Worldmapper is a highly entertaining and informative website, that has an enormous collection of maps. These maps are not drawn according to land area – they are cartograms. There are maps on Worldmapper based on simple things such as population size, religion and literacy rate. There are also maps drawn according to slightly more esoteric criteria, such as military spending, meat consumption, and even condom use (one by men and another by women).
Each map is accompanied by an explanation, including a few examples of countries featured more prominently on the map. While browsing the site, and by no means performing an exhaustive search, I found Israel to be mentioned twice.
Obviously, as home to the largest Jewish population (having recently surpassed the U.S.), Israel is mentioned with regards to the map showing Jewish population around the world.
However, as anyone who has ever been to Israel around any major holiday knows, certain groups in Israel love to go on strike. The teachers, university students, professors, longshoremen and everyone else Ofer Einy (who learned well from Amir Peretz) can convince to suck the Israeli economy dry for various selfish, unreasonable causes. And according to Worldmapper, “The highest rates [of strikes and lockouts] were in Guyana, Israel and Azerbaijan.”
Once again, Israel is recgnized for such a positive trend in our vibrant democracy. Bravo.
The “student strike” was actually a boycott, because students are consumers of education and not producers of it.
I was just using the prevailing terminology, but that is a good point, nonetheless.