Happy 70th birthday Israel
Israel, as a modern state, was founded on the 14th of May 1948 – 70 years ago. The next day they were attacked by Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria. It took 13 months for Israel to win the War of Independence.
In 1950 they enacted the Law of Return granting automatic citizenship to anyone of Jewish matrilineal descent. This is later extended to spouses, children and grandchildren of Jews. Under this law, I could move to Israel and become a citizen.
In 70 years, Israel has become one of the world’s leading scientific and technological companies. 45 of their top inventions are listed here.
12 Israelis have won Nobel Prizes – one literature, three peace, two economics, six chemistry. (Note a further 155 Jews in other countries have won a Nobel Prize, comprising 22% of all nobel prizes since 1901 despite being just 0.25% of the world’s population).
A few of their inventions are:
- cellphones
- Intel chips
- ICQ
- Polio vaccine
- antivirus software
- ingestible video cameras for cancer detection
- USB flash drives