Israeli Jews
Israeli Jews or Jewish Israelis comprise Israel's largest ethnic and religious community. The core of their demographic consists of those with a Jewish identity and their descendants, including ethnic Jews and religious Jews alike. About 46% of the global Jewish population resides in Israel; is uncommon and is offset exponentially by, but those who do emigrate from the country typically move to the Western world. As such, the Israeli diaspora is closely tied to the broader Jewish diaspora.
Israel is widely described as a melting pot for the various Jewish ethnic divisions, primarily consisting of Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews, and Mizrahi Jews, as well as many smaller Jewish communities, such as the Beta Israel, the Cochin Jews, the Bene Israel, and the Karaite Jews, among others. Over 25% of Jewish children and 35% of Jewish newborns in Israel are of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardic or Mizrahi descent, and these figures have been increasing by approximately 0.5% annually: over 50% of Israel's entire Jewish population identifies as having Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi admixture. The integration of Judaism in Israeli Jewish life is split along four categories: the secularists, the traditionalists, the Orthodox, and the Ultra-Orthodox. In addition to religious influences, both Jewish history and Jewish culture serve as important aspects defining Israel's Jewish society, thereby contributing significantly to Israel's identity as the world's only Jewish-majority country.
In 2018, Israel's Knesset narrowly voted in favour of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. As the Israeli government considers a person's Jewish status to be a matter of nationality and citizenship, the definition of Jewishness in the Israeli Law of Return includes patrilineal Jewish descent; this does not align with the stipulations of Judaism's, which defines Jewishness through matrilineality., all Jews by blood and their spouses automatically qualify for the right to immigrate to the country and acquire Israeli citizenship.
According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, the Israeli Jewish population stood at 7,208,000 in 2023, comprising about 73% of the country's total population. Including non-Jewish relatives raises this figure to 7,762,000, about 79% of the country's population. A 2008 Israel Democracy Institute study found that a plurality of Israeli Jews identify as Jews first and as Israelis second, and that 39% consider themselves Israelis first and foremost.
Upon the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, the Palestinian Jews of the Yishuv in the British Mandate for Palestine became known as Israeli Jews due to their adoption of a new national identity. The former term has since fallen out of common use.
History
Origins
Jews have long considered the Land of Israel to be their homeland, even while living in the diaspora. According to the Hebrew Bible the connection to the Land of Israel began in the covenant of the pieces when the region, which is called the land of Canaan, was promised to Abraham by God. Abraham settled in the region, where his son Isaac and grandson Jacob grew up with their families. Later on, Jacob and his sons went to Egypt. Decades later their descendants were led out of Egypt by Moses and Aaron, given the Tablets of Stone, returned to the land of Canaan and conquered it under the leadership of Joshua. After the period of the judges, in which the Israelites did not have an organized leadership, the Kingdom of Israel was established, which constructed the First Temple. This kingdom was soon split into two—the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Israel. After the destruction of these kingdoms and the destruction of the First Temple, the Israelites were exiled to Babylon. After about 70 years parts of the Israelites were permitted to return to the region and soon thereafter they built the Second Temple. Later they established the Hasmonean Kingdom. The region was conquered by the Roman Empire in 63 BCE. During the first couple of centuries in the common era during a series of rebellions against the Roman Empire the Second Temple was destroyed and there was a general expulsion of Jews from their homeland.The area was later conquered by migrant Arabs who invaded the Byzantine Empire and established a Muslim Caliphate in the 7th century during the rise of Islam. Throughout the centuries the size of the Jewish population in the land fluctuated. Before the birth of modern Zionism in the 1880s, by the early 19th century, more than 10,000 Jews were still living in the area that is today modern Israel.
Following centuries of Jewish diaspora, the 19th century saw the rise of Zionism, a Jewish nationalist movement that had a desire to see the self-determination of the Jewish people through the creation of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. Significant numbers of Jews have immigrated to Palestine since the 1880s. Zionism remained a minority movement until the rise of Nazism in 1933 and the subsequently attempted extermination of the Jewish people in Nazi-occupied areas of Europe in the Holocaust. In the late 19th century large numbers of Jews began moving to the Ottoman and later British-controlled region. In 1917, the British endorsed a National Home for Jews in Mandate Palestine by issuing the Balfour Declaration. The Jewish population in the region increased from 11% of the population in 1922 to 30% by 1940.
In 1937, following the Great Arab Revolt, the partition plan proposed by the Peel Commission was rejected by both the Palestinian Arab leadership and the Zionist Congress. As a result, believing that their position in the Middle East in the event of a war depended on the support of the Arab states, Britain abandoned the idea of a Jewish state in 1939 in favour of a unitary state with a Jewish minority. The White Paper of 1939 capped Jewish immigration for five years, with further immigration dependent on the agreement of the Arabs. In the event, limited Jewish immigration was permitted until the end of the mandate.
In 1947, following increasing levels of violence, the British government decided to withdraw from Mandatory Palestine. The 1947 UN Partition Plan split the mandate into two states, Jewish and Arab, giving about 56% of Mandatory Palestine to the Jewish state. Immediately following the adoption of the Partition Plan by the United Nations General Assembly, the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected the plan to create the as-yet-unnamed Jewish State and launched a guerrilla war.
File:Declaration of State of Israel 1948 2.jpg|thumb|upright|David Ben-Gurion proclaiming Israeli independence from the United Kingdom on 14 May 1948, below a portrait of Theodor Herzl
On 14 May 1948, one day before the end of the British Mandate of Palestine, the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine led by prime minister David Ben-Gurion, made a declaration of independence, of the State of Israel though without any reference to defined borders.
1948 Arab–Israeli War
The armies of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq invaded the former mandate, thus starting the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The nascent Israeli Defense Force repulsed the Arab nations from much of the former mandate, thus extending its borders beyond the original UNSCOP partition. By December 1948, Israel controlled much of Mandate Palestine west of the Jordan River. The remainder of the Mandate consisted of Jordan, the area that came to be called the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Prior to and during this conflict, 711,000 Palestinians Arabs fled their original lands to become Palestinian refugees. The reasons for this are disputed, and range from claims that the major cause of Palestinian flight was military actions by the Israel Defense Forces and fear of events such as the Deir Yassin massacre to an encouragement to leave by Arab leaders so that they could return when the war was won.1949–present
Immigration of Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from Arab lands doubled Israel's population within one year of its independence. Over the following years approximately 850,000 Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews fled or were expelled from surrounding mostly due persecution in Arab countries, and in smaller numbers from Turkey, India, Afghanistan, and Iran. Of these, about 680,000 settled in Israel.Israel's Jewish population continued to grow at a very high rate for years, fed by waves of Jewish immigration from round the world, most notably the massive immigration wave of Soviet Jews, which arrived in Israel in the early 1990s following the dissolution of the USSR, who, according to the Law of Return, were entitled to become Israeli citizens upon arrival. About 380,000 arrived in 1990–1991 alone. Some 80,000–100,000 Ethiopian Jews have immigrated to Israel since the early 1980s.
Since 1948, Israel has been involved in a series of major military conflicts, including the 1956 Suez War, 1967 Six-Day War, 1973 Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and 2006 Lebanon War, as well as a nearly constant series of ongoing minor conflicts. Israel has been also embroiled in an ongoing conflict with the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories, which have been under Israeli control since the Six-Day War, despite the signing of the Oslo Accords on 13 September 1993, and the ongoing efforts of Israeli, Palestinian and global peacemakers.