The land area of Israel is not as big as the smallest country in Central America – El Salvador!
Israel – at almost 8 million population – is more than 20 percent Arab.
Jerusalem has 800,000 residents; Tel Aviv on the coast has about half that number.
[After the Civil War in America had ended, Mark Twain visited the Holy Land. He described it as “a desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds – a silent, mournful expanse…”]
Michael Medved on a similarity between the American Revolution and Israel’s struggle for independence:
“In the end, an estimated 25,000 Americans died in the war – nearly 1 percent of the Colonial population at the time… Israel lost 6,373 fighters in its War of Independence – nearly 1 percent of the Jewish population of the nation at the time.”
A partial timeline of modern Israel:
1948– Israel became a nation (May)
1956– Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal (July);
Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula (late October)
1967– Six-Day War (June)
1970– Egypt’s Nasser died at 52 (September)
1972– massacre at Munich Olympics (late summer)
1973– Yom Kippur War (October)
1978– Camp David peace accords with Sadat/Begin/Carter (September)
1979– the Shah left Iran for exile (January)
1981– Israel destroyed nuclear reactor under construction in Baghdad (June);
Anwar Sadat assassinated (October)
1982– First Lebanon War began (June) with Israel invasion: they drove out the PLO and installed a Christian government;
Bachir Gemayel, the 34-yr-old president, is assassinated (September)