East Meets West in Israel
ALLEMANN, F. R.
Not only is the Jewish state a geographic bridge between Europe and Asia, but its population now combines Westerners and Orientals East Meets West in Israel By F. R. Allemann Tel Aviv ISRAEL is...
...A railroad is planned to complete this "Suez Canal on land," in which the Israelis see the future lifeline of their country...
...It is the only Mediterranean state except Egypt which has direct access (through the Gulf of Aqaba) to the Indian and Pacific Oceans...
...Yet foreign policy represents only one side of Israel's East-West problem, and not even the most important one...
...Most important are the plants for refining Asian and African raw materials (an oil press, for instance...
...Its leaders are considering collaboration with the Council of Europe and a future European Free Trade Area...
...But Israel's position as bridge between the continents and oceans is more than a fact of geography...
...The different population groups adjust to each other without, however, merging to any great extent...
...Already one sees the beginnings of an industrial center...
...Will the nation between the continents not only become a geographic bridge, but also find a synthesis of the opposing forces within it...
...But, driving from Tel Aviv to Elath on the Red Sea, one enters Israel's gateway to the Orient...
...They put their stamp oil the state, pass on their rhythms of life and work to the community, orient Israel's intellectual life...
...They were later joined by a sizable German immigration consisting largely of intellectuals who sought refuge in Palestine from Hitler's anti-Semitism...
...Alongside it is an equally modest pipe line which pumps oil from the tankers in Elath harbor up to the Mediterranean...
...Today, Jews from Central and Eastern Europe still form the core of the Israeli nation...
...He by no means lacks intelligence or adaptability...
...But the world from which he comes is fundamentally different from the one that receives him...
...There is a "Western" and an "Eastern" Israel which have nothing to do with the points of the compass...
...Thus we find in Israel today the beginnings of an inner East-West conflict, of a social, cultural and partly even "racial" nature...
...But since 1948, the structure of Israel's population has undergone basic change...
...If cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, which with its environs already contains a quarter of the country's population, is something like Israel's New York, Elath could one day become its San Francisco...
...Children from Oriental families generally have scored higher on intelligence tests than those of European descent...
...Zionism is socially and intellectually a product of Europe...
...For example, the Israeli postal service improved strikingly after the influx of the Iraqis, because in Iraq the postal service had been considered a specifically "Jewish" domain...
...The Oriental immigrant adjusts outwardly, though not inwardly, to the unaccustomed forms of life of the pioneer society which receives him...
...Entire communities, thousands of years old, were transplanted...
...From Tunisia, Turkey, Libya and Iran, even from distant, isolated outposts in Central Asia and India, multitudes found their way once again to the Promised Land...
...Yet, the process of assimilation is still incomplete...
...For these Oriental immigrants, settlement in Israel represented a gigantic adjustment: from a medieval (and partly even pre-medieval), tribal form of life they were suddenly catapulted into a decidedly modern, Western society of industrial-technological cast, ideologically influenced by Socialism...
...The group that has up to now provided Israel s leaders has ceased to be representative, but no new one has emerged from among the Oriental immigrants which could assist or partly replace it...
...Only a few governments of the new Asian and African countries have thus far established diplomatic relations with Israel...
...There are no limits to the imagination in picturing what the city will look like in years to come...
...They occupy the top political, military, labor and economic positions...
...Workshops fashion the green copper precious stones of the neighborhood into jewelry...
...Hence the French in the Maghreb and the British in Iraq called on the Jewish part of the population when they began to institute their modern administrations...
...Across the Mediterranean it faces Europe...
...This has now benefited Israel...
...it is exported to Israel and paid for with industrial products and fertilizers...
...Not only is the Jewish state a geographic bridge between Europe and Asia, but its population now combines Westerners and Orientals East Meets West in Israel By F. R. Allemann Tel Aviv ISRAEL is a nation between continents...
...Israeli seamen man Ghana's merchant fleet and train the Africans as sailors...
...Nearby, in Timna, King Solomon's copper mines are again being worked, for the first time since Biblical days, with modern machinery obtained as reparations from Germany...
...But the most intelligent of Israel's leaders are aware of how problematic such a position must be amid fervently anti-Western surroundings...
...Existing in a state of apparently hopeless conflict with its Arab neighbors, built predominantly by European colonizers over more than half a century and led by an elite from the Russian-Polish-German diaspora, Israel understandably tends to look on itself as an outpost of European civilization in Asia...
...It is also a political and intellectual challenge...
...Their hope is to establish footholds in the colored world as well without having to give up their ties with Europe...
...It is they who have given the country its "European" features—which encompass not only an economic dynamism which differs so visibly from that of the entire Middle East, but also Israel's social and political framework...
...A number of first-rate minds believe that the return of the Jews to Israel should also mean a return to the Orient...
...among them is the kibbutz, the agricultural community which has played such a singular and important role in the development of Israel...
...The discussion has hardly started in earnest...
...Traveling in Israel, one soon gets used to speaking in terms of the future...
...For a long time, Ben-Gurion had on the wall of his study a large map not of Israel but of the Asian continent with the tiny speck of his country at the rim of the huge land mass to which it belongs...
...Once we shed our thin European coating, we suddenly gain a much better, much deeper understanding of everything Oriental than we ever had of anything German, French or English...
...The majority of the people who wanted to realize Theodor Herzl's program and who went to Palestine as workers and farmers, came—before 1933—from Russia, Poland and the successor states of the Hapsburg Monarchy...
...For the tension between Europe and the Orient affects the Jews in their own country as a cultural and ethnic problem...
...Under the guidance of Israeli agricultural experts, Burma is growing wheat on large acreages...
...At first, many Israelis feared that this new element would irresistibly "orientalize" Israel, would stamp it as Levantine...
...Granite from the quarries of Elath finds customers as far away as the U.S...
...the ancient Jewry of Mesopotamia, which traces its origins back to the Babylonian captivity, came "home," as did the Jewry of Yemen, which still remembers its heyday during the days before Mohammed when a large part of Southern Arabia professed Moses' faith...
...Trade with Japan, Thailand and Ethiopia is also gradually gaining ground...
...All the more reason for the Israelis to cultivate assiduously the few contacts they have...
...But he also knows how difficult it is to gain the understanding of the anti-colonial Asians for a land of colonizers, and how much easier the task of the Arabs is to mobilize the sentiments of the Bandung nations—even the non-Islamic ones...
...For what the Wild West was to the American of the 19th century, the Desolate South is to the Israeli of the 20th...
...The author speaks for a minority, but he doesn't stand alone...
...This creates tensions which do not appear on the surface but are active deep down in the nation...
...We are Orientals...
...Ghana in West Africa and Burma in Southeast Asia are the models for this policy...
...These sentences are from an article entitled "Oriental Renaissance," which seems symptomatic to me...
...However, both in North Africa (especially in the French part) and in Iraq there existed a Jewish upper class which had long been exposed to European influence...
...The thread connecting the two seas ia still tenuous: a boldly planned but narrow road, opened to regular traffic only last January, dynamited out of rock in the desolate canyon landscape...
...But after the Sinai campaign eighteen months ago, Elath was merely a pioneering outpost of 700 souls...
...If and how Israel can make itself at home in Asia is one of its vital problems— though it is still overshadowed by other, more immediate cares...
...Since the blockade of the Straits of Tiran was removed in the Sinai campaign, the Red Sea has connected it with East Africa and Asia...
...Certain institutions and forms of life developed by the original Zionists remain profoundly alien to the newcomers...
...At the end of this year, it expects to have 8,000 inhabitants...
...The kernel of Jewish colonization around metropolitan Tel Aviv and the key port of Haifa bears a wholly Mediterranean aspect...
...Today, 4,000 people live in Elath which is situated not far from the Biblical Ezion-Geber on the 6-mile-wide coastal strip from which one can see Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt...
...The very opposite has happened: The new immigrants are sucked into a rapid process of "Westernization," assimilate with the "old" colonists, and are merged into the existing society...
...The immense wave of immigration—almost a million people in a decade—added new and different elements: not only survivors of Hitler's concentration camps, but also the masses of Oriental Jews from North Africa and the Middle East...
...Again and again, Premier David Ben-Gurion reminds his countrymen of their Asian "hinterland...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 22
