Israel

Israel lies on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. A fertile coastal plain runs north past Tel Aviv to Haifa and the wooded ridge of Mount Carmel. Inland rise the hills of Galilee and the Sea of Galilee, a freshwater lake fed by the Jordan, while the south is the Negev desert, cut by the erosion crater of Makhtesh Ramon and ending at Eilat on the Red Sea. The Dead Sea, so salty that bathers float, lies to the east.

The ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah arose here in the Iron Age, and the Hebrew Bible took shape among their people. After Rome destroyed the Second Temple in AD 70, most Jews lived in the diaspora for nearly two thousand years. Zionist settlement began in the 1880s, Britain governed the land from 1920, and the State of Israel was declared in May 1948. The war that followed displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs; later wars came in 1967 and 1973, and peace treaties followed with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994.

Hebrew, the language of scripture, was revived as an everyday spoken tongue around the turn of the twentieth century. Jewish immigrants from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Ethiopia brought their own food and music, and Arab, Druze and Christian communities keep theirs. Technology firms around Tel Aviv design chips, software and medical devices, diamonds are cut and traded in Ramat Gan, and drip irrigation, developed here in the 1960s, spread to farms worldwide.