The World’s Only Jewish State,

Land of the Chosen People

 o g r a p hy
G e
Israel
is a country in southwestern Asia, located on the
Asia Levant (region on the eastern
Mediterranean). It borders Lebanon on the north,
Syria and Jordan on the east, and Egypt on the
south-west.
20,700 sq.km. (about 8,000 sq.mi.) the total land
of Israel.
Areas occupied by Israel as a result of the Six Day
War included territories in West Bank, the Gaza
Strip, the Golan heights, and Eastern Jerusalem.
The United Nations and most countries do not
recognize these annexation.
Jerusalem is the capital city which is also the
Clim a t e
 Typical Mediterranean climate with cool, rainy winters and warm,
dry summers.

p ul a t i o n
P o
 6,276,883 the estimated population of Israel, including
residents of the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. The
population density, including the area of the Golan Heights
and East Jerusalem, was 309 persons per sq. km. (800 per
sq. mi.).
 It is one of the most urbanized countries in the world.
Some 92 percent of the population live in the metropolitan
areas of its three largest cities:

> Jerusalem
>Tel-Aviv-Yafo
 g u a g e &
L a n
Re l i g i o n
Hebrew and Arabic are the official languages.

The region of Palestine has been a focus for three world religions:
Judaism
Christianity
Islam 

Sacred cities to Christians 

Jerusalem
Bethlehem
Nazareth

Sacred to Islam 
Jerusalem is also sacred to Islam because .it is the location of the
ascent of Mohammad to heaven.
 y o f L i f e
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 y o f L i f e
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 y o f L i f e
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 y o f L i f e
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 r n m e n t
Go v e
 is a multiparty parliamentary republic with ultimate
authority vested by the people in the legislature, or Knesset.

 Thre is no written constitution, but a number of basic law

passed by the parliament over the decades determine
government operations and activities.

 Has a unitary, or non-federalist system of government

where in the central government in Jerusalem runs most of
government functions.

 The president is elected by the Knesset (legislature) who

may serve a maximum of two five-year terms.
 o m y
Econ
Flowers account for almost a quarter of its agricultural
exports. Cut diamonds and electronics equipment are
among Israel’s biggest export earner. Tel-Aviv-Yafo and
Haifa serve as the primary manufacturing centers.

The tourism industry is flourishing because of its historical

and religious significance, as well as, its favorable
Mediterranean climate.
 e n c y
Curr
The new Israeli sheqel (MIS), consisting of 100
agorot (4.55 NIS equal U.S. $ 1,2003).
 a l R o o t s
H i s t o ri c
Israel was born of the Holocaust, but it was sired
thousands of years before.
For at least 2,000 years Jews prayed, "Next year in
Jerusalem." And until the middle of the 20th century,
such prayer was only a religious metaphor.
Then, dramatically, in 1948, the possibility of "next
year in Jerusalem" became a possibility for every Jew
in the world.
The political machinations of the Zionist State are
testimony to the cohesive and pervasive Jewish power
in the West.
In its operation, Israel lives as testimony to the very
supremacist nature of both Judaism and its partly
secular son, Zionism.
 a l R o o t s
H i s t o ri c
Jewish messianic tradition goes back as far as
their recorded history.
Even when the Jews were one of the smallest
tribes of the Middle East, they fashioned a faith
that designated themselves a special people, a
chosen people, a people who were promised to
rule the world.
These messianic intentions are not paranoid
delusions of anti-Semites, they are written plainly
in their own Hebraic scriptures, and since that
time they have been dutifully appended all the
way to the present.
Compare the following Biblical quotation to the
messianic words of Israel´s first Prime Minister,
 a l R o o t s
H i s t o ri c
Many people are amazed to discover that most Jews in
Israel are "non-religious," just as was their first great
leader David Ben-Gurion.
However, these mostly atheistic Jews tolerate a
religious state. Apparently, Jews who have no belief in
God support Judaism as a state-sponsored institution
that preserves both Jewish culture and the Jewish
genotype.
Other than a few intolerant fanatics, the Jewish
Orthodox institutions allow a wide range of religious
belief, from atheism to forms of the occult called
Kabbalism.
Only the Talmud, could have a passage where a rabbi
claims to have argued with God and defeated him.
To Jewish orthodoxy, biblical and theological
interpretations may vary greatly as long as Jewish
tradition and Jewish heritage is scrupulously preserved.
 i sm a n d
Z i o n
r a ti o n
immig
The modern ideological expression of Zionism
began to take shape in the nineteenth century.
Jews freed from the ghetto found that they could
not, or did not want to, assimilate and lose their
Jewishness, while at the same time, they could be
part of a medieval religion whose time had
passed.
They came to the understanding that Jews are a
people as well as a religion, and made explicit
what had been implicit in Jewish culture.
Various thinkers such as Moses Hess and Leon
Pinsker wrote the first real Zionist ideological
manifestos, and the Chovevei Tzion and BILU
groups organized Zionist immigration to the land
of Israel on a small scale.
 m a n d
Zionis n
r a t i o
immig
 Zionism became a political movement with the first Zionist
congress in 1897, organized by Theodor Herzl.
 The conference turned an intellectual "movement,"
scattered around Europe, into a political force, and provided
a clear goal: the achievement of a national home for the
Jewish people in Palestine, guaranteed by international law.
 Beyond this symbolic step, the conference was in reality a
rather modest milestone.
 Without the support of the Jewish masses and rich
financiers, it was hard for Zionism to show great concrete
achievements.
 Without such achievements, it was hard for Zionism to win
the support of the Jewish masses for a project that seemed
hopeless and Quixotic.
 Tenacity, gradualism, pragmatism, courage and daring
leveraged the tiny, gradually accumulated achievements of
Zionism from a few people in a conference hall to a
movement, from a movement in Europe to Jewish
settlement in the land of Israel, from a few settlements to
 i s h m e n t
Esta b l
S t a t e of
th e
Is ra e l
 1947- increasing levels of violence from groups such as
Irgun and Lehi in response to Arab attacks, uncontrollable
immigration from Europe and general war-weariness, the
British government decided to withdraw from the Palestine
Mandate.
 i s h m e n t
Esta b l
S t a t e of
th e
Is ra e l
 R e v i e w
Is ra e l i n
 Israel in 1948: a country of 640,000 Jews; just three years
after the annihilation of six million Jews in Nazi-occupied
Europe.

 A country on the eve of invasion by five neighboring Arab

nations intent on wiping it out, or, in the words of one Arab
leader, "driving the Jews into the sea.“

 A country in the throes of absorbing the remnant of

decimated European Jewry - despoiled of all their worldly
goods and brutally severed from their cultural and linguistic
roots, but intent on surviving and creating a new life in the
one piece of land that was prepared to accept them.
 R e v i e w
Is ra e l i n
 Each of the decades that followed was marked by yet more
social and political convulsions.

 The fifties were the years of the mass immigration of Jews

from Arab lands: from Morocco, from the Yemen, from Iraq;
and of tens of thousands of Jews from some 70 countries
worldwide, all of whom had brought with them their own
language, national heritage and cultural baggage.
 R e v i e w
Is ra e l i n
The sixties were, above all, marked by the military
victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, when a whole new
national mythos and sense of euphoria engulfed not
only the Jewish population of Israel, but indeed the
entire Jewish Diaspora - only to be shattered to a large
extent by the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and its
aftermath, some of the effects of which are still very
much with us nearly three decades later.

The seventies and the eighties saw the first tentative

bridges to peace with the Arab world, beginning with
the historic visit to Israel of President Anwar al-Sadat
of Egypt in 1977.
 , M u s i c ,
A r t
The a t e r
Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra-
 subsequently to become the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
 founded by a renowned Polishborn violinist, Bronislaw
Huberman in 1936, its opening concert being conducted by
Arturo Toscanini.

Bezalel Academy of aArt

 Founded by the Bulgarian-born Professor Boris Schatz in
Jerusalem in 1906.

Habiham Theater
 Founded in Moscow in 1917
 Had moved to Tel Aviv in 1931 and attracted large and
appreciative audiences for its dramatic offerings, which
were already beginning to include works by local
playwrights.
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