Israel Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
8correct to beat the crowd
108 free Israel trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
53 free Israel trivia questions with answers. Israel is smaller than New Jersey and packs in the lowest point on Earth, a ski resort, three of the world's oldest cities and more start-ups per head than anywhere else. This quiz is a general-knowledge tour: the geography of the Dead Sea, Galilee, Negev and Eilat; the cities of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa; the road from Herzl and Balfour to 1948, the Six-Day War, Camp David and Rabin; and the culture, from Hatikvah and the flag to falafel, shakshouka and four Eurovision wins. There are questions on the revival of Hebrew, the kibbutz, the shekel, Masada and the Western Wall, and on Israeli inventions like drip irrigation, the USB flash drive and Waze, plus a few on Olympic and Maccabiah sport. It suits pub quizzes, classrooms and anyone planning a trip. Easy questions come first; the harder ones will stretch even people who have lived there. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on the country, its cities, its history and its institutions, and each question shows the sentence that supports it once you answer. Free, no signup.
30 of 108 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US president recognised Israel eleven minutes after the state came into being in May 1948?
Truman
Truman acted over the objections of his own secretary of state, George Marshall, who feared recognition would damage relations with the Arab states.
Q 02Who proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel and became its first prime minister?
David Ben-Gurion
David Ben-Gurion resigned in 1953 to live and work on a remote desert kibbutz, but returned to politics in 1955 and led the government again until 1963.
Q 03Which four countries share a land border with Israel?
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt border Israel: Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east and Egypt to the south-west; the Mediterranean forms the western coast.
Q 04Which city in northern Israel, the childhood home of Jesus in the Gospels, holds the Basilica of the Annunciation?
Nazareth
Nazareth was so little regarded in the Gospels' day that Nathanael asks, 'Can anything good come from there?'; it is now a busy city and a centre of Christian pilgrimage.
Q 05Roughly how many times saltier than the ocean is the Dead Sea?
10 times
About 10 times: its water is roughly 34 per cent salt against the ocean's 3.5, too harsh for fish or plants, which is how the lake got its name.
Q 06What is the Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee, the lowest freshwater lake on Earth?
Kinneret
Kinneret is popularly traced to kinnor, the Hebrew for harp, after the lake's shape, but scholars derive it from an ancient walled city of the same name on its shore.
Q 07Which desert covers the south of Israel?
The Negev
The Negev covers more than half of Israel, and its vast Ramon Crater looks like a meteorite strike but was carved out by erosion.
Q 08Which Red Sea resort is Israel's southernmost city?
Eilat
Eilat was the last ground taken in Israel's war of independence: troops crossed the roadless desert, reached its police post without a fight and raised a flag hand-drawn in ink.
Q 09Which mountain cluster, home to a ski resort, holds the highest point under Israeli control?
Mount Hermon
Mount Hermon carries Israel's only ski resort on its southern slopes, and its melting snow feeds the springs that become the Jordan River.
Q 10Which city, Israel's third-largest, is built on the slopes of Mount Carmel?
Haifa
Haifa climbs Mount Carmel from its bay; after Britain opened the deep-water port in 1933, a pipeline carried crude oil across the desert from Iraq to refineries built beside it.
Q 11The garden terraces climbing Mount Carmel surround the golden-domed shrine of which religious community?
Baháʼí
Baháʼí pilgrims come for the Shrine of the Báb, a founding figure of the faith who was shot by firing squad in Persia in 1850; his followers buried his remains on Mount Carmel in 1909.
Q 12Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 as a suburb of which ancient port city?
Jaffa
Jaffa was swallowed by its own suburb: Tel Aviv, laid out on sand dunes north of the ancient port, outgrew it and absorbed it in 1950 as Tel Aviv-Yafo.
Q 13Tel Aviv's name is the Hebrew title of a 1902 novel by which Zionist thinker?
Theodor Herzl
Theodor Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland ('Old New Land') appeared in 1902; Nahum Sokolow titled his Hebrew translation Tel Aviv, pairing 'tel' (ancient mound) with 'aviv' (spring).
Q 21The 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine was a letter to whom?
Lord Rothschild
Lord Rothschild, a leader of Britain's Jewish community, received the letter from Arthur Balfour to pass on to the Zionist Federation; what its promised 'national home' meant has been disputed ever since.
Q 22The father of political Zionism convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in which city?
Basel
Basel was the second choice: the congress was planned for a German city until Jewish leaders there objected, and afterwards its organiser wrote in his diary, 'At Basel I founded the Jewish State.'
Q 23Which linguist, who moved to Jerusalem in 1881, drove the revival of spoken Hebrew?
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda
Q 14Tel Aviv's White City is a UNESCO-listed district of some 4,000 buildings in which architectural style?
Bauhaus
Bauhaus-style blocks fill the White City, built from the 1930s by immigrant architects trained in Europe, who swapped the style's big glass walls for small recessed windows and shaded balconies to beat the heat.
Q 15Jerusalem's Old City is divided into Jewish, Christian, Muslim and which other quarter?
Armenian
Armenian monks settled in Jerusalem in the fourth century, soon after Armenia became the first kingdom to adopt Christianity, and the quarter grew up around their monastery of St James.
Q 16Israel's parliament is called what?
The Knesset
The Knesset takes both its name and its 120 seats from the Knesset HaGdola, the Great Assembly of 120 sages and prophets in Jewish tradition.
Q 17Which voting system elects Israel's parliament?
Proportional representation
Proportional representation treats the whole country as one constituency and hands each party list seats in line with its national vote, so small parties get in and Israel is governed by coalitions.
Q 18What is Israel's currency?
The new shekel
The new shekel replaced the old shekel at 1,000 to 1 in the mid-1980s, after inflation had run at more than 400 per cent a year.
Q 19Which Nobel Peace laureate was prime minister when Israel's 1985 plan ended its hyperinflation?
Shimon Peres
Shimon Peres, leading a unity government, won the trade unions' backing for painful spending cuts, and inflation fell from over 400 per cent a year to under 20 within two years.
Q 20Which commune by the Sea of Galilee is known as the 'mother of the kibbutzim'?
Degania
Degania's defenders stopped Syrian tanks at the edge of the settlement in the 1948 war and turned back the advance; one tank was left where it halted as a memorial.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda made his son Ben-Zion the first child in modern times raised on Hebrew alone, and began the Hebrew dictionary his widow and a younger son carried on after his death.
Q 24What does Hatikvah, the title of Israel's national anthem, mean?
The Hope
'The Hope' was sung as the Zionist anthem from the 1890s and at Israel's founding, yet the government made it the official national anthem by law only in 2004.
Q 25The two blue stripes on the Israeli flag are modelled on what?
A tallit prayer shawl
A tallit prayer shawl, white with dark stripes, was the model: a 'flag of Judah' shown in Boston in 1891 borrowed its pattern, and the Zionist movement took up a similar banner in 1897.
Q 26In which war of June 1967 did Israel capture the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights?
The Six-Day War
The Six-Day War, 5–10 June 1967, opened with Operation Focus, a surprise air strike that destroyed most of Egypt's air force on the ground within hours.
Q 27Which two leaders signed the Camp David Accords in September 1978, witnessed by Jimmy Carter?
Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin
Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin signed the accords at the White House on 17 September 1978; they shared that year's Nobel Peace Prize, and the Egypt–Israel treaty followed in March 1979.
Q 28Which prime minister was assassinated in November 1995 after signing the Oslo Accords?
Yitzhak Rabin
Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's first native-born prime minister, was shot on 4 November 1995 by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist opposed to the accords, as he left a rally held to support them.
Q 29Which future Israeli prime minister grew up in Milwaukee and trained there as a teacher?
Golda Meir
Golda Meir, born in Kyiv, came to Milwaukee at eight, trained as a teacher and joined the Labor Zionists, then left in 1921 to work on a kibbutz in Palestine; 48 years later she was prime minister.
Q 30What event forced Israel's prime minister to resign in April 1974?
The Yom Kippur War
The Yom Kippur War opened with Egypt and Syria's surprise attack on 6 October 1973; an inquiry's damning report on Israel's unpreparedness brought the government down the following April.