Israel Trivia
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109 free Israel trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 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 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On what date did Israel declare independence?
14 May 1948
Israel's Declaration of Independence was read in Tel Aviv on 14 May 1948, hours before the British Mandate expired at midnight; five Arab armies invaded the next day.
Q 02Who proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel and became its first prime minister?
David Ben-Gurion
David Ben-Gurion, born David Grün in Płońsk in 1886, read the declaration and served as prime minister until 1954 and again from 1955 to 1963.
Q 03Which four countries share a land border with Israel?
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt border Israel: Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east and Egypt to the south-west; the Mediterranean forms the western coast.
Q 04What is the lowest land-based elevation on Earth, found on Israel's border?
The shores of the Dead Sea
The shores of the Dead Sea, shared with Jordan, lie more than 430 metres below sea level, and the lake keeps dropping about a metre a year as inflow shrinks.
Q 05How much saltier than the ocean is the Dead Sea?
Nearly tenfold
At about 34 per cent salinity against the ocean's 3.5 per cent, the Dead Sea is nearly tenfold saltier; its density of 1.24 kg per litre keeps swimmers afloat.
Q 06What is the Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee, the lowest freshwater lake on Earth?
Kinneret
The Kinneret, named for its harp-like shape (kinnor), lies about 210 metres below sea level and is fed mainly by the Jordan River.
Q 07Which desert covers the south of Israel?
The Negev
The Negev covers more than half of Israel's land area; Beersheba, its largest city, is the capital of the Southern District.
Q 08Israel's southernmost city, a Red Sea resort known for coral reefs, is which?
Eilat
Eilat, at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, is VAT-free and sits between Egypt's Taba and Jordan's Aqaba; its reef is protected as the Coral Beach Nature Reserve.
Q 09Which mountain cluster, home to a ski resort, holds the highest point under Israeli control?
Mount Hermon
Mount Hermon, on the northern edge of the Golan, hosts Israel's only ski resort; the 2,814-metre summit itself lies on the Syria–Lebanon border.
Q 10Israel's third-largest city, built on the slopes of Mount Carmel, is which?
Haifa
Haifa spreads up Mount Carmel from its bay and ranks behind Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in population; its British-built deep-water port opened in 1933.
Q 11The Baháʼí Terraces climb Mount Carmel on how many terraces?
19
There are 19 terraces: nine above and nine below the Shrine of the Báb, plus the shrine's own; UNESCO listed the Baháʼí holy places in 2008.
Q 12Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 as a suburb of which ancient port city?
Jaffa
Tel Aviv began in 1909 as Ahuzat Bayit, a garden suburb north of the ancient port of 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
Theodor Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland ('Old New Land') appeared in 1902; Nahum Sokolow titled his Hebrew translation Tel Aviv, pairing 'tel' (ancient mound) with 'aviv' (spring).
Q 21The 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine was a letter to whom?
Lord Rothschild
Arthur Balfour addressed the letter to Lord Rothschild, Walter Rothschild, a leading figure in British Jewry, for transmission to the Zionist Federation; 'national home' was left deliberately vague.
Q 22The father of political Zionism convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in which city?
Basel
The First Zionist Congress met in Basel's Stadtcasino concert hall in August 1897; its organiser wrote in his diary afterwards, 'At Basel I founded the Jewish State.'
Q 23Which linguist, who moved to Jerusalem in 1881, drove the revival of spoken Hebrew?
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda
Q 14Tel Aviv's White City has the world's largest concentration of buildings of which architectural school?
Bauhaus
The White City holds some 4,000 Bauhaus and International Style buildings, many by German-Jewish architects who fled the Nazis; UNESCO listed it in 2003.
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
Israel's parliament has 120 seats, a number echoing the Great Assembly of the Second Temple era; members are elected by nationwide proportional representation from a single constituency.
Q 18What is Israel's currency?
The new shekel
The new shekel (ILS), introduced in the mid-1980s, is divided into 100 agorot; 'shekel' was an ancient Near Eastern unit of weight of about 11 grams.
Q 19Israel's hyperinflated 1980s currency was replaced in 1986 at what ratio?
1,000 to 1
The exchange was 1,000 to 1, a thousand old units for one new, under the 1985 stabilisation plan that ended Israel's triple-digit inflation.
Q 20What was the name of the first kibbutz, founded in 1910?
Degania
Degania, founded in 1910 where the Jordan leaves the Sea of Galilee, was the first kibbutz; by 2010 Israel had about 270 kibbutzim with some 126,000 members.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who arrived in Jerusalem in 1881, raised his son Itamar speaking only Hebrew and compiled a 17-volume dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew.
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 stripes echo a tallit prayer shawl, the white garment with blue or black bands worn at prayer; 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
The Six-Day War, 5–10 June 1967, opened with Operation Focus, a surprise air strike that destroyed most of Egypt's air force on the ground within hours.
Q 27Which two leaders signed the Camp David Accords in September 1978, witnessed by Jimmy Carter?
Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin
Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin signed the accords at the White House on 17 September 1978; they shared that year's Nobel Peace Prize, and the Egypt–Israel treaty followed in March 1979.
Q 28Which prime minister was assassinated in November 1995 after signing the Oslo Accords?
Yitzhak Rabin
Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's first native-born prime minister, was shot by Yigal Amir after a Tel Aviv peace rally on 4 November 1995; he 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 in 1898, Golda Meir moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1906, trained there as a teacher and embraced Labor Zionism before emigrating to Palestine in 1921.
Q 30What event forced Golda Meir to resign in 1974?
The Yom Kippur War
The Yom Kippur War began with Egypt and Syria's surprise attack on 6 October 1973; the Agranat Commission's criticism of Israel's unpreparedness led Meir to resign in April 1974.