Israel’s population passed 7 million. In census data released this week ahead of Israel’s 58th Independence Day, the Central Bureau of Statistics said there are 7,026,000 Israeli citizens — an almost nine-fold increase since the state was founded in 1948. Seventy-six percent of the population is Jewish, 20 percent is Christian or Arab Muslim, with the remainder being immigrants or foreign workers without religious classification. Some 21,000 new immigrants arrived in Israel over the past year, almost half of them from the former Soviet Union. There were 2,500 immigrants from France and 2,000 from the United States.
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