Every year, right before Rosh Hashanah, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics releases an up-to-date report on the country’s population. This year, the eve of 5766 was no exception. There was a time when these reports seemed like good news. They told the story of a small Jewish state whose Jewish population, following the decimation of Jewish life in the Holocaust, was growing rapidly from year to year and decade to decade. In 1948,the year of Israel’s establishment, this population was barely 600,000. By the early 1950s, it had doubled due to massive immigration. By the early 1970s, it has doubled again. By the year 2000 it had more than doubled once more, reaching 5 million.

Indeed, Israel’s Jewish population is still growing swiftly. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics report, it now stands at 5,237,600, an increase of roughly 100,000 from the previous year that has resulted from some 20,000 Jewish immigrants and from a birthrate – an average of 2.7 children per Jewish woman – considerably higher than that of other developed countries. By some estimates, Israel’s Jews already are, or soon will be, as numerous as those of the United States, those numbers they are poised to overtake.

So what’s to worry about? Quite simply, the fact that Israel’s Arab population has been growing even faster. It has now reached 1,340,299, or 19.5 percent of the country’s total population, the highest it has ever been (it stood at 11 percent at the end of Israel 1948-49 War of Independence, with its mass flight of Palestinian refugees) and an increase of 1.5 percent from as little as five years ago. Jews now constitute only 76.2 percent of Israelis, while citizens who are neither Jews nor Arabs – mostly the non-Jewish families of Jewish immigrants from the ex- Soviet Union – make up another 4.2 percent.

We are talking, it is important to realize, about the Arab population of Israel within its 1967 borders, plus the annexed portion of former Arab Jerusalem but without the Gaza Strip and without a centimeter of the West Bank. (Jewish population figures, on the other hand, include West Bank settlers.) This is a population with an average birthrate of 4.4 children per woman – which, although lower than the West Bank and Gaza’s, is still one of the highest in the Arab world.

What this means is that, in the absence of countervailing trends, such as dramatic increases in Jewish immigration or births, Israel’s Arab population, even if all or nearly all of the occupied territories are evacuated, will continue to grow proportionally from year to year. Already last year, the 5766 report shows, only 69 percent of the 145,000 babies born in Israel were Jewish, compared to 28 percent who were Arab. Assuming that these children mature into adults having children of their own at the same relative rates, the next generation of Israeli children would be 60 percent Jewish and 40 percent Arab – and if these children, somewhere in the mid-21st century, continue to reproduce accordingly, over 50 percent of their children will be Arabs!

In a word, although Israel indeed has a demographic problem in the occupied territories, to which the disengagement from Gaza was a partial and necessary response, it will continue to have one after it disengages from all or most of the West Bank as well. The difference is one of degree. Without disgorging the occupied territories, Israel as a Jewish state would be demographically doomed. After disgorging them, it will remain demographically threatened, but nonetheless with a realistic chance of coping with the problem.

It has been frequently claimed by Israeli Arabs that the very notion of a “demographic threat” to Israel’s Jewish majority is both racist and self-servingly pessimistic, based as it is on the premise that Jews and Arabs cannot get along in a single society and that one of the two groups must either dominate or be dominated by the other. And yet this is looking at the problem upside-down. The fact is that “dominate-or-be-dominated” would become an existential imperative for Israeli Jews only if their clear majority status were threatened. As long as it is not – as long, that is, as Israel remains a society in which the mechanisms of democratic procedure are sufficient to ensure that its essential Jewish character can be safeguarded – there is no reason why Israeli Arabs should not be able to take advantage of this same procedure to attain the full equality they now lack without Jews feeling that this endangers them.

Indeed, concealed in the bad news of the Central Bureau of Statistics’ Rosh Hashanah report, is some potential good news. Given the fact that, after the depletion of Russian Jewry, there are no longer any likely sources of large-scale Jewish immigration to Israel, and that raising the Jewish birthrate to the current level of the Arab one is an unrealistic goal in an economically advanced country whose counterparts elsewhere in the world have birthrates that are much lower, there remains one workable strategy for keeping Israel’s clear Jewish majority – namely, lowering the Arab birthrate to the level of the Jewish one. And there is a proven way to do this – namely, to raise the Israel Arab standard of living to the level of the Jewish one.

Data from all over the world today shows that birthrates inevitably decline as the economic and educational achievements of families increase. Indeed, we know this even from Israeli Arab society itself, where the most economically and educationally successful groups, the small Christians and Druze populations, have far lower birthrates than do the Muslims.

Once further disengagements have freed Israel of the burden of the occupied territories, therefore, its task vis-a-vis the Arabs within its borders will be clear: To improve their material situation as quickly as possible in order to encourage them to have less children. This would be a win-win situation from which everyone would profit, Jews and Arabs alike.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.