[finnbow]

Originally Posted by Tom Joad

That does surprise me.

Israel is about 8,000 square miles in area and has about 8 million people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel

That's pretty close to what New Jersey has.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey

I've never been to Israel, but I have been to New Jersey and it's pretty damned crowded to me.

Both have quite a bit of open space. From the pine barrens to the Delaware Water Gap, there's lot of open space in New Jersey. As for Israel, there's virtually no population in Israel south of Beer Sheva (other than Eilat way down south) and a fair amount of open space in the hills between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as well as in the Galilee. The dense population is from Tel Aviv to Haifa plus the Jerusalem area. Everything else is not particularly densely populated.