The State of Israel is a country in southwestern Asia on the eastern side of the Mediterranean Sea. Israel is the only Jewish country, and the spiritual home for Jews all over the world. Israel's population was 8.1 million people in 2013 and 6.04 million are Jewish. Almost all the other citizens of Israel are Arab (1.6 million) and include Muslims, Christians, and Druze. Israel's largest city is Jerusalem. Israel's capital city is Jerusalem (limited recognition). Most countries keep embassies in Tel Aviv.
Israel is a small country, but it has mountains, deserts, shores, valleys and plains. The climate is hot and rainless in the summers with high humidity in the coastal plain and lower elevations, and cool and rainy in the winters, rarely going below freezing temperatures.
Israel has few natural resources and imports more goods than it exports. It has a relatively high standard of living and life expectancy. Almost all of its people can read and write.
According to the Democratic Index, Israel is the only democratic republic in the Middle East. According to Freedom House, Israel is the only full democracy in the Middle East. It has a long history of conflict with Palestine.
History
The country's history goes back thousands of years, to ancient times. Two world religions, Judaism and Christianity, began here. It is the place where the Jewish nation and religion first grew. Jews and Christians call it the Holy Land, because it is the place of many events described in the Bible, and because some commandments of Jewish law can be accomplished only on its soil.
Premodern
From the time of the first Jewish patriarch Abraham four thousand years ago, the land now called Israel were populated by Canaanites and other Semitic peoples. Around 1400 BCE, another Semitic people, called the Hebrews, settled in Canaan under the leadership of Moses and Joshua. They were named the “Children of Israel” or “Israelites”: which were divided into 12 tribes. A few centuries later, the Hebrews made Saul, as their leader. The next king, David, began the Kingdom of Israel in about 1000 BCE and made the city of Jerusalem his capital. His son, Solomon, built the first Temple for the worship of their God. Solomon died in about 928 BCE. His kingdom broke into two countries. The northern country kept the name Israel. The southern country, called Judah, kept Jerusalem as its capital.
The Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel in 732 BCE and the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE and destroyed Solomon's Temple. Many Jews returned from Babylonia and built a country again and rebuilt the Temple. First the Persians, then the Greeks and then the Romans ruled the Land of Israel.
The Jews fought against the Romans but the Romans defeated them. In 70 CE, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Jewish Temple there. Again, in 135 CE, the Romans defeated the Jews and killed or took many of them to other places. The number of Jews living in Israel became much smaller. Many were forced to live in other countries. This spreading of Jewish communities outside of Israel is called the Diaspora.
Many of the Jews who remained moved to the Galilee. Jewish teachers wrote important Jewish books, called the Mishnah and part of the Talmud there, in the 2nd to 4th centuries CE.
The Romans began to call this region by the word that became Palestine in English. The Roman and then the Byzantine empires ruled until 635 CE, when Arabs conquered the region. Different Arab rulers, and for a while Crusaders, ruled the land. In 1516, the Ottoman Empire conquered the land and ruled the region until the 20th century.
Modern
Since the Diaspora, there have been many attempts to make a new homeland for the Jewish people. In the 1880s, this wish for a Jewish nation in Israel became a movement called Zionism. Jews from all over the world began to come to the area and settled in desert zones, then governed by the Turkish and later by the British Governments.