Israelis Israelis Israelis ( "Yiśraʾelim", "al-ʾIsrāʾīliyyin") are citizens or permanent residents of the State of Israel, a multiethnic state populated by people of different ethnic backgrounds. The largest ethnic groups in Israel are Jews (75%), followed by Arabs (20%) and other minorities (5%). Among the Israeli Jewish population, hundreds of thousands of Jews born in Israel are descended from Ashkenazi Jew, Mizrahi Jews, Sephardi Jews and an array of groups from all the Jewish ethnic divisions, though over 50% of Israel’s Jewish population is of at least partial Mizrahi descent. Large-scale Jewish immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Ashkenazi Hebrew eastern, e.g. Eastern Syriac "Peshitta" as against Western Syriac "Peshito". Ashkenazi Hebrew in its written form also resembles Palestinian Hebrew in its tendency to "male" spellings (see Mater lectionis). Others, including Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, believed that the distinction is more ancient, and represents the distinction between the Judaean and Galilean dialects of Hebrew in Mishnaic times (1st−2nd centuries CE), with the Sephardi pronunciation being derived from Judaean and the Ashkenazi from Galilean. This theory is supported by the fact that Ashkenazi Hebrew, like Samaritan Hebrew, has lost the distinct sounds of many of the guttural letters, while there are references