Introduction: Israel’s destiny: Fertility and mortality in a divided society

In Israeli public discourse, demography is associated more than anything else with the relative size of different ethnic groups, and population forecasts. This is a frustrating view of the subject for many academic demographers, who devote so much of their time in an effort to understand a specific domain of human behavior. Counting the population of Israel and making population forecasts are mostly the task of the Central Bureau of Statistics, but this is only a small and very applied part of demography. Most demographers doing scientific research are far more interested in studying the determinants and implications of demographic behavior than in undertaking technical surveys and forecasts.