60 Fun Facts About Israel

On what date did Israel declare independence?

The British Mandate ended the same day, and neighbouring Arab states invaded.

Who proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel and became its first prime minister?

Born David Grün in Płońsk, Poland, he retired to Kibbutz Sde Boker in the desert.

Which four countries share a land border with Israel?

Its western coast is on the Mediterranean and its southern tip touches the Red Sea.

What is the lowest land-based elevation on Earth, found on Israel's border?

Its surface stood about 440 metres below sea level as of 2025.

How much saltier than the ocean is the Dead Sea?

Its density of 1.24 kg per litre makes swimming more like floating.

What is the Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee, the lowest freshwater lake on Earth?

It sits between 209 and 215 metres below sea level and is fed mainly by the Jordan River.

Which desert covers the south of Israel?

Beersheba, its largest city, is the administrative capital of the Southern District.

Israel's southernmost city, a Red Sea resort known for coral reefs, is which?

It is a tax-free zone, next door to Egypt's Taba and Jordan's Aqaba.

Which mountain cluster, home to a ski resort, holds the highest point under Israeli control?

The summit itself, at 2,814 metres, straddles the Syria-Lebanon border and hosts the world's highest permanently manned UN post.

Israel's third-largest city, built on the slopes of Mount Carmel, is which?

It is home to the Baháʼí World Centre and the country's oldest and largest port.

The Baháʼí Terraces in Haifa climb Mount Carmel on how many terraces?

More than 1,500 steps ascend to and past the Shrine of the Báb; the site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008.

Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 as a suburb of which ancient port city?

The two were merged as Tel Aviv-Yafo in 1950.

Tel Aviv's name is the Hebrew title of a 1902 novel by which Zionist thinker?

Nahum Sokolow chose it for his translation of Altneuland, 'Old New Land'.

Tel Aviv's White City has the world's largest concentration of buildings of which architectural school?

More than 4,000 of them were built in the 1930s, many by German Jewish architects.

The Old City of Jerusalem is divided into how many quarters?

They are the Armenian, Christian, Jewish and Muslim quarters, all within 0.9 square kilometres.

Israel's parliament is called what?

Its name comes from the Knesset HaGdola, the Great Assembly of Jewish tradition.

How many members sit in Israel's parliament?

Its building in Givat Ram, Jerusalem was a gift from James de Rothschild in his will and opened in 1966.

What is Israel's currency?

Each one is divided into 100 agorot; the shekel was an ancient unit of weight, originally perhaps of barley.

The new shekel replaced its hyperinflated predecessor in 1986 at what ratio?

Before the shekel, Israel used the Israeli pound from 1952 to 1980.

What was the name of the first kibbutz, founded in 1910?

By 2010 there were 270 kibbutzim with a combined population of 126,000.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine was a letter to whom?

It was to be passed on to the Zionist Federation; the phrase 'national home' was deliberately vague.

The father of political Zionism convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in which city?

A year earlier he had published the pamphlet Der Judenstaat.

Which linguist, who moved to Jerusalem in 1881, drove the revival of spoken Hebrew?

He compiled the first modern Hebrew dictionary; Israel is the only country with a revived official language.

Israel's national anthem is called Hatikvah. What does the title mean?

The words are adapted from an 1878 poem by Naftali Herz Imber.

The two blue stripes on the Israeli flag are modelled on what?

The flag with its Star of David was adopted on 28 October 1948.

In which war of June 1967 did Israel capture the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights?

It opened with Operation Focus, a surprise strike that destroyed nearly all of Egypt's air force.

Which two leaders signed the Camp David Accords in September 1978, witnessed by Jimmy Carter?

They shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty followed in 1979.

Which prime minister was assassinated in November 1995 after signing the Oslo Accords?

He was Israel's first native-born prime minister and had shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Peres and Arafat.

Golda Meir, prime minister from 1969 to 1974, grew up in which US city?

Born in Kyiv, she trained as a teacher there and embraced Labor Zionism before emigrating.

What event forced Golda Meir to resign in 1974?

Egypt and Syria's surprise attack on 6 October 1973 caught Israel off guard.

In which country did Mossad agents capture Adolf Eichmann in 1960 before his trial in Jerusalem?

He was hanged at Ramla Prison on 1 June 1962.

The 1976 Entebbe hostage rescue took place in which country?

Israeli commandos flew 4,000 km to free 102 hostages from a hijacked Air France flight backed by Idi Amin.

Masada, the desert fortress overlooking the Dead Sea, was fortified as a refuge by which king?

According to Josephus its Sicarii defenders died by mass suicide when the Romans breached the walls in 73 or 74 AD.

Which Roman legion besieged Masada, building a circumvallation wall and a massive ramp?

Its commander was Lucius Flavius Silva.

The Western Wall in Jerusalem is a retaining wall of which structure?

Its huge lower stones are Herodian, from the end of the Second Temple period.

Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, is the country's second most-visited site after which?

It was established by a unanimous Knesset law in 1953 and sits on Mount Herzl.

What title does Yad Vashem confer on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust?

They are honoured in a garden and an avenue at the memorial.

How many times has Israel won the Eurovision Song Contest?

Wins came in 1978, 1979, 1998 and 2018, and it has hosted in Jerusalem twice and Tel Aviv once.

Which singer's song Toy won Eurovision for Israel in 2018 with a record 529 points?

It ended a 20-year wait since Dana International's Diva.

Shakshouka reached Israel with Jewish immigrants from which region?

It began appearing in Israeli restaurants in the 1990s.

Falafel, a national favourite, is a fritter of what origin?

In the Levant it is usually made from chickpeas rather than the fava beans used in Egypt.

Which Israeli navigation app did Google buy for $1.3 billion in 2013?

It began in 2006 as a community project called FreeMap Israel.

Which company, founded with a Negev kibbutz, commercialised modern drip irrigation?

Engineer Simcha Blass partnered with Kibbutz Hatzerim in 1964.

Which Israeli company filed the 1999 patent for the USB flash drive?

Amir Ban, Dov Moran and Oron Ogdan are often credited as the inventors, though rival claims exist.

Which is Israel's oldest university, established in 1912 in Haifa?

An early row over whether to teach in German or Hebrew, the War of the Languages, helped cement Hebrew as the national language.

The research institute in Rehovot is named after which chemist, who became Israel's first president?

Founded in 1934 as the Daniel Sieff Research Institute, it was renamed in 1949.

Israel is nicknamed for its entrepreneurship because it leads the world in what?

It also has the world's highest number of scientists and engineers per 10,000 employees.

The Sorek plant near Tel Aviv is the world's largest facility of what kind?

By 2014 desalination already supplied about 35% of Israel's drinking water.

The Maccabiah Games, the 'Jewish Olympics', were first held in Tel Aviv in which year?

Since 1953 they have run every four years, in the year after the Olympics.

Israel's first Olympic medal, a silver in 1992, came in which sport?

Yael Arad won it in Barcelona; Gal Fridman took the first gold in 2004 in windsurfing.

At which Olympics were eleven members of the Israeli team murdered by Black September?

Israel later boycotted Moscow 1980, and the victims were honoured at the Tokyo 2020 opening ceremony.

Which is Israel's main international air hub?

Ramon, near Eilat, and Haifa are the other two international airports.

The 1950 law granting Jews the right to immigrate to Israel and gain citizenship is called what?

About 300,000 Russian-descended Israelis gained citizenship under it despite not being Jewish under rabbinical law.

What is the oldest known artefact to mention 'Israel' as a people?

The Egyptian inscription dates to the late 13th century BCE; the name itself is traditionally traced to the patriarch Jacob.

By what vote did the provisional government pick the name 'Israel' over Zion, Judea and Ever?

David Ben-Gurion proposed the name; 'Ever' would have honoured the biblical ancestor Eber.

Into how many main administrative districts, or mehozot, is Israel divided?

They are Center, Haifa, Jerusalem, North, South and Tel Aviv, subdivided into 15 sub-districts.

In 2018 which language lost its official status in Israel and was given a 'special status' instead?

It remains the main teaching medium in Arab schools and appears on signage and transport announcements.

Which Israeli writer shared the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature with Nelly Sachs?

By law two copies of every work published in Israel must be deposited in the National Library.

Which offshore natural gas field, discovered in 2010, began production in 2019?

Together with Tamar, found in 2009, its reserves could keep Israel energy-secure for more than 50 years.

Founded in 1918 in Tel Aviv, what is Israel's oldest repertory company and national theatre?

The company grew out of the Yiddish theatre traditions of Eastern Europe.