Israel defines itself as a state of and for the Jewish people, and about 80 percent of the population are Jews. It is, however, a country of immigrants, and unlike the indigenous Palestinian Israelis, the vast majority of Jewish Israelis (or their ancestors) have come to Israel from all over the world in the last 120 years, but mostly since 1948. The tiny communities of indigenous and intensely orthodox Jewish communities in places like Safed and Jerusalem, have largely remained separate from mainstream or even the "regular" ultra-orthodox Israeli Jewish population.

Two-thirds or so of Israel's Jews are Arabs--they or their ancestors emigrated to Israel from Morocco or Yemen, from Iraq or elsewhere in the Arab world. A small percentage of Israeli Jews are Africans, mainly Ethiopians; and the rest are what is known as Ashkenazi, or European Jews, of which about one-fifth are Russians who arrived in the 1990s.

It was European and Russian Jews, back in the 1880s, who first began significant Jewish immigration to what was then Ottoman Turkish- and later British-ruled Palestine. They came fleeing persecution and violent pogroms, or communal attacks, in czarist Russia and eastern Europe, and they came in answer to mobilizations organized by a movement known as Zionism, which called for all Jews to leave their countries of origin to live in a Jewish state in Palestine. The use of Hebrew, created as a modern language in the early 1900s, an orientation towards Europe and the U.S. rather than to the neighboring Middle East, and nearly universal military service (excepting only Arabs and ultra-orthodox Jews) became the central anchors around which national consciousness was built.

Israel defines itself as a state of the entire Jewish people, not simply a state for its own citizens. It encourages Jewish immigration through what is known as the Law of Return, under which any Jew born anywhere in the world, with or without pre-existing ties to Israel, has the right to claim immediate citizenship upon arrival in Israel, and the right to all the privileges of being Jewish in a Jewish state--including state-financed language classes, housing, job placement, medical and welfare benefits, etc. In most circumstances only Jews have the right to immigrate to Israel; the indigenous Palestinians and their ancestors are denied that right despite the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.