STATE OF ISRAEL

Official name: Medinat Yisrael (State of Israel)
Location: West Asia
International organisations: The United Nations, The World Trade Organisation
Borders: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian Territories, Syria
Coastline: Gulf of Aqaba, Mediterranean Sea
Land area: 20,770 Km2 (1967 borders)
Population: 6,000,000 (includes 390,000 settlers in Palestinian territories)
Ethnicity: Jewish 80%, Arab 20%.
Languages: Hebrew is the official language and is used by most of the Jewish population. Arabic has official status in matters relating to the Arab minority. Russian, Yiddish and Polish are spoken among the Jewish population. English is widely used in business and media.
Religion: Judaism is the state religion and is the religion of 80% of the population. Other religions have freedom of worship. The Arab minority is divided between Sunni Moslems (15%) and Christians of various denominations (5%).

Form of government: Parliamentary democratic republic. Israel is divided into six districts.
Capital: Jerusalem (Yerushalayim, or al-Quds in Arabic)
Constitution: Israel has no formal constitution. The system of government is defined in series of Basic Laws.
Head of state: The President, chosen by the legislature for a seven-year term. The President's functions are largely ceremonial. President President Moshe Katsav took office on 31 July 2000.
Head of government: The Prime Minister, appointed by the President. The Prime Minister is the leader of the majority coalition in the legislature and is accountable to it.
Legislature: Israel has a unicameral legislature. The Parliament (Knesset) has 120 members, elected for four-year terms by proportional representation.
Electoral authority: The government administers national elections
Freedom House 2005 rating: Political Rights 1, Civil Liberties 3

Political history

The territory which is now Israel was part of the Ottoman province of Palestine from 1516 until 1917, when it was occupied by the British army during the First World War. In 1923 it became a League of Nations mandated territory under British administration. During the war the British had promised the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire independence, but they had also made a statement (the Balfour Declaration) in favour of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine, for which the Zionist movement in Europe had been agitating since the 1890s.

The Palestinian Arabs, who had been a majority of the population for more than a thousand years, were opposed to Jewish immigration, which they suspected of being a prelude to an attempt to establish a Jewish state. As the persecution of Jews in Europe worsened during the 1930s, pressure for Jewish immigration to Palestine increased, and Arab resistance broke into open revolt in 1936. The failure of this revolt left the Arabs leaderless and divided.

After the Second World War the fate of the European Jews aroused international sentiment in favour of a Jewish state. When the British banned further Jewish immigration, Zionist militias launched a terrorist campaign against the British. In 1947 the British handed the issue to the United Nations, which recommended that Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. The Jewish organisations accepted the Palestine Partition Plan, but the Palestinians, supported by the Arab states, rejected it, and war broke out immediately. The State of Israel was declared in May 1948.

The victorious Israelis kept the lands seized during the war, leaving 800,000 Palestinians as refugees. Since independence Israel has absorbed millions of Jewish immigrants. It fought wars with its Arab neighbours in 1956, 1967 and 1973. In 1967 Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt. Sinai was returned in 1979 as part of a peace treaty with Egypt, but the other territories, home to 2 million Palestinians, remain under Israeli occupation.

From the late 1960s the Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation, waged an intermittent campaign of terrorist violence against Israel. This served mainly to harden Israeli attitudes, leading to a prolonged war in Lebanon in the 1980s and many deaths on both sides. Finally in 1993 Yitzhak Rabin's Labour government concluded an agreement known as the Oslo Accords, whereby the Palestinians agreed to recognise Israel in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority was created (see also Palestine), and Israel handed over administration of most of the territories to it.

In 1995, however, Rabin was assassinated, and a Likud government opposed to the Accords was elected in his place. The process was stalled, but was revived when Labour's Ehud Barak won the 1999 election. Barak, supported by the US, made extensive concessions to the Palestinians, but in 2000 Arafat rejected the offer at the Camp David meeting. Barak's government fell, the Oslo process collaped, and the Palestinians resumed terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, leading to Israeli military retaliation.

Israeli politics has been dominated by the Palestinian issue since the 1970s. The Labour Party, which governed Israel from independence until 1977, favours renewed negotiations and further concessions. The conservative Consolidation or Likud party of the current Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, opposes concessions. Sharon won a crushing victory on this policy at the 2003 elections.

Israel's system of proportional representation fosters a multitude of parties. Likud is usually supported by conservative and religious parties including Shas (International Organization of Torah-observant Sephardic Jews), National Union, Homeland, Revival, Our Home Israel, National Religious Party, Israel and Immigration and United Torah Judaism. Labour is allied with the centrist Dimension party, and is usually supported by the social-democratic Energy, as well as left-wing parties including Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, One Nation, National Democratic Alliance and the United Arab List. The liberal-secularist Change-Centre Party maintains an independent position.