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BACKGROUND
Land and Climate
Covering 8,792 square miles (22,770 square kilometers), Israel is about the same size as New Jersey. This area does not include the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Despite Israel's small size, the terrain varies substantially by region, from fertile valleys and hills to deserts and the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth at 1,339 feet (408 meters) below sea level. In the south, the arid Negev Desert is home to craters, mountains, and oases.
On the coastal plain, summers are humid and winters mild. The hills of the interior offer more comfortable summers but colder winters. Jerusalem's temperatures average around 85°F (29°C) in the summer and 500F (100C) in the winter. An efficient irrigation system makes agricultural land arable all year.
History
The Holy Land, from which the present state of Israel emerged, claims a long history of rule by different powers. A Hebrew kingdom was established from the 12 tribes of Israel that came out of Egypt with Moses. King David ruled this kingdom some three thousand years ago. After his son Solomon's reign, it split into two states - Israel and Judah - that were later destroyed by Assyria and Babylonia in the eighth and sixth centuries BC. The populations were dispersed or taken captive, although many Israelites remained in the area. After the Persian conquest of the Middle East, many Jews were allowed to return to the Holy Land to establish a nation and build a temple. The land later fell to the Greeks and then to the Romans. Heavily persecuted, the Jewish population declined sharply during the Byzantine era (AD 313-636). In the 600s, the area (named Palestine by the Romans) was conquered by Muslims, who ruled for nearly one thousand years.
The Ottoman Turks controlled Palestine from the 16th century until World War I. In the 1890s, a Hungarian named Theodor Herzl founded Zionism as an international movement to restore Palestine to the Jews. After World War I, the area came under British control. Various plans for partitioning the area were put forth but never implemented. Spurred by the genocide and suffering of the Holocaust during World War U, Jews immigrated to Israel in large numbers. The British first tried to...