 Hi there, welcome back to my YouTube channel. My name is Daniel Rosal, I live in Jerusalem, and on this channel you can find videos about everything to do with living in Jerusalem and Israel. I'm not sure why I remembered this today, but I've actually been planning for a while to do a video about the cities of Israel. Specifically, how Israel defines a city, how many of them there are, and how densely populated the country is. If I asked a random person to name two cities in Israel, I reckoned the first two they would go for are Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. These are indeed the two biggest cities in Israel, so that wouldn't be too far off. Jerusalem is actually more populated than Tel Aviv, with about 966,000 residents. However, as I've explained in other videos, that number is a little bit misleading, because West and East Jerusalem function too a little bit as independent cities, and the number counted in the census includes both places. I plan on making a separate video about the interesting demographics of Jerusalem, however, I'll give a quick preview of where the city stands today. According to data released by the Central Bureau of Statistics last year, the CBS in English, which is Israel's national statistics body, 61.2% of Jerusalem's population is Jewish, while the remaining 38.8% is classed as Arabs. Within the Jewish population, 35% of the Jewish residents are classed as Haredi, which means ultra-Orthodox. 25 considered themselves to be just observant. Those two numbers totals 60%, leaving us with about 40% of residents who are defined as either tradition or secular. In terms of population, Tel Aviv comes in second place after Jerusalem. It has 468,000 residents, however, when you consider the population living in Gush Dan, that number jumps all the way up to just over 4 million. For reference, Israel's population at the end of 22 was 9,656,000 residents. In other words, almost half of Israel's population either lives in Tel Aviv or within cities that are relatively close by and located along the coastal plain on the Mediterranean, including Netanyah, Ben-Abrak, and Hulon. In addition to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, there are 14 more cities with more than 100,000 residents in Israel. When you consider the fact that Israel is very close in size to the state of New Jersey, Israel's only 14% bigger, that's actually a surprisingly high number. If Israel has 16 small to large cities but is only the size of a small state in the US, it stands to reason that the country is quite densely populated. This is indeed the case. Israel's population density is about 431 people per square kilometer. However, while the coastal plain is jam-packed with residents, there are large sways of the country like the Negev Desert in the south that actually have very little inhabitants. If you guessed that this means that traffic jams in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are absolutely terrible, you would be completely right. According to official stats, there are almost 4 million vehicles on the road today in Israel. As of 2021, for every kilometer of paved road, there are 2,730 vehicles. Israel has one of the worst rates of traffic congestion in the entire world, and the situation only seems to be getting worse. Yesterday took me more than three hours to drive from Jerusalem to a kebutz in the north of Israel, and this wasn't that unusual. The only sustainable and long-term solution for Israel's transport dilemma appears to be greatly scaled up public transport. Israel, as I mentioned, has more than 400 people stuffed into every kilometer of its territory. In a list of countries organized based on their population density, that puts it in the middle 30s, very close to the level of population density of India, in fact. The most densely populated places in the world tend to be city-states and tiny territories like Macau, Monaco, Singapore, and Hong Kong. So comparing Israel with more comparable geographies, that population density is even higher, and again the fact that it's almost at the density of India is quite revealing. Again, projections show that the situation is accelerating. According to projections from the CBS, Israel is expected to reach 10 million residents by 2024. By 2048, estimates show there will be 15 million residents, and by 2065, the end of the projection period I was looking at here, that number will shoot up to 20 million. If Israel does reach 20 million residents, it will have roughly the same population as Syria, Chile, and Malawi do today. So what are these cities in Israel then? After Tel Aviv and Jerusalem comes Haifa, which has about 280,000 residents, Rishon L'tzion with about 257,000 residents, and Petach Tikvah with about 253,000 residents. And as we go further down the list, names may become less recognisable. There is, for instance, Ashdod, 256,000, Natanya, 224,000, Benay Brak, 212,000, Bersheva, 211,000, and Holon, 197,000. It's also worth pointing out that the State of Israel has conferred the status of city on some towns with relatively small populations, places that would be considered officially to be towns in other countries. Kiryat Shemone, near the northern border with Lebanon, for instance, only has about 22,000 residents, but it's officially classed as a city. In total, Israel has 16 cities with a population of 100,000 residents or more. The total land area of Israel is 22,145 square kilometers. That means that there is a city with 100,000 residents or more for every 1,384 square kilometers of territory. By comparison, the Republic of Ireland has a land area of 70,273 square kilometers, but only has two cities with more than 100,000 residents. Those are Cork and Dublin. That's one city with more than 100,000 residents for every 35,136 square kilometers of territory. The difference between these two numbers between Israel and Ireland is actually quite amazing. Israel has 25 times the density of cities of Ireland if we choose 100,000 residents as the cutoff point. Ireland's population density at about 72 residents per square kilometer is also a lot lower than Israel's overall on the national basis. I hope this video has satisfied some of your curiosity about the demographics of Israel. Like many, I have plenty of criticisms about the very boring state of urban planning in Israeli cities besides Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but if you're going to advance the argument that there aren't enough cities in Israel on a per kilometer basis, it's simply wrong. If you'd like to learn a lot more about all things related to urban planning from somebody who actually knows what they're talking about, I'd refer you to an excellent YouTube channel called Ir Lechiotba, which in English is called a livable city. I'll drop a link in the description and the good news is there are subtitles in English for many videos. I hope this video itself is interesting. If you have topics about life in Israel you'd like to see me cover, please feel free to drop me an email that's listed on the about section of this YouTube channel or just leave a comment on this video. Thanks for watching and if you liked it, please do consider liking and subscribing.