Demographics:
Israel has a total population of 9.7 million people. For comparison, Canada’s population is 38.2 million, the U.S.’s is 381.9 million. The metropolitan area of the city of New York has a population of 18.9 million. Toronto is sitting at just under 7 million. The population of Israel’s eastern neighbor, Jordan, is 11.3 million; to the south, Egypt has 112.7 million people; to the north, Lebanon’s population is 5.3 million and Syria’s is 23.2 million. Physically, Israel is 417 km long from north to south (i.e. shorter than the distance from Toronto to Ottawa) and is 115 km wide at its widest point from east to west (the distance from Montreal to Ottawa is 198 km). Israel is not very big, either in size or in population. Why it therefore gets such outsized attention, both from the media and from the UN, is a good question that I'll muse about another time.
“Apartheid”:
If you’re wondering, there are just over 7 million Jews in Israel (note: this is based on a census that looks at ethnic affiliation only; i.e. this category “Jews” come in all colors and from all backgrounds, from North African to African American, from Moroccan and Yemenite to Asian and Caucasian). The other 2.5 million people who live here consist of a variety of other ethnic and religious groups, with Arabs (both Christian and Muslim) comprising about 21% of the total population. These Arabs – unlike those in the Palestinian Territories or in Gaza – are full citizens of Israel. They are part of every fabric and class of Israeli society. An Arab-led party is the third-largest party in the Israeli parliament. They serve in the army and are part of the justice system, all the way to the Supreme Court. There is nothing “apartheid” about any of this – and to label it as such denies and whitewashes the horrific suffering of Blacks under an actual apartheid South African regime that enforced racist, discriminatory laws and segregation and deprived Black people of all rights. Israeli Arabs have the same legal rights as any other citizens in Israel. Are there problems here? Are there racial tensions? Of course. We live in a world fraught with concern about the color of people's skin and fear of those who are different from us. Look at where you live - are there problems there? Are there racial tensions? I'm willing to bet the answer is a definite yes. And just like where you live, there are good people working very hard - many devoting their entire lives - to enforce the equality for all that is guaranteed under the law of the land. (A law, by the way, that does not exist under Hamas rule in Gaza.)
Other interesting tidbits that you’ll never see in the Western news media:
When the Arab Spring in 2011 set off a bloody civil war in Syria, during which it is estimated that President Bashar al-Assad exterminated over 400,000 of his own people – many of them children – Syrian families started appearing on the northern border of Israel. Soldiers, refugees, mothers, and children with horrific injuries were taken by the Israel Defense Forces to nearby Israeli hospitals and treated. As word spread and more and more sought treatment in Israel, in 2013 the Israeli military created a new unit called “Good Neighboring” in Hebrew to coordinate aid and treatment for the injured Syrians. Over 200,000 Syrians have been treated in Israel, including close to 50,000 children. When a soccer team was stuck in a cave in Thailand, Israel sent a group of Israeli divers. When an earthquake killed thousands in Haiti in 2010, Israel sent a crew of nurses and doctors in addition to food and water. The Israeli NGO IsraAID has provided physical and psychological support to over 160,000 refugees in Kenya, worked toward female empowerment in Nepal, and sent over 60 Israeli experts to train 3000 Japanese healthcare professionals in trauma treatment for the survivors of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. They developed a program to treat Yazidi women survivors of ISIS enslavement and trained Yazidis who returned to Iraq to help others. They collaborated with Jewish and Arab Israeli youth movements to set up the School for Peace for refugee children on the Greek island of Lesbos.
There are many, many more examples but hopefully you get the picture. I invite you to compare this small sample of info about Israel with the human rights records of any of the other countries in the Middle or Far East, if you want to understand why all of the Western nations - despite their own records with Jews in the past - are firmly standing with Israel right now.
Other fun facts you might want to know if you're left-leaning:
Not only is abortion legal here, but it is free because it falls under women's health in the socialist health care system (this article has good info on the history of abortion laws in Israel)
The annual Pride parade in Tel Aviv is the largest in continental Asia (and note that in the majority of other countries in the Middle East it is illegal to be gay, and punishable by death; this article gives info on LGBTQ rights in Israel)
Israel has more vegans per capita than any other country in the world
As Noa Tishby put it "Israel is the only country in the Middle East in which you can practice any religion you want freely while making out with your same-sex partner on the beach."
While the right-wing and religious groups' voices are often the ones that are heard loudest, almost half (44%) of Israelis consider themselves to be secular (compare Canada's rate of 34.6% who consider themselves secular), and there is a strong socialist streak particularly in the ethos of the founders of the country who fled Eastern Europe from the late 19th century onward. If you’re interested in learning more about what Israel actually is and does, I recommend reading Israeli news outlets – many are available in English online – as a supplement to what is otherwise coming regularly across your newsfeed.
Some follow-up questions from all of this that you may have:
If all of this is true, why does Israel get such a bad rap in the media? Why is none of this ever reported?
And…what about the Palestinians?
Stay tuned: I'll be getting to these questions soon (in the meantime, if you can't wait until I get to this I highly recommend Tishby's book, especially the chapters that deal with modern Israel).