papicek:

Good question. There's where history applies. It's not to say there aren't anomalies in the data, I'd be amazed if there weren't, however as far as Israel goes, I'd speculate that the values they largely reflect derive from the split from the areas of Eastern Europe where most settlers came from a century ago.

What is remarkable is that Israel and Greece are coloured as outliers when they are not arguably part of the group they are coloured with.

They are not "Catholic Europe" either, of course, but they are "Mediterranean".

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith