The Israeli Supreme Court’s 6-5 decision on Sunday to reject an appeal against legislation, passed by the Knesset in 2002, that denies residence rights to non-Israeli Palestinians marrying Arab citizens of Israel, has aroused much controversy. “A Badge of Shame For the High Court,” was the caption of an editorial in Monday’s liberal daily newspaper Haaretz, which declared:

“There is not a Western country that does not put restrictions on immigration and does not set priorities that conform to its needs at a given time. But although such immigration laws put obstacles in the way of foreign partners of the country’s citizens and serve to prevent fictive weddings [for the purpose of obtaining residence rights], not a single Western country discriminates against a group of its own citizens by means of laws aimed only at them and only their choice of the partners they can live with in their native land.”

In point of fact, Haaretz is not entirely accurate. There are Jews in Israel, too, who have been kept by immigration procedures from bringing their non-Jewish partners to Israel. But two wrongs, of course, do not make a right. The question is, then: Is the court’s ruling wrong?

On purely legal grounds, it would be difficult to maintain that it is. Israel’s Law of Return, which gives Jews automatic rights of immigration that non-Jews do not have, is a pillar of national policy that has never been challenged in court, so that the privileging of Jewish immigrants is built into the very structure of Israeli law. What, then, is to keep this from being extended to would-be immigrants who marry Israelis?

True, the minority in Sunday’s decision sought to base its dissent on a vague but frequently invoked Knesset statute affirming “the human right to dignity and freedom” – a right that is violated, so the appellants claimed, by denying Israel’s Arab citizens the opportunity to live in Israel with the partner of their choice. (There is nothing, of course, to keep such a couple from living in the Palestinian Authority.)

And yet this decision was clearly a case, not of reasoning from a legal principle to a social policy that followed from it, but rather of reasoning from a social policy to a legal principle needed to justify it. The real argument against the 2002 bill was moral and political. Whereas the Law of Return, this argument goes, discriminates against Israel’s Arabs only inadvertently, its real purpose being to let Jews into Israel, not to keep Arabs out, the legislation in question is a deliberate form of anti-Arab discrimination. As such, the appellants held, it has no place in the democratic society that Israel aspires to be.

In seeking to defend the law, for their part, the government’s lawyers sought to present the issue as one of security. Before the present restrictions were enacted, they told the court, over two-dozen Palestinians who had entered Israel legally by virtue of marrying Israeli citizens were arrested for terrorist activities. To protect its own nationals, Arab and Jewish alike, against terror, Israel therefore had to take defensive measures.

Nonsense, said the lawyers for the appellants. The small number of marriage partners arrested as terrorists came from among 16,000 applicants admitted to Israel over the years under a program of “family reunion” before the 2002 law took effect. A proper security check could have weeded most of them out, just as it could weed out similar cases in the future. The real, hidden reason for the restriction, the appellants maintained, was not security but demography – not, that is, the threat of terrorists, but the threat of Israel’s Arab population increasing at an even faster rate than its high birthrate is causing it to do now.

A number of the dissenting judges agreed with this. “The demographic issue,” wrote Justice Ayala Procaccia, “haunted the [2002] legislation from the beginning and was a central issue in the discussions of the [Knesset] Committee on Internal Affairs [which prepared the bill], as well as on the floor of the Knesset.”

And in fact, both the appellants and Justice Procaccia are right. Demographic considerations were indeed the real ones behind the immigration bill. The fear of terrorism was little more than a smokescreen, behind which lurked the fear of the current four-to-one population balance of Israel’s Jews to Israel’s Arabs tipping further in the latter’s favor. Concerned that couching the bill in demographic terms might lead to its being struck down in court, its framers sought to keep to safer ground. Both they and the six majority judges were being hypocritical in pretending that terror was the real issue.

And yet the worst hypocrisy in this case is to be found on the appellants’ side, and in the liberal Israeli circles represented by Haaretz. It consists of the refusal to acknowledge that demography is a not only perfectly legitimate but a crucial concern in a Jewish state that wishes to preserve its Jewish character in a Muslim Middle East that has one of the highest population growth rates in the world. An Israel that makes believe that demographic concerns can be overlooked in the name of democracy is an Israel that, in the final analysis, will not be democratic either, since if its Jewish population is ever threatened by the loss of its majority status, the first thing to go by the boards will be the rights of the Arab minority. Paradoxically, only an Israel that acts “undemocratically” to keep this minority from growing too large will be able to extend to it the benefits of democracy in all other areas of life.

The six judges who upheld the 2002 law did so for the wrong reasons. It is time to stop making believe that the right ones don’t exist.

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