jewish women having more and more children, while the trend in the Arab sector has been the opposite.

Further to the birth rates, the government body noted that at the end of 2015 there were 2,798,000 children in Israel (33 percent of the population), out of which 1,996,000 were Jewish and 718,000 were Arab (the discrepancy between these two numbers and the total number of children is due to other, smaller minority groups).

Taken as a whole, these new statistics are yet another repudiation of the notion that Israel faces a demographic threat if it does not surrender Judea and Samaria for the creation of a Palestinian Arab state.