Founded as a Jewish state, Israel's society, numbering over seven million people, forms a mosaic of different religions, cultures and social traditions. Citizenship is determined by birth, residence or naturalization; citizens wishing to hold dual nationality may do so.
Religious affiliation and practice is a matter of personal choice, with religious freedom guaranteed by the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel.
Today the country's population is comprised of 76.2 percent Jews, 16.4 percent Muslims, 2.1 percent Christians (mostly Arabs), 1.6 percent Druze and 3.7 percent not classified by religion.
Within this pluralistic framework, the various communities maintain their own religious, educational, cultural and charitable institutions. The courts of each religious community have full jurisdiction in matters of the personal status of its members.
Each of the country's many holy sites is administered by its own religious authority, while protection against desecration and trespassing as well as free access are guaranteed by law.
Israel's official day of rest is Saturday, the Shabbat. Muslims observe their day of rest on Friday, while Christians observe theirs on Sunday.
Since the establishment of the state (1948), the Jewish population has grown from 650,000 to over seven million, doubling in the first four years alone with the mass immigration of European Holocaust survivors and refugees from Arab countries.
From that time, Jews have continued to come, in varying numbers, both from countries of oppression and from the free world. In two major efforts (1984, 1991) virtually the entire Jewish community of Ethiopia, believed to have been there since the time of King Solomon, was gathered to Israel. Another large wave of immigration, which began in 1989, is comprised of over one million Jews from the former Soviet Union.
In the course of the "ingathering of the exiles," Jews brought with them the traditions of their own communities as well as aspects of the culture indigenous to the countries where they had lived for generations. Thus Israel's Jewish population, while united by a common faith and history, is characterized by a diversity of outlooks and lifestyles, resulting in a society which is partly Western, partly Eastern European, partly Middle Eastern, but mainly Israeli.
Israel's non-Jewish, primarily Arab communities, comprising about 24 percent of the population, have increased from 156,000 people in 1949 to some 1.6 million today. Their participation in the country's democratic processes attests to their civic affiliation, though development of relations between Israeli Arabs and Jews has been hindered by differences in language, religion and lifestyles as well as by the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict.
The two populations live side by side, with contacts on economic, municipal and political levels, but with little social interaction.