HERA · Human Entity Reference Atlas by Masego Inc

The land has been continuously contested and continuously inhabited for millennia. Israelite kingdoms are attested from the early first millennium BC; the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC and the Second by Rome in AD 70, after which the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 dispersed much of the Jewish population. Byzantine rule gave way to the Arab conquest of 638, the Crusader kingdoms, Mamluk rule and then four centuries under the Ottomans from 1517. Political Zionism was organised at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897; the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 committed Britain to a Jewish national home in Palestine, and the British mandate governed the territory from 1920. Jewish immigration rose sharply under Nazi persecution and after the Holocaust. The United Nations General Assembly voted for partition on 29 November 1947, and Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948. The war that followed left Israel in control of more territory than the partition plan allotted and displaced around 700,000 Palestinians, an event Palestinians call the Nakba. Wars followed in 1956, 1967 — after which Israel held the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, the Golan and East Jerusalem — and 1973. Peace treaties were signed with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994.

Israeli culture is the product of a state that assembled its population from dozens of others in a few decades. Jewish communities arrived from Central and Eastern Europe, from North Africa and the Middle East, from Ethiopia and, after 1990, in very large numbers from the former Soviet Union, each bringing its own liturgy, cooking and music, and the friction and blending between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi traditions has been a running theme of domestic politics and popular art alike. Religion is woven into public life whether or not individuals are observant: the week ends on Friday afternoon, public transport largely stops for Shabbat, and the Jewish holiday calendar sets the national one. Alongside that runs a strongly secular urban culture, most visible in Tel Aviv, and the sharp contrast between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a national shorthand. Arab citizens, about a fifth of the population, maintain their own schools, media, religious institutions and political parties. Near-universal conscription makes the army a social institution as much as a military one. Israeli manners are famously direct — the term sabra, for a native-born Israeli, refers to a cactus fruit that is prickly outside and soft within.

The revival of Hebrew is the achievement Israelis cite first, and it deserves the billing: a language that had survived for centuries in prayer, law and poetry but not in conversation became the everyday speech of a country, a process driven by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and by the schools of the early twentieth century. Nine sites within Israel hold UNESCO World Heritage status, among them the desert fortress of Masada and the Ottoman-Crusader port of Acre, both inscribed in 2001; the White City of Tel Aviv, with the largest concentration of International Style buildings anywhere, inscribed in 2003; the biblical tels of Megiddo, Hazor and Beer Sheba; the Incense Route cities of the Negev; the Bahai holy places at Haifa and in the Western Galilee; and the prehistoric caves of Mount Carmel that record human evolution. The Dead Sea Scrolls, found at Qumran from 1947, are displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Israeli scientists have won Nobel Prizes in chemistry four times since 2004 — for ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation, the structure of the ribosome, quasicrystals and multiscale modelling — and S.Y. Agnon took the literature prize in 1966.

Israel describes its founding demographic project as the ingathering of exiles, and the result is a society layered from communities that had been separated for centuries. European Jews brought Yiddish and Central European institutions; Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Iran and Egypt, most of whom arrived in the years after 1948, brought Arabic and Judeo-Arabic, Middle Eastern liturgical melody and food; Ladino came with Sephardi families from the Balkans and Turkey. Ethiopian Jews arrived in two dramatic airlifts, Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991, and about a million people came from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, so that Russian-language newspapers, bookshops and supermarkets are ordinary features of Israeli towns. The fusion is most audible in music, where Mizrahi pop moved from the margins to the commercial mainstream, and most obvious at the table, where a Levantine base of hummus, tahini and grilled meat carries Yemenite breads, Iraqi kubbeh and Balkan bourekas. Arabic has left a heavy deposit in Hebrew slang. The traffic is not only inward: Israeli television formats, dance and cuisine now export widely.

Israeli music divides roughly into three streams that increasingly overlap. Classical performance is anchored by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1936 by the violinist Bronislaw Huberman as a refuge for Jewish musicians dismissed from European orchestras, with its first concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini; Zubin Mehta led it for decades, and the country has produced violinists of the rank of Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman. The second stream is the songs of the land, the shirei eretz yisrael of the pioneer and army-ensemble era, built on European folk melody with Hebrew lyrics. The third, and now the dominant popular form, is Mizrahi music, which brings Middle Eastern ornament, quarter tones and rhythm into pop — a style pushed from cassette stalls to the charts by singers such as Zohar Argov and Ofra Haza and carried on by Eyal Golan and Sarit Hadad. Israel has won the Eurovision Song Contest four times, in 1978, 1979, 1998 and 2018. In dance, Israeli folk dance was consciously created from the 1940s as a national form, while the Batsheva Dance Company, founded in 1964, became internationally significant under Ohad Naharin, whose Gaga movement language is now taught worldwide.

Israeli cooking is Levantine at its base and diasporic in its details. Hummus, served warm with olive oil and chickpeas and eaten with bread rather than as a dip, is close to a national obsession, and falafel, shakshuka — eggs poached in spiced tomato and pepper — and the aubergine, egg and amba sandwich called sabich are the staple street foods. The salad of finely diced cucumber and tomato appears at breakfast, and breakfast itself, with cheeses, eggs, olives and salads, is a distinctive institution inherited from the kibbutz dining hall. Immigrant traditions supply the rest: Yemenite jachnun and malawach, slow-baked and pan-fried doughs eaten on Shabbat morning; Iraqi kubbeh dumplings in beetroot or okra soup; Balkan and Turkish bourekas; Ashkenazi challah, gefilte fish and cholent; the Jerusalem mixed grill of offal, onion and spice that began as a market vendors' dish. Kosher dietary law governs public institutions and much of the food industry, separating meat from dairy. The desert produces Medjool dates in the Arava and Jordan valleys, and a wine industry revived from the 1980s now works seriously in the Galilee, the Judean hills and the Golan.

Israel has no national costume, and its everyday dress is informal to a degree that visitors remark on — open sandals, no tie even in senior offices, and the kova tembel, a shapeless cotton sun hat, surviving as an affectionate emblem of the pioneer generation. What the country has instead is a dense vocabulary of communal dress that carries precise information. Among Jewish men the head covering signals affiliation: a knitted kippah for religious Zionists, black velvet for the non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox, a black hat over it for many Haredim, and the fur shtreimel worn on Shabbat and festivals by Hasidim, whose long black coats follow eighteenth-century Eastern European patterns. Married Orthodox women cover their hair with scarves, hats or wigs. The prayer shawl, the tallit, with its knotted fringes, is the one garment prescribed by scripture rather than custom. Yemenite Jewish bridal dress, with its towering gargush headdress worked in silver filigree and coral, is among the most spectacular surviving Jewish costumes and is still worn at henna ceremonies. Druze men wear a white cap or turban with dark baggy trousers, Druze women a white head veil, and Bedouin and Palestinian women in Israel maintain cross-stitch tatreez embroidery whose motifs identify a village.

Football and basketball are the two mass sports, and basketball produces the country's most consistent success. Maccabi Tel Aviv has won the top European club title six times, in 1977, 1981, 2001, 2004, 2005 and 2014, and its games are national events; Hapoel Jerusalem and Hapoel Tel Aviv sustain a fierce domestic rivalry. Football's national league is well supported, and the men's national team's single major-tournament appearance came at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. Israel's sporting geography is unusual and politically determined: excluded from the Asian Football Confederation in 1974, the country competes in European competition across almost all sports, which pits a small nation against the strongest field available. Judo has become the most productive Olympic discipline, and Israel's Olympic history carries a permanent shadow in the murder of eleven members of its team by Palestinian gunmen at the Munich Games in 1972. The Maccabiah Games, first held in 1932 and staged every four years in Israel for Jewish athletes worldwide, are among the largest sporting gatherings anywhere by number of participants. Windsurfing, sailing and rhythmic gymnastics complete the medal-winning core.

Education is compulsory and free to the end of secondary school and is organised in parallel streams — secular state schools, state-religious schools, Arabic-language schools serving Arab citizens, and largely independent ultra-Orthodox networks — an arrangement that reproduces the country's social divisions and is a permanent subject of political argument. Secondary education ends with the bagrut matriculation examinations, which govern university admission alongside a psychometric test. The universities predate the state: the Technion in Haifa was founded in 1912 and opened in 1924, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose founding board included Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, opened on Mount Scopus in 1925. The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Haifa complete the research sector, alongside a large Open University. Most students begin degrees after military service and are therefore older than their international peers. Israel devotes a larger share of its economy to research and development than any other OECD member, a figure driven by business spending, and the pipeline between university laboratories, the army's technical units and commercial companies is unusually short and well established.

Israel has fought conventional wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982, and has been engaged in a longer conflict with Palestinian national movements that has run through the first intifada from 1987, the Oslo process of the 1990s, the second intifada from 2000, and repeated rounds of fighting in and around the Gaza Strip in 2008 and 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021. The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority but the permanent-status issues were never settled. On 7 October 2023 a Hamas-led attack from Gaza killed roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel and took about 250 hostages, the deadliest single day in the country's history; the Israeli military campaign in Gaza that followed produced a Palestinian death toll reported in the tens of thousands, the displacement of most of the territory's population and a humanitarian emergency documented by United Nations agencies. The conflict has moved into international courts: South Africa brought a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in December 2023 and the court ordered provisional measures in January 2024; the same court issued an advisory opinion on the occupation in July 2024; and the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas figures in November 2024. Israel rejects the central allegations in each proceeding.

Israel's territorial disputes are the core of the wider conflict rather than a footnote to it. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip, taken in 1967, are regarded by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice as occupied territory to which the Fourth Geneva Convention applies; Israel disputes elements of that characterisation, and the Israeli civilian settlements built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, held unlawful by the ICJ and by successive Security Council resolutions, are among the sharpest points of international disagreement. Jerusalem's status is unresolved: Israel annexed the eastern part of the city and declared the whole of it its capital in 1980, which the Security Council declined to recognise, and Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. The Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967, were brought under Israeli law in 1981; the Security Council declared that step without effect, and only the United States, from 2019, has recognised Israeli sovereignty there. Lebanon claims the Shebaa Farms area. On the maritime side, the long-running Israel-Lebanon boundary dispute in the eastern Mediterranean was resolved by a United States-brokered agreement in October 2022, allowing gas development on both sides.

Israel is a small country of about 22,000 square kilometres that packs in an improbable range of environments over a north-south distance of some 470 kilometres. A fertile Mediterranean coastal plain holds most of the population and industry; behind it rise the hills of Galilee, Samaria and Judea; and to the east the ground falls into the Jordan Rift Valley, part of the Great Rift system, where the shore of the Dead Sea at roughly 430 metres below sea level is the lowest land surface on Earth and continues to drop as the lake shrinks. The Negev desert occupies well over half the national territory and contains the makhteshim, erosion craters formed by a mechanism found almost nowhere else, of which Makhtesh Ramon is the largest. Lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, is the principal natural freshwater body. Mount Meron in the Galilee is the highest point within the pre-1967 lines at 1,208 metres. The climate is Mediterranean in the north and centre, with hot dry summers and rain concentrated between October and April, and arid to hyper-arid in the south. The country sits on one of the world's great bird migration flyways, with hundreds of millions of birds passing twice a year.

The beach is the default Israeli leisure setting, and the Tel Aviv shoreline functions year-round as a public living room, complete with the incessant knocking of matkot, a paddle-and-ball game played at the water's edge with no scoring and no winner. Hiking is close to a civic activity: the tiyul, an organised walk with a guide explaining landscape, archaeology and botany, is embedded in schooling and youth movements, and the Israel National Trail runs roughly 1,100 kilometres from the Lebanese border to the Red Sea, with a tradition of households along the route offering water and a bed to walkers. Weekends bring picnics and barbecues in national parks and forests. The Red Sea at Eilat offers coral diving at the northern limit of the tropical reef system, and the Dead Sea draws floaters and mud-bathers. Archaeology has an unusually broad amateur following, with volunteer participation in excavations. Café culture is heavy in the cities, and Friday afternoon and evening are given over to family meals. Spectator interest concentrates on football and, above all, on basketball, where European club competition draws serious attention.

Israeli art begins institutionally with the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, founded in Jerusalem in 1906 by the sculptor Boris Schatz to create a distinctively Jewish national art, blending European academic training with Middle Eastern ornament and biblical subject matter. The painters of the mandate period, Reuven Rubin and Nahum Gutman among them, developed a bright, flattened landscape style responding to the light of the coast. The most influential body of design, though, is architectural: the roughly four thousand International Style buildings put up in Tel Aviv in the 1930s by architects trained at the Bauhaus and in Europe, adapted to the climate with balconies, brise-soleil and raised pilotis, and inscribed by UNESCO as the White City in 2003. Post-independence art turned to abstraction and to environmental scale — Yaacov Agam's kinetic works, which change as the viewer moves, and Dani Karavan's monumental concrete Negev Monument outside Beer Sheba. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, with the white-domed Shrine of the Book built to house the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art are the principal collections. Contemporary practice, including the video and installation work of Michal Rovner and Sigalit Landau, circulates widely internationally.

David Ben-Gurion read the declaration of independence in 1948 and served as the first prime minister; Chaim Weizmann, a chemist whose wartime work on acetone production gave him political access in London, became the first president. Golda Meir led the government from 1969 to 1974. Yitzhak Rabin, chief of staff in 1967 and prime minister when the Oslo Accords were signed, shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat in 1994 and was assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv in November 1995. Menachem Begin had shared the same prize in 1978 with Anwar Sadat. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda drove the revival of spoken Hebrew. In literature S.Y. Agnon won the Nobel Prize in 1966, and Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman became the country's most translated novelists. In science, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky founded behavioural economics from Jerusalem, work for which Kahneman received the economics Nobel in 2002; Ada Yonath mapped the structure of the ribosome; and Dan Shechtman's discovery of quasicrystals, initially dismissed, won the 2011 chemistry prize. Ohad Naharin reshaped contemporary dance, and Gal Gadot and Natalie Portman are the best known Israeli-born film actors.

Israel's inventions cluster around water, semiconductors and medical devices. Drip irrigation was developed by the engineer Simcha Blass and commercialised from 1965 with Kibbutz Hatzerim as the company Netafim, delivering measured water directly to the root and transforming agriculture in arid regions worldwide. Large-scale seawater reverse osmosis and the systematic reuse of treated wastewater for farming followed the same logic and are now Israeli specialisms exported globally. In computing, Intel opened its first design centre outside the United States in Haifa in 1974, and processors and mobile platforms designed there have shipped in enormous volumes; Mellanox, founded in Yokneam, became a central supplier of high-speed networking for data centres. An Israeli company produced one of the earliest and most widely credited USB flash drives in 2000, and Mirabilis released the ICQ instant messenger in 1996, an ancestor of modern chat applications. Medicine has contributed capsule endoscopy — a swallowable camera pill developed by Given Imaging and approved in 2001 — and the ReWalk powered exoskeleton for spinal injury. Mobileye's vision-based collision avoidance, spun out of the Hebrew University, became standard equipment across the car industry, and Waze pioneered crowd-sourced live traffic navigation.

Israel spends a larger share of its gross domestic product on research and development than any other OECD country, and the resulting concentration of engineers, venture capital and multinational research centres has given a country of nine million people a technology sector of global consequence. Intel, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nvidia and IBM all run substantial Israeli research operations, and the cybersecurity industry that grew out of military signals-intelligence units is among the largest anywhere. Water technology is the other national specialism, and it is applied rather than theoretical: large reverse-osmosis plants along the Mediterranean coast, of which Sorek is the biggest, now supply the majority of household water, and Israel reclaims and reuses a higher proportion of its treated wastewater for agriculture than any other country. Agricultural research has produced drought-tolerant crops and the long-shelf-life cherry tomato bred at the Hebrew University. In space, Israel has launched its own reconnaissance and communications satellites since 1988; Ilan Ramon became the first Israeli astronaut and died aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 2003; and the privately funded Beresheet probe reached lunar orbit in 2019 before crashing during its descent.