Israel Annual Fact Digest 2015

Israel Annual Fact Digest 2015 (IAFD) tells the story of Israel—a country that, while famous, is little-known in its workings and its citizens' lives. Viewing Israel through the lens of the year 2014, IAFD moves from field to field—Crime, Defense, Economy, etc., all the way to Social Affairs—and skips over the torrent of daily news to reveal trends, make comparisons, and offer insights on everything happening. The making of IAFD IAFD was conceived in the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge (July–August 2014). During OPE, the editor interacted intensively with adversaries of Israel in various media organs, most of them hostile. He became familiar with the BDS (Boycott-Divest-Sanction) movement, its kindred spirits in the Western Left, and its antisemitic fellow travelers. He sought to stake out territory on which their faux intellectual tenor would give them no polemic advantage. The turf he chose was their tendency to substitute axiom for fact. An axiom, you know, is a statement so self-evident that it requires no proof. And Israel’s opponent crusaders of the keyboard abound with them. Here are a few: • Israel is a creation of, and is populated mainly by, European colonists. • It oppresses its Arab (Palestinian) citizens through a set of some fifty apartheid laws. • Its presence over the Green Line is illegal; UN Security Resolution 242 requires it to withdraw from all the territories. • There is a right-to-exist test for states that Israel has failed. • Firing thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians is excusable, if not laudable, because of something called “Israel’s crimes”—especially if the rockets are crude and their warheads small. • Israel is a failed state, subsisting on ill-begotten American charity. • Fact need not be respected when one deals with Israel. On the basis of the last-mentioned axiom, some serious-sounding authors—not just commenters—misstate the country’s year of founding, its crime rate, dimensions, demography, economy and standard of living, education system, governmental system, media and basic freedoms—even its archaeology, natural resources, water system, and all the rest. IAFD corrects this by consulting and crunching hundreds of Hebrew and English source texts and by accompanying it all with comparative and descriptive statistics. IAFD is conveniently segmented and easy to use on a range of reading devices. It is priced within everyone's reach. Who will want IAFD? Anyone who wishes or needs to understand Israel beyond the few topics that command media attention. This means: * Visitors who really want to understand where they've landed. * Potential or current investors in Israeli firms. * Those who have relatives or friends there. * "Anglos" in Israel who know they're not receiving the whole picture. * Adversaries. That's right. No sarcasm intended. Who will enjoy IAFD? All the above and even readers who have no obvious reason to delve into Israel. This is because Israel is a microcosm of the whole family of nations. Despite its small population and size, it carries out all the functions of a major power. So a window onto Israel is a window onto any country -- and no other country has a publication like IAFD.