How many people live in Israel?
Demographics of Israel
The demographics of Israel are monitored by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. The State of Israel has a population of approximately 8,855,000 inhabitants as of the first half of 2018.[3] Some 74.5% are Jews of all backgrounds (about 6,556,000 individuals), 20.9% are Arab of any religion other than Jewish (about 1,837,000 individuals), while the remaining 4.6% (about 400,000 individuals) are defined as "others", including persons of Jewish ancestry deemed non-Jewish by religious law and persons of non-Jewish ancestry who are family members of Jewish immigrants (neither of which are registered at the Ministry of Interior as Jews), Christian non-Arabs, Muslim non-Arabs and all other residents who have neither an ethnic nor religious classification.
Israeli Jews
Immigration of Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from Arab lands doubled Israel's population within one year of its independence. Over the following years approximately 850,000 Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews fled or were expelled from surrounding mostly due persecution in Arab countries, and in smaller numbers from Turkey, India, Afghanistan, and Iran. Of these, about 680,000 settled in Israel (see also Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries).