Smoking Declines in Palestine as Israelis Keep Puffing Away
Image by Wikimedia
There aren’t many facets of healthcare in which Palestinians are progressing faster than the far better-resourced Israelis. But it turns out that that Palestinians do seem more prepared to kick the tobacco habit.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has just reported that among Palestinians, there has been an enormous decrease in smoking over recent years. It has declined by some 18% in the last decade. In Israel, by contrast, the figures are stagnant. The percentage of people who smoke is — coincidentally — 23%, the same as among Palestinians. But while the figure among Palestinians has been on a downward slide, the Israeli number has been the same for three years. That’s despite investment in stop-smoking campaigns.
What is really bizarre is the huge discrepancy in smoking habits between Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. While between a quarter to a third of Palestinian males smoke, among Israeli Arabs the figure is more than a half.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
