Facts about Israel
East Jerusalem has been under Israeli civil law, jurisdiction and administration since and the Golan Heights since 1981, though they have not been formally annexed.
Aggravated assault and the extent of the harm committed to the victim are the determining factors in sentencing.
The international community and the Israeli far-left have criticized the wall, but it has significantly reduced the number of terrorist attacks against Israel.
Israel, fearing Egypt's increase in power, staged an attack in the Sinai Desert.
Israel leads the Middle East in medium-range ballistic missile development.
The Negev Desert comprises approximately 4,600 square miles (12,000 square kilometers), more than half of Israel's total land area.
Israel's architecture is diverse, including a good deal of Islamic architecture, dating from 1250 to 1517.
Israel maintains a fleet of Dolphin-class submarines, widely suspected of being armed with Israeli-made medium-range (1,450 kilometers) cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Israelis tend to define their religious affiliation by degree of their religious practice.
When Egypt closed the strategic Straits of Tiran to Israeli vessels, and began massing large numbers of tanks and aircraft on Israel's borders, Israel preemptively attacked Egypt on June 5.
According to the World Bank, Israel has the best regulations for businesses and strongest protections of property rights in the Greater Middle East.
One of Israel's Basic Laws, that of human dignity and liberty, serves to defend human rights and liberties.
Most Haredi Jews extend these deferments until they are too old to be conscripted, a practice that has fueled much controversy in Israel.
Israelis are avid newspaper readers and there is an average daily circulation of 600,000 copies out of a population of approximately seven million.
Tourism in Israel includes a rich variety of historical and religious sites in the Holy Land, as well as modern beach resorts, archaeological tourism, heritage tourism, and ecotourism.
In 2016, Israel's population was an estimated 8,541,000 million people, of whom 6,388,800 (74.8 percent) were recorded by the civil government as Jews.
Israel's legal system mixes influences from Anglo-American, continental and Jewish law, as well as the Declaration of the State of Israel.
Israel is well-known for its classical orchestras, especially the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra under the management of Zubin Mehta.
Israel's military consists of a unified Israel Defense Forces, known in Hebrew by the acronym Tzahal.
The modern Israeli wine industry was founded in 1882 by Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, owner of the famous Bordeaux Chateau Chвteau Lafite-Rothschild, in support of a new wave of Jewish immigrants.
Theatre covers the entire range of classical and contemporary drama in translation, as well as plays by Israeli authors.
Arabs in Israel include descendants of those who remained within Israel's borders during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Palestinians who immigrated to Israel (especially since 1993) as well as Druze and Bedouins.
Eichmann became the only person ever sentenced to death by the Israeli courts.
Israel has wineries numbering in the hundreds and ranging in size from small boutique enterprises making a few thousand bottles per year to the largest producing over ten million bottles per year.
Most Israeli Arabs are not conscripted because of a possible conflict of interest, due to the possibility of war with neighboring Arab states.
Despite limited natural resources, Israel has intensively developed its agricultural and industrial sectors over the past 20 years.
Israeli literature is mostly written in Hebrew and reflects the revival of the Hebrew language as a spoken language in modern times.
The influx, coupled with the opening of new markets at the end of the Cold War, energized Israel's economy, which grew rapidly in the early 1990s.
The Gaza War lasted three weeks and ended after Israel announced a unilateral ceasefire.
Israel is the only country in the Middle East considered to be a liberal democracy, having a broad array of political rights and civil liberties present.
According to Webometrics (2006), of the top ten universities in the Middle East, seven out of ten are in Israel, including the top four.
By the end of 2007, Israel entered another conflict as a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel collapsed.
In 1982, Israel launched an attack against Lebanon, which had been embroiled in the civil war since 1975, to defend Israel's northernmost settlements from terrorist attacks.
A total of 76.1 percent of Israelis are Jewish, 16.2 percent are Muslim, 2.1 percent are Christian, 1.6 percent are Druze, and 3.9 percent unclassified.
A U.S.-Palestinian-Israeli committee was created to convene several times a month to prevent terrorism.
Israel possesses extensive facilities for oil refining, diamond polishing, and semiconductor fabrication.
Israel bombarded Hamas targets as well as bridges, roads, and the only power station in Gaza.
Israel's per capita GDP in 2005 (purchase power parity) was $26,200 (28th in the world).
On July 7, 1981, the Israeli Air Force bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osiraq in an attempt to foil Iraqi efforts at producing an atomic bomb.
Israelis are involved in hockey, rugby, and, as exemplified by Israeli-born Sagi Kalev, bodybuilding.
The State of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948, one day before the expiry of the British Mandate of Palestine.
At the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, Palestinian militants held hostage and killed members of the Israeli delegation.
About nine percent of Israeli Arabs are Christians of various denominations, mostly Catholics and Orthodox.
Israel is divided into four main geographical regions: the Israeli Coastal Plain, the central hills, the Jordan Rift Valley, and the Negev Desert.
Israel has a system of kibbutzim—cooperative farms in which property is collectively owned.
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip live under an occupation intensified by the tit-for-tat of Palestinian terrorism and Israeli reprisals and security clampdowns.
Israel initiated an air and naval blockade, airstrikes across much of the country, and ground incursions into southern Lebanon.
Israeli pupils stay at school longest in the Greater Middle East and Western Asia.
Israel usually posts sizable current account deficits, which are covered by large transfer payments from abroad and by foreign loans.
The modern country was named State of Israel, and its citizens are referred to as Israelis in English.
Israel receives more venture capital investment than any country in Europe, and has the largest number of start-up companies in the world after the United States.
Israel's "Basic Law" states that "Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel," although the Palestinian Authority sees East Jerusalem as the future capital of Palestine.
The first peace talks between Israel and Palestinian Arabs, represented by Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), in Madrid in October 1991, gave the Palestinians responsibility for the Gaza Strip and Jericho.
Barak withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, to frustrate Hezbollah attacks on Israel by forcing them to cross Israel's border.
Palestinians threw rocks at Israeli soldiers occupying the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Roughly half of the government's external debt is owed to the United States, and a large fraction of that is held by individual investors, via the Israel Bonds program.
After establishing a 40-kilometer barrier zone, the Israel Defense Forces captured Lebanon's capital Beirut, and expelled the Palestinian Liberation Organization from the country.
Of these, about 600,000 settled in Israel; the remainder went to Europe and the Americas.
In 1977 Egyptian president Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem to talk with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.
Israel is a democratic republic with universal suffrage that operates under a parliamentary system.
Over the last decade, large numbers of migrant workers from Romania, Thailand, China, Africa, and South America have settled in Israel.
Palestinian memories of the 1948 War of Independence are of the Nakba ("disaster" or "cataclysm"), when more than 700,000 were displaced by the victorious Israelis.
The sovereign territory of Israel, excluding all territories captured by Israel in 1967, is 8019 square miles (20,770 square kilometers) in area, or slightly smaller than New Jersey in the United States.
The archaeology of Israel is researched intensively in the universities of the region and also attracts considerable international interest on account of the region's Biblical links.
Most people in Israel have a similarly comfortable standard of living, although the majority of the poor are Palestinian, as are recent immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe.
Despite various political proposals to establish a Palestinian state existing in peace alongside Israel, no agreement has been reached.
Such criticism has also led to Israel's press being ranked as most free in the region.
Israeli folk dancing today is choreographed for recreational as well as performance dance groups.
The unresolved conflict between Israel and the Arab world has resulted in a lasting displacement of Palestinian refugees.
Israel had gained an additional 23.5 percent of the Mandate territory west of the Jordan River.
The land of Israel holds a special place in Jewish religious obligations, encompassing Judaism's most important sites (such as the remains of the First and Second Temples of the Jewish People).
Israel's unicameral legislative branch is a 120-member parliament known as the Knesset.
The name "jellyfish" is also often used to denote two other classes of cnidarians, Class Hydrozoa (Portuguese Man o' War, Obelia, etc.
The State of Israel (in Hebrew "Medinat Yisra'el," or in Arabic "Dawlat Isr?'?l") is a country in the Southwest Asian Levant, on the southeastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea.
The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel included a broad commitment to uphold the rights of its citizens.
The biblical nation fathered by Jacob was then called "The Children of Israel" or the "Israelites."
Israel's economy was originally based on a socialist model, but has developed into a technologically-advanced market economy with substantial government participation.
The initial wide public support for the Oslo Accords began to wane as Israel was struck by an unprecedented wave of attacks supported by the militant Hamas group, which opposed the accords.
After compulsory service, Israeli men become part of the reserve forces, and are usually required to serve several weeks every year as reservists until their 40s.
Israel's limited natural resources and strong emphasis on education have also played key roles in directing industry towards high technology fields.
The Green Line of 1949 became the administrative boundary between Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Israeli statute body is not comprised of codes, but of individual statutes.
Hezbollah continuously launched rocket attacks into northern Israel and engaged the Israeli Army on the ground with hit-and-run guerrilla attacks.
Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula and evacuated the settlements established there during the 1970s.
Israel's folk songs often deal with Zionist hopes and dreams and glorify the life of idealistic Jewish youth.
The numerous limestone and sandstone layers of the Israeli mountains allow the water to pour from the west flank to the east.
On October 6, 1973, the day of the Jewish Yom Kippur fast, the Egyptian and Syrian armies launched a surprise attack against Israel.
Israel has two official languages: Hebrew, the state language spoken by most people; and Arabic, which is spoken by the Arab minority and by some members of the Mizrahi Jewish community.
The secondary education mostly consists of preparation for the Israeli matriculation exams (bagrut).
Israelis are very informal, and their standards might be considered rude elsewhere.
During the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, Gaza Strip (which was under Egyptian occupation), and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt.
Enmity between Muslim Palestinians and Jewish Israelis is rooted in the displacement of large populations (a cause similar to conflicts in Armenia and Azerbaijan, Indonesia, and Northern Ireland).
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem houses the Dead Sea Scrolls along with an extensive collection of Jewish religious and folk art.
The president of Israel is head of state, serving as a largely-ceremonial figurehead.
Twenty-four percent of Israel's workforce holds university degrees, ranking Israel third in the industrialized world after the United States and Netherlands.
Any Israeli with a full matriculation certificate can proceed to higher education.
Israel is divided east-west by a mountain range running north to south along the coast.
The Jordan River, Israel's largest river at 200 miles (322 kilometers), originates in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains and flows south through the drained Hulah Valley into the freshwater Lake Tiberias.
Ever since it came into existence by fighting off Arab armies in the midst of the 1948 War of Independence, Israel has continually fought for survival.
Israel is not a member of the International Criminal Court as it fears it could lead to prosecution of Israeli settlers in the disputed territories.
Israel has won nine Olympic medals since its first win in 1992, including a gold medal in windsurfing at the 2004 Summer Olympics.
The Israeli athletic tradition precedes the establishment of the state of Israel.
A conflict between the Palestinian militant group Hezbollah and Israel began July 12, 2006, with a cross-border Hezbollah raid and shelling, which resulted in the capture of two and killing of eight Israeli soldiers.
Israel is bordered by Lebanon in the north, Syria and Jordan in the east, and Egypt in the southwest.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has stated outright that it believes Israel to possess nuclear weapons, an assertion the Israeli government has neither affirmed nor denied.
Dudu Fisher, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman are some of the more renowned classical musicians from Israel.
Israel was founded to provide a national home, safe from persecution, to the Jewish people.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict touches the deepest levels of religious sentiment and tribal identity, and it solution is pivotal not only to prospects for peace in the Middle East but throughout the world.
During the 1990-1991 Gulf War, Iraq hit Israel with 39 Scud missiles, although Israel was not a member of the anti-Iraq coalition and was not involved in the fighting.
Israel's move toward quality wines began with one fine wine—Carmel Special Reserve 1976 (released in 1980).
Israeli science is well known for its military technology, as well as its work in genetics, computer sciences, electronics, optics, engineering, agriculture, physics, and medicine.
Israeli music is diverse and combines elements of both Western and Eastern music.
On June 28, 2006, Hamas militants dug a tunnel under the border from the Gaza Strip and attacked an Israel Defense Forces post, capturing an Israeli soldier and killing two others.
The modern country was named State of Israel, and its citizens are referred to as Israelis in English.
Among Arab Israelis, 82.6 percent were Muslim, 8.8 percent were Christian and 8.4 percent were Druze.
Israel is largely self-sufficient in food production except for grains and beef.
According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, as December 2006, 76 percent of the population were ethnic Jews, 20 percent Arabs, and four percent "others."
A committee composed of Knesset members, Supreme Court Justices, and Israeli Bar members carries out the election of judges.
Israel's main wine-producing areas remain the traditional coastal regions of Sharon & Shimshon, but the best quality wines are coming from the Upper Galilee, Golan Heights, Judean Hills & Ramat Arad.
The first historical record of the word "Israel" comes from an Egyptian stele documenting military campaigns in Canaan.
Israel is the most industrially and economically developed country in the Middle East.
During the war, Israel provided gas masks for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Additional continental law influences can be found in the fact that several major Israeli statutes (such as the contract law) are based on civil law principles.
In 2003, 56.4 percent of Israeli grade 12 students received a matriculation certificate; 57.4 percent in the Hebrew sector and 50.7 percent in the Arab.
Israel began building the Israeli West Bank Barrier to defend against attacks by armed Palestinian groups.
Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 prize in economics, and Robert Aumann won the 2005 economics prize.
Pre-human occupation of the land area that became the state of Israel dates back to 200,000 B.C.E.
Jewish tradition holds that the written Torah was transmitted in parallel with the oral tradition.
Israeli forces fought back, and captured significant amounts of territory that had been designated for the Arab state of Transjordan, as well as part of Jerusalem.
Freedom House classified Israel as "free," and most other countries in the Middle East as "Not Free."
Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other nation, boasts one of the highest per capita rates of patents filed, and is ranked third in research and development spending.
From the Hebrew name יִשְׂרָאֵל (Yisra'el) meaning "God contended". In the Old Testament Israel (who was formerly named Jacob; see Genesis 32:28) wrestles with an angel. The ancient and modern states of Israel took their names from him.
Creation of Israel, 1948. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized the new nation on the same day.
On 14 May 1948, the day before the expiration of the British Mandate, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, declared "the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel."
The religious affiliation of the Israeli population as of 2016 was 74.7% Jewish, 17.7% Muslim, 2.0% Christian, and 1.6% Druze, with the remaining 4.1% including both minor faiths such as Samaritanism and Baha'iism, and irreligious people with no faith. Israel does not have a constitution.
Hummus, Falafel, Breads, Etc. Hummus. Falafel. ... Breakfast. Breakfast Feast at Manta Ray (Tel Aviv) Shakshuka. ... Cheese. "White Cheese" Cottage Cheese. ... Meat and Fish. Lamb Shawarma from Shawarma Bino (Jaffa) Carpaccio from Salon (Tel Aviv) ... Sweets. Mutabak from Zalatimo (Jerusalem) Kanafeh Pastry. ... Drinks. Pomegranate Juice.
A typical lunch in Israel is shnitzel with different side salads, including hummus and tahini, and served with rice or mashed potatoes, and vegetables. For a quick meal on the go, it's easy to grab a falafel or shwarma on the street, usually stuffed in pita with French fries ("chips") and salad.
It incorporates many foods traditionally eaten in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisines, and foods such as falafel, hummus, msabbha, shakshouka, couscous, and za'atar are now widely popular in Israel.
Hummus msabbaha/mashawsha is a mixture of hummus paste, warm chickpeas and tahini. Hummus is a popular dip in Egypt where it is eaten with pita, and frequently flavored with cumin or other spices. Hummus is a common part of everyday meals in Israel.