Some more interesting facts about Israel

OK, so hopefully through this site you’ve got an idea of the places to go, the food to eat and the beaches to visit. But continuing on from this post of the Top 10 interesting facts, here are a few more facts about the Holy Land that you probably weren’t aware of.

• Israel has a total coastline of only 273km, including some 137 official beaches.
• The population of Israel is now 7,233,701, including the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
• Of its 7.2 million people, 75.8 percent are Jews, 19.9 percent are Arabs (mostly Muslim) and the remaining 4.3 percent include Druze, Circassians, and others not classified by religion.
• The mobile telephone population of Israel is now estimated at well over 9 million telephones (8.9m in 2007).
• Apart from the US and Canada, Israel has the largest number of NASDAQ listed companies.
• Israel has more museums per capita than any other country.
• Israel has the world’s second largest output of new books per citizen.
• The first anti-virus software was developed in Israel in 1979.
• Israel’s national football team has only ever qualified for the World Cup Finals once, back in 1970.
• Raising/breeding pigs in Israel is illegal for Jews due to a 1962 Israeli law (a number of Arab farmers raise pigs). Only one Jewish organization bucks the trend, Kibbutz Lahav, breeding pigs (over 10,000 of them) which are officially for “research purposes”.