Israel’s population topped 9 million on the eve of the 71st anniversary of its declaration of independence, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics said Monday.
A total of 9.021 million citizens and legal permanent residents are living in Israel, including 6.697 million Jews, who today make up 74.2% of the total population. That’s a decrease in the proportion of Jews, which fell from 74.5% in 2018.
Israel’s Arab population, by contrast, remained stable at 20.9% of the total population, with 1.890 million Arabs in Israel.
The number of residents and citizens in the Other category – people who are neither Jewish nor categorized as Arabs, such as non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union – rose from 404,000 in 2018 to 434,000 in 2019, making up 4.8% of the population, compared to 4.5% last year.
In addition, there are currently 166,000 foreign nationals residing in Israel who were not included in the total population figure.
Israel’s population has grown more than eleven-fold since the country was established in 1948, from 806,000 total to 9.021 million. It is expected to reach 15.2 million by the year 2048 – the one-hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the state.
That population growth was fueled in large part by the 3.2 million immigrants who moved to Israel since 1948. Forty-three percent of those immigrants came after 1990. Most (75%) of Israel’s Jews today, however, are native-born (Sabras).
Approximately 45% of the total world Jewish population now lives in the State of Israel.