What are the odds of dying on Birthright?

People love doing stupid things with facts. Facts are just numbers that don’t mean much. But when you decide to take you biased/racist/political views and spin the facts, that’s when the fun begins! You can turn ’30,000,000 poor, uninsured Americans’ into ’30,000,000 lazy black Americans’ and nobody will question you! That’s the best part of our wonderful American media.

Recently, a 22 year old Ukraine male died on a Birthright trip. Not from the scary Palestinian terrorists, mind you! (Although that wouldn’t have happened because his bus had a single 22-year-old recently deployed Israeli soldier with a 1950s single-shot rifle protecting him. No worries, mah!) For some reason, the boy climbed an electric pole and died. This is sad. Quite sad. But the internets isn’t to dwell on sad things in the world. It’s here to make wild, deeply partisan and usually trolling interpretations of broad, hefty ideas such as the meaning of ‘life’.

In actuality, only 2 Birthright participant has ever died DURING Birthright. However, because I prefer to believe that death will snatch us all up any day now, I’m going to include the one other. The first died in his sleep in 2010 while on his last day of Birthright, in Israel. The second kid died in 2000 who died from meningitis after shortly returning from Israel. (Did he get it smooching with some Israeli boy or girl? I’ll never know.)

Alright. So computing with simple math skills, 3 Birthright participants out of a total of 300,000 have died during or shortly after visiting Israel. That means the odds of dying on your free Birthright trip to Isreal is:

1 out of 100,000.

This begs the question: What are the odds of dying on Birthright? What activities are safer than going on Birthright?

You are less likely to die of these than Birthright*:

• In a vehicle accident as a bus occupant    1:106,655
• Being bitten by a dog   1:119,998
• Trapped in a low-oxygen environment    1:548,562
• Earthquake   1:153,597
• Flood  1:383,994
• Firework discharge   1:479,992

And you are more likely to die of these than Birthright*:

• Accidental hanging/strangulation   1:13,569
• Firearm discharge   1:17,454
• Contact with heat and hot substances   1:41,290
• Jumping, falling, or pushed from a high place    1:47,999
• Contact with hornets, wasps, bees    1:62,950
• Legal execution    1:79,999
• Lightening   1:81,701

So before you agree to sign up for your free trip to Israel, just think of the above facts. Do you want to be a statistic? Wouldn’t you rather go out in a blaze of 4th of July firework discharge glory (odds of death 1:479,992)? You have options.

*Data from the U.S. 2006