Human Geography: Population, Settlement, and Urbanization
Human geography in the Bagrut examines Israel's population structure, the map of settlement, and the processes that produced an urban, immigrant-based society with a dense core and a thin periphery.
Population
Israel has about 9.8 million people. Growth comes from natural increase and immigration, especially the roughly one million immigrants from the former USSR after 1990. Fertility is high in the ultra-Orthodox and Arab sectors, so the age pyramid is broad at the base in those groups. Jews are about three-quarters and Arabs about one-fifth of the population.
Settlement
Settlement types include the kibbutz (communal), moshav (family farms), community settlements, Arab villages and towns, and Bedouin townships in the Negev. Development towns were planted in the 1950s in the Galilee and Negev under a dispersal policy. Urbanization is about 92%. The main metropolitan areas are Gush Dan (Tel Aviv), Haifa, Jerusalem, and Beersheba.
Urbanization
Gush Dan is the primate core: it concentrates finance, high-tech, and transport. Jerusalem is a capital and religious center with a large Arab and ultra-Orthodox population. Peripheral towns often grew slowly because of distance from jobs and weak infrastructure.
Worked example
A town has 1,000 people; births 25, deaths 5, immigrants 10, emigrants 3. Natural increase = 20; net migration = 7; total growth = 27; growth rate = 2.7%. This shows why immigration can dominate a year even when natural increase is steady.
Traps
Do not equate population growth with natural increase; do not place all Arabs in the West Bank; remember ultra-Orthodox concentration in Bnei Brak, Beit Shemesh, and Jerusalem; and check whether a settlement is Jewish or Arab before generalizing.