60 free Israel trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
53 free Israel trivia questions with answers. Israel is smaller than New Jersey and packs in the lowest point on Earth, a ski resort, three of the world's oldest cities and more start-ups per head than anywhere else. This quiz is a general-knowledge tour: the geography of the Dead Sea, Galilee, Negev and Eilat; the cities of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa; the road from Herzl and Balfour to 1948, the Six-Day War, Camp David and Rabin; and the culture, from Hatikvah and the flag to falafel, shakshouka and four Eurovision wins. There are questions on the revival of Hebrew, the kibbutz, the shekel, Masada and the Western Wall, and on Israeli inventions like drip irrigation, the USB flash drive and Waze, plus a few on Olympic and Maccabiah sport. It suits pub quizzes, classrooms and anyone planning a trip. Easy questions come first; the harder ones will stretch even people who have lived there. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on the country, its cities, its history and its institutions, and each question shows the sentence that supports it once you answer. Free, no signup.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On what date did Israel declare independence?
14 May 1948
The British Mandate ended the same day, and neighbouring Arab states invaded.
Q 02Who proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel and became its first prime minister?
David Ben-Gurion
Born David Grün in Płońsk, Poland, he retired to Kibbutz Sde Boker in the desert.
Q 03Which four countries share a land border with Israel?
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt
Its western coast is on the Mediterranean and its southern tip touches the Red Sea.
Q 04What is the lowest land-based elevation on Earth, found on Israel's border?
The shores of the Dead Sea
Its surface stood about 440 metres below sea level as of 2025.
Q 05How much saltier than the ocean is the Dead Sea?
Nearly tenfold
Its density of 1.24 kg per litre makes swimming more like floating.
Q 06What is the Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee, the lowest freshwater lake on Earth?
Kinneret
It sits between 209 and 215 metres below sea level and is fed mainly by the Jordan River.
Q 07Which desert covers the south of Israel?
The Negev
Beersheba, its largest city, is the administrative capital of the Southern District.
Q 08Israel's southernmost city, a Red Sea resort known for coral reefs, is which?
Eilat
It is a tax-free zone, next door to Egypt's Taba and Jordan's Aqaba.
Q 09Which mountain cluster, home to a ski resort, holds the highest point under Israeli control?
Mount Hermon
The summit itself, at 2,814 metres, straddles the Syria-Lebanon border and hosts the world's highest permanently manned UN post.
Q 10Israel's third-largest city, built on the slopes of Mount Carmel, is which?
Haifa
It is home to the Baháʼí World Centre and the country's oldest and largest port.
Q 11The Baháʼí Terraces in Haifa climb Mount Carmel on how many terraces?
19
More than 1,500 steps ascend to and past the Shrine of the Báb; the site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008.
Q 12Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 as a suburb of which ancient port city?
Jaffa
The two were merged as Tel Aviv-Yafo in 1950.
Q 13Tel Aviv's name is the Hebrew title of a 1902 novel by which Zionist thinker?
Theodor Herzl
Nahum Sokolow chose it for his translation of Altneuland, 'Old New Land'.
Q 14Tel Aviv's White City has the world's largest concentration of buildings of which architectural school?
Q 21The 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine was a letter to whom?
Lord Rothschild
It was to be passed on to the Zionist Federation; the phrase 'national home' was deliberately vague.
Q 22The father of political Zionism convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in which city?
Basel
A year earlier he had published the pamphlet Der Judenstaat.
Q 23Which linguist, who moved to Jerusalem in 1881, drove the revival of spoken Hebrew?
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda
He compiled the first modern Hebrew dictionary; Israel is the only country with a revived official language.
Bauhaus
More than 4,000 of them were built in the 1930s, many by German Jewish architects.
Q 15The Old City of Jerusalem is divided into how many quarters?
Four
They are the Armenian, Christian, Jewish and Muslim quarters, all within 0.9 square kilometres.
Q 16Israel's parliament is called what?
The Knesset
Its name comes from the Knesset HaGdola, the Great Assembly of Jewish tradition.
Q 17How many members sit in Israel's parliament?
120
Its building in Givat Ram, Jerusalem was a gift from James de Rothschild in his will and opened in 1966.
Q 18What is Israel's currency?
The new shekel
Each one is divided into 100 agorot; the shekel was an ancient unit of weight, originally perhaps of barley.
Q 19The new shekel replaced its hyperinflated predecessor in 1986 at what ratio?
1,000 to 1
Before the shekel, Israel used the Israeli pound from 1952 to 1980.
Q 20What was the name of the first kibbutz, founded in 1910?
Degania
By 2010 there were 270 kibbutzim with a combined population of 126,000.
Q 24Israel's national anthem is called Hatikvah. What does the title mean?
The Hope
The words are adapted from an 1878 poem by Naftali Herz Imber.
Q 25The two blue stripes on the Israeli flag are modelled on what?
A tallit prayer shawl
The flag with its Star of David was adopted on 28 October 1948.
Q 26In which war of June 1967 did Israel capture the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights?
The Six-Day War
It opened with Operation Focus, a surprise strike that destroyed nearly all of Egypt's air force.
Q 27Which two leaders signed the Camp David Accords in September 1978, witnessed by Jimmy Carter?
Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin
They shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty followed in 1979.
Q 28Which prime minister was assassinated in November 1995 after signing the Oslo Accords?
Yitzhak Rabin
He was Israel's first native-born prime minister and had shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Peres and Arafat.
Q 29Golda Meir, prime minister from 1969 to 1974, grew up in which US city?
Milwaukee
Born in Kyiv, she trained as a teacher there and embraced Labor Zionism before emigrating.
Q 30What event forced Golda Meir to resign in 1974?
The Yom Kippur War
Egypt and Syria's surprise attack on 6 October 1973 caught Israel off guard.