Israel

The World’s Only Jewish State, Land of the Chosen People

y h p a r g o e G 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

e t a Clim  Typical Mediterranean climate with cool, rainy winters and warm,

dry summers.

n o i t a l u p o P

 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

& e g a u g n a L n o i g i l Re 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.

e f i L f o y a W f

e f i L f o y a W f

e f i L f o y a W f

e f i L f o y a W f

t n e m n r e v

Go

 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.

y m o 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.

y c n e Curr The new Israeli sheqel (MIS), consisting of 100

agorot (4.55 NIS equal U.S. $ 1,2003).

s t o o R l a c i r o t s i H 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.

s t o o R l a c i r o t s i H 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,

s t o o R l a c i r o t s i H 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.

d n a m s i n o i Z n o i t a r 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.

d n a m Zionis n o i t a r 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

t n e m h s i l b Esta f o e t a t S e th l e a r Is  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.

t n e m h s i l b Esta f o e t a t S e th l e a r Is

w e i v e R n i l e a r s I  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.

w e i v e R n i l e a r s I  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.

w e i v e R n i l e a r s I 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.

, c i s u M , t r A r e t a The 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.

END… ….