The Dream after 25 Years: Triumph and Trial
We, the members of the National Council, representing the Jewish people in the land of Israel and the Zionist movement, have assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine, and, by virtue of our national and historic right and of the resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, do hereby proclaim the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. . ."
ON that day--May 14, 1948 --David Ben-Gurion, standing in the Tel Aviv Museum beneath a portrait of Zionism's founder, Theodore Herzl, read the hastily drawn proclamation of the rise of the state of Israel. Four thousand years of Jewish history had passed since, in the words of Genesis, the Lord God told Abraham: "Go forth from your country . . . to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation." After centuries of wandering in the Diaspora, the people of the Covenant had returned to their Promised Land. No longer did the Passover toast, "Next Year in Jerusalem," represent an impossible messianic dream. It was reality.
For the Jews of the world, the founding of Israel--those steeped in biblical faith prefer to speak of its "restoration"--was something of a miracle. So, in a way, is the fact that a nation of 3,000,000 people, surrounded by implacably inimical Arab states whose populations outnumber it 42 times, has not only survived a quarter-century of strife and war, but grown and prospered beyond its founders' wildest dreams. Thus on May 7* Israelis will celebrate their nation's 25th anniversary by throwing the biggest bash in its history. The ceremonies will begin at sundown on May 6 at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. There twelve torches will be lighted by surviving heroes of Israel's 1948-49 war of independence. In a separate ceremony. President Ephraim Katzir and the chief of staff, General David Elazar, will light a memorial torch at that holiest of Jewish holy places, the Wailing Wall in Old Jerusalem.
That night giant bonfires will be lit in towns and villages throughout the country, and the Israelis will treat themselves to a night of entertainment, street dancing and fireworks. Next day a military parade five miles long--Israel's first in five years--will snake for hours through the streets of Jerusalem. Overhead, more planes (the exact number is classified) will fly above the historic city than have ever been gathered in the region before. One group of Mirages will form a Star of David. The real message of the air display, however, as all Arabs will surely recognize, is that Israel today is far and away the strongest military power in the Middle East.
On hand for the celebration will be more than 100,000 foreign tourists, who will have journeyed to Israel by plane and aboard 15 passenger liners. A small army of police and soldiers has already been posted at airports, harbors and along the parade route in Jerusalem. Particular care is being taken to safeguard the Queen Elizabeth 2, which sailed to Israel last week with 620 passenger-pilgrims aboard.
The 700 nervous crew members were paid $125 "danger bonuses" for the 14-day cruise, and ten rabbis on board prayed for the Q.E.2's safety as the ship sailed out of Southampton Harbor. From there, the ship was followed by Royal Air Force jets; as she entered the Strait of Gibraltar she was joined by a British destroyer. The Q.E.'s crew was augmented for the occasion by at least 50 security men and several Labrador retrievers whose mission was to sniff out any explosives that might be hidden within the ship. With three tons of matzoth in the pantry to be served during the eight-day Passover, one joke circulating on board was that, if necessary, the passengers could always float to safety on a raft of unleavened bread.
The size and swagger of the anniversary celebrations have been questioned by some thoughtful Jews both inside and outside Israel. For one thing, the expense (an estimated $10,000,000) constitutes another fiscal burden to be borne by Israeli citizens, who already pay the highest income taxes in the world (62% on amounts over $10,000). The demurrers also feel that the spectacular party will be an unnecessary flaunting of Israel's military might at a time when a slightly lower profile might encourage and hearten its friends abroad.
But the Israelis have never been known for understatement, and the grandeur of the anniversary will accurately reflect the country's prevailing mood. Although it has plenty of unresolved social and political tensions, Israel today exists in a state of euphoria. And why not? Militarily, it has never been stronger. Economically, it has never been more prosperous. Statistically, its achievements in the past 25 years are virtually unparalleled in history.
Israel, which had a population of 650,000 in 1948, now is home to 2,600,000 of the world's 14,000,000 Jews. In addition, there are about 1,400,000 Arabs under its jurisdiction, either in Israel itself or in the territories conquered in 1967 and held ever since. The gross national product is still rising at an average rate of 9% a year (from $3.2 billion in 1950 to $28 billion last year), while the country's exports are 48 times greater than they were in 1949.
The student population has increased from 140,000 in 1948 to 1,000,000. The armed forces have developed from a band of 50,000 volunteers armed with borrowed (and sometimes stolen) rifles to a force of 420,000 men (including 300,000 reservists). More and more of their weaponry is produced by the Israelis themselves, including missile boats, tanks and Mirage fighters. There is also the Israeli nuclear capability, shrouded in secrecy. It is generally believed that if the Israelis do not have nuclear weapons, they have the capacity to produce them on short notice.
Native Israelis take almost as much delight as the tourists do in the contrasts and paradoxes of their extraordinary homeland. Lod was a fortified city in the days of Joshua; its motto is taken from the prophet Jeremiah: "Thy children shall come again to their own border." At the site of this ancient citadel, giant jetliners today disgorge joyous refugees from the Soviet Union, the source of the latest aliyah. Horse-drawn carts rattle through the streets of nearby Ramla, while Phantom and Skyhawk jets scream overhead. Beneath the Qumran caves, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, picnickers romp along the shores of the Dead Sea. In Rehovoth, a sleepy little town founded by Polish Jews in 1890, the mysteries of life and death (not to mention the technicalities of heavy water) are probed by scientists at the Weizmann Institute, a research center that is among the world's best.
"If you ask me about our achievements," says Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir, "I will tell you about the university in Beersheba. Do you know what Beersheba was 25 years ago? A couple of huts and some Arab Bedouins. The best place in the world to get murdered. There's a university there now, and that's achievement." With understandable hyperbole he adds, "All our life is a permanent revolution."
Israel's unique history has somehow imbued its citizens with the notion that there is practically nothing they cannot do, from flying supersonic jets to making gardens bloom in sandy deserts. Visitors to the country are constantly prompted to remember Israel's proud past. Let no one forget, the Israeli seems to say, the incredible war of 1948 in which the forces of one tiny nation defeated six invading Arab armies. Let no one forget the Six-Day War, when the Egyptians literally abandoned their shoes as they tried to get back across the Suez Canal, leaving their armored corps in a smoldering heap in the Mitla Pass. Let no one forget the "War of Attrition," including that memorable day in 1970 when the Israelis trapped Soviet MiGs just north of Cairo in a pincer of Phantoms and Skyhawks and shot down five of the Russian-piloted aircraft. Many of these stunning achievements were made possible, to be sure, by a steady flow of funds from the U.S. ($9 billion in public and private aid of all kinds since 1948), but through their courage and resourcefulness the Israelis have made the deeds their own.
Along with their remarkable self-confidence goes an abiding and rather awesome sense of perseverance. The Israelis protested loudly when France reneged on a promise to sell them 50 Mirage jets--and ended up stealing the plans and building the planes themselves. For years, children in kibbutzim near the Golan Heights were put to bed every night in bomb shelters; in the end, Israel stormed those seemingly unassailable enemy positions and sent the Syrians scuttling toward Damascus. The Israelis persevere manfully with the Hebrew language, despite the fact that almost every conversation is punctuated with shrill cries of "Mai? Mai?" (What? What?) because so many people are still amateur at it.
And yet, behind the beauty and bravado of Israeli life today, there lies an array of bewilderingly complex domestic problems. The "miracle in the desert" has been transformed into a highly urbanized society; 85% of the Israelis now live in the nation's four largest cities, while only 4% still live in the kibbutzim. Zionist Writer Ze'ev Jabotinsky remarked in the 1920s: "We won't really be a country until we have Jewish policemen and Jewish prostitutes." Today Israel has both.
On some days, downtown Tel Aviv has more smog than Los Angeles. The water in the Sea of Galilee grows murkier by the year. Crime is on the increase: there were so many bank robberies in Tel Aviv last summer that the government had to bring in a force of tough, green-bereted border police from the Gaza Strip. Traffic jams are commonplace; for this year's celebration, all roads into Jerusalem will be closed for 24 hours to avoid the customary holiday snarl.
The nation is plagued, in a sense, with the problems of both poverty and prosperity. On the one hand, the government must spend 30% of its current budget of $4.7 billion on defense and 20% on maintaining its enormous debts--and both of these expenditures are the highest per capita in the world. At the same time, the country's overheated economy inflated the cost of living by 13% in 1972 and another 5% so far this year. Slowly but surely, a semi-socialist nation that takes economic equality for granted has developed a small class of discreet, quiet-living millionaires (2,000 at last count). Yet its 1,300,000 Sephardic Jews, who emigrated from North Africa and the Middle East, live in relative hardship compared with the Ashkenazic Jews of European origin.
"The problem comes," says Sociologist Chaim Adler, "when the child from the 'Oriental' family looks at his peer. The two serve together in the army as equals. But then one goes to work, while the other goes to the university. The son from the uncultured home forgets that his family used to live in a tent and now lives securely in an apartment. He only sees the son of the cultured home who is living three times better than he, and he wants the same."
The extent of the poverty problem was first brought to public attention in 1971, much to the government's embarrassment. A small group of young North African Jews organized street demonstrations to dramatize the substandard housing in which one-third of the nation's people were living. Calling themselves "Black Panthers," they complained that the Oriental Jews, who had lived in Israel for years, were as deserving of good housing as brand-new immigrants from the Soviet Union.
Most Israelis agreed. The government, which is committed to providing a dwelling for every immigrant, dutifully promised to alleviate the housing shortage by 1975. But even then, there will still be 40,000 Israeli families living three persons to a room.
The Israelis have long been known as one of the world's more fractious peoples. The Knesset is a turbulent forum for their divisions, as are their newspapers, despite official censorship of anything involving "state security." Moreover, Orthodox Jews, who represent about 25% of the population, are often pitted against their secular-minded countrymen in both matters of law and face-to-face encounters. Regardless of whether or not he is a believer, in matters of birth, marriage, death or divorce, an Israeli Jew is totally subject to the rulings of rabbinical courts. In the Mea Shearim quarter of Jerusalem, home of many ultra-Orthodox Jews, young men wearing dark frock coats and prayer curls regularly hurl stones at buses that tour the sector on the Sabbath, violating what they consider to be the law of God.
Many Israelis object to the strong influence of orthodoxy on the country's laws and mores. "After 25 years," says Archaeologist Yigael Yadin, "we have reached the point where, for a majority of our citizens, the rabbinical authority over our way of life is third in importance after defense and the economy. Most Israelis want a pluralistic system whereby those who want to be governed by religious law can voluntarily do so, and those who want secular law in matters of personal affairs can accept that."
Dilemma. If many Sephardic Jews regard themselves as second-class Israelis, it follows that the nation's 400,000 Arab citizens, though largely impassive, have reason to feel the same way. Although constantly subject to the subversive propaganda of Palestinian liberationists, they have remained, as a group, remarkably loyal to Israel. The Arabs even have a better voting record than their Jewish countrymen (85% to 82%) and occasionally volunteer for military service (though they are never drafted). Their per capita income has quintupled since 1948 (to about $1,000), and their literacy rate has jumped from 4% to 85%; yet they remain a wholly separate and unassimilated segment of Israeli society.
At the lowest level of all are the 1,000,000 Arabs in the occupied territories. Their fate is at the very core of the Israeli dilemma today. So far, Israel has formally annexed only the 19 sq. mi. (and 70,000 inhabitants) of East Jerusalem; but the Golan Heights, Sharm el Sheikh at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula and the access road along the Gulf of Aqaba have also been annexed in everything but name. The government's strategy is to create an interlocking economy between Israel and the territories, and today 30% of the territories' labor force crosses the border every morning to work in Israel (see box page 39).
The extent of Israeli construction in the territories--44 new settlements, as well as airports, fortifications, power projects, tourist hotels and 1,000 miles of new roads--clearly indicates that the Israelis have no intention of withdrawing to the old borders. Nevertheless, the occupation has stirred up a nationwide intellectual and moral debate that has come to be known as "the War of the Jews." The "hawks" of the argument, led by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, favor complete integration of the territories with Israel, including the building of new cities and farm communities.
The Israeli doves oppose the integration of the 1,000,000 Arabs in the territories--either out of fear of the "demographic nightmare" that this would create, or because it would stand in the way of an eventual peace settlement. By 1998, estimates Finance Minister Sapir, Israel would have four Arabs for every five Jews. "There would no longer be a Jewish state but a binational state," he says. "It would be a tragedy." Sapir also argues that it would be morally wrong to rule a people without holding out to them the hope of eventual citizenship.
One of the most eloquent of Israel's super-doves is Arie Eliav, former secretary-general of the ruling Labor Party. "Yes, we have a 4,000-year claim on this land," he says. "But the Arabs have a 1,300-year claim,* and that's long enough. The only way to defuse the situation is for the Palestinian people to be incorporated into a state of their own"--either Jordan or a separate state between Jordan and Israel. He dismisses the arguments that the Arabs under Israeli control were never before so well off as a "terrible echo of our past in the Diaspora, when the Gentiles used to say the same about Jews."
Chasm. In most of the debates over the territories, Prime Minister Golda Meir has sided with the hawks. She seems to have strong popular backing for her increasingly militant stand. A survey published last week by the Institute for Applied Social Research in Jerusalem noted that 58% of Israeli adults opposed concessions on the West Bank (v. 41% a year ago). Other findings: 96% want to keep Sharm el Sheikh and 93% the Golan Heights; 63% are prepared to give up part of the Sinai Desert in return for a peace settlement, but 66% feel that the Gaza Strip, formerly held by Egypt, is not negotiable at all.
There is another division within Israeli society that will even more profoundly influence the nation's future. Every country has a generation gap between its leadership and its younger citizens. In Israel, the gap is a veritable chasm. The ruling elite is almost entirely made up of men and women, now in their 60s and 70s, who were born in Europe. Only two members of the present 19-man Cabinet, Dayan and Deputy Premier Yigal Allon, are native-born Israelis, as are only 27 out of 120 members of the Knesset.
Today, though, the Sabras--who take their name from the sweet-centered prickly-skinned fruit that thrives in Israel's desert lands--account for half of the 2,600,000 Jewish population. More important, their attitudes, ideas and experiences differ profoundly from those of their parents who were born abroad.
Says Amnon Rubenstein, 41, a Sabra who is dean of the Tel Aviv University Law School: "For me, as for my friends, our standing as natives of Israel crowned us with a tint of nobility. We were the first generation of the deliverance, Hebrew children who did not know what anti-Semitism was. We were tanned, cheeky and free--the diametrical opposite of the Diaspora child, who was pale, white and frightened."
Today's typical Sabra is tough, proud and seemingly unemotional. "Our children are ashamed to be ashamed," an Israeli psychoanalyst once observed. "They are afraid to be afraid." The Israeli-born Jew is also a bit weary of hearing about the sufferings of the Diaspora, if not openly scornful of the Diaspora Jew's passive acceptance of his fate.
As a group, the Sabras tend to dismiss or be uninterested in the grand visions of Zionism; yet they are zealous about the fate of their homeland. They tend to be more tolerant and respectful toward the Arabs of Israel than their parents are. In the right-wing extremist group called "Land of Israel," which would like to expel Arabs from all Israeli territory, there is said to be not a single native-born Israeli.
The Sabras worry about the Arabs, but they fear them as well. Says David Halevy, 32, a Jerusalem-born reporter for TIME who is also a captain in the army reserve: "We are troubled by what war will cause our state to become. But we Sabras are fated to be soldiers, and we will suffer spiritually from this. War--past, present and future--is a major concern to us all. In the words of a song that was popular after the Six-Day War: 'Whenever, wherever you go, it will be you and me and the next war.' "
In his novel. War Is Not for Heroes, Ehud Ben-Ezer expressed a far different emotion that also reflects the ambiguity of the Sabra attitude. Before dying in battle, Ben-Ezer's young war hero declares, "We have become slaves of the sword, not masters of it. And in order to protect ourselves against the cruelty outside, we have become narrow-minded and cruel in our own homes." Within the heart of the Sabra, it has been said, Athens and Sparta are forever at war.
A more pressing conflict must be resolved before the Sabras' dreams can be realized. "The main issue of the next few years," says Sociologist Adler, "is the question of peace and war, of our coexistence with our Arab neighbors." Adler poses a whole set of dilemmas that thoughtful Israelis have debated without resolving: "Should we employ Arabs in Israel? Or should we put up artificial walls, refuse to hire them and fall back on our own labor? If coexistence means using Arab labor, then what does that do to the fabric of our society? Should we not seek more ties with the Arabs, teach more of our children Arabic, set up joint economic enterprises with them? Can we, if they are hostile? If there is no war, then there must be some kind of coexistence and mutual experience. On the other hand, how will close ties with the Arabs affect the Jewishness of Israel?"
Meanwhile, the litany of savagery continues without respite: Munich, the Sinai Desert, Khartoum, Nicosia, Beirut. Who knows where terrorism, Arab or Israeli, will strike next? To the Israelis, attacks on fedayeen camps and stray assassinations of Palestinian envoys are legitimate acts of self-defense designed to convince Arab fanatics that their war of vengeance makes no sense. The Israelis' calculated campaign of attrition may or may not ultimately discourage the implacable zealots of Al-Fatah or Black September. On the other hand, there is ample proof that the most recent displays of belligerence have discouraged Arab moderates. Many feel that the Israelis are hell-bent on a course of Zionist aggression and are beginning to think that maybe the Palestinians were right all along. "Now it's hopeless," concludes the editor of one Beirut newspaper. "I don't think Israel wants peace."
Pressure. The terrible irony of the Middle Eastern tragedy is that the early Zionists actively wished peace and coexistence with their Moslem neighbors. They never wanted the Arabs to pay the price for the creation of a Jewish state. As early as 1924, for instance, David Ben-Gurion declared: "We have no right to deprive a single Arab child, even if through such deprivation we shall realize our aims." In later years, as hostility between Israeli and Palestinian heightened, Ben-Gurion was to remark: "If I were a young Arab, I might also be one of the fedayeen."
On the eve of its 25th birthday, Israel seems less and less able to believe in any compromise with the Arabs. But how long can Israel maintain its position of superiority? "For another quarter of a century, perhaps," says one top U.S. official. "But reason and the law of averages suggest that, surrounded by a huge mass of Arabs, tiny Israel will at some point lose its supremacy."
That supremacy has been in large measure ensured by the consistent support of the U.S. In recent years, the U.S. Senate has been a particularly strong backer of the Israeli cause--and last week was accused by one of its own members, William Fulbright, of being "subservient" to Israel.
Fulbright was angry that the Senate had refused to pass an Administration trade bill giving the Soviet Union most-favored-nation tariff concessions. The Senate's objections centered on the "education tax" (as much as $30,000 per person) that Moscow has been imposing on educated Soviet Jews who emigrated to Israel. Fulbright and others did not think that the tax, an internal Soviet measure, was a legitimate U.S. concern. Nonetheless, the pressure paid off. Last week, in order to get the trade bill through the Senate, Moscow advised the U.S. that it was suspending the controversial tax.
Unswerving American support is something that Israel may not be able to count on quite so heavily, however, in the new era of energy politics. At present, oil from Arab nations accounts for 7% of U.S. imports. By 1980, it could easily climb to 50%. Last week, as a sign of the sort of pressure that the U.S. can expect in the future, Saudi Arabia's Petroleum Minister, Ahmed Yaki Yamani, flatly refused to increase his country's oil production until the U.S. changes its policy toward Israel.
The new people of Israel, like the old, are quite prepared to face a hostile world all by themselves. One factor that unites the generations is a profound conviction--to some, perhaps, a substitute for religious faith--that their nation will survive, no matter what. Survival is the Jewish sacrament. Even the secular-minded are compelled to regard Jewish survival through millenniums of repeated exodus and holocaust as one of history's miracles. Israel is that miracle's latest and perhaps most remarkable incarnation.
Yet militancy and militarism can blur the fine edge of moral responsibility and idealism. Biblical Archaeologist Yigael Yadin, a former army Chief of Staff, concedes that one of Israel's greatest challenges is to secure the nation's spiritual imperatives while at the same time trying to preserve its physical existence. Sociologist Ferdynand Zweig puts the matter in a different way: "The contest between the mystique of violence and the mystique of redemption is the most fateful and crucial conflict on which the future of Israeli society depends."
Surrounded by hostile nations that challenged it to survive, Israel during the first 25 years had no choice but to live by and with violence. One great question of the next quarter-century is whether it will have a chance to live by and with redemption.
*Not on May 14 because of slippage between the Hebrew lunar calendar and the Gregorian solar calendar.
*Moslem Arabs seized Palestine from the Christian Byzantine empire in the 7th century A.D.
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