Israel's 'Expresso Generation':

...In addition to this readiness to forgive—the deep-down conviction that "our children" can do no wrong —there is another element in their upbringing which has contributed to the disorientation of the young in Israel...

...Zalman Aranne, Israel's former Minister of Education, in explaining the reason for the changed orientation, maintained that for decades Israeli schools had been beset by what he termed "educational contradictions...

...The public image of Israeli youth —tough, courageous, idealistic—is, of course, partly true...

...to the youth, suspicious of being ideologically manipulated, this kind of ambivalence can be unsettling...

...The sudden shift from overindulgence in childhood to the severe demands made on him in young adulthood have resulted in a psychological maladjustment that manifests itself in cynical attitudes toward parents' ideals or sullen silence toward those who seek not gratitude so much as confirmation that their sacrifice was worth making...

...comparatively few were sabras...

...Some months before, Israelis scanning their newspapers—at that time full of dispatches describing the turmoil in the Congo following its independence—had blinked their eyes incredulously when they read that among the Jewish refugees from Katanga Province (no one ever suspected there might be any) was a fifth-generation sabra, a native-born Israeli young woman who had apparently found life in the Congo more attractive than in Israel, at least until the rioting broke out...

...Moreover, he finds it difficult to forgive his elders for their too-quick reversal from their former denigration of the Diaspora to the hurried efforts now being made by the Government (through its "Jewish Consciousness Program") to teach the youth some appreciation of the spiritual contributions of world Jewry to Israel...

...Other speakers at the conference denounced Israel's "Expresso Generation" (everything quick, cheap, no effort) for wanting to achieve in two years the same living standard it had taken their parents 25 years to attain...

...As recently as five years ago the great majority of the top scientists at the Weizmann Institute (Israel's principal institution for pure and applied research in the exact sciences) were foreign-born and foreign-trained...

...As much as he may recognize the importance of the tourist industry for the country's economy and the need to greet all visitors with good grace, the sabra nevertheless does a poor job of it...

...These are jobs requiring not only highly specialized training, but the youth and stamina to carry them out under rugged conditions...

...It is natural for people who have themselves endured hardships and repression in their childhood to try to make amends, as it were, to their own children—nothing in the world is too good for them, no freedom too great...

...There are new dangers, new tasks, new opportunities to serve the nation and the world...

...Consider his childhood, for example...

...This feeling of pride and self-confidence that a whole new world lies open before you can be a truly wonderful thing—but it may also lead to doubt and a defensive arrogance when, as he must, the sabra begins to realize that he not independent, that he and his country must depend for their very existence on a larger Jewish community outside Israel which he has been encouraged to think of as unworthy, and which prefers a devious, tolerated, though financially comfortable, existence in a glittering limbo to one of dignity and selffulfillment in Israel...

...But the students were perfectly right," he retorted, somewhat to my surprise...

...Seemingly eager to explain everything away, she pleads: "But they are still young...

...Cheating has been going on at exams for a long time now—it's unjust to single out two students without warning, and ruin their careers...

...From early childhood he has been taught to be frank and outspoken: no need to bide his true feelings, as his parents too often were compelled to do in the Old Country...

...This same oversolicitousness for the young, which tends to keep them emotionally immature by relieving them of responsibility for their conduct, is apparent in a recent Jerusalem Post article by Hannah Lamdan, a member of the Knesset (Parliament...

...He has no affection for the foreign Jew, certainly no gratitude...

...Their scorn for the ideals of their elders may be a mask for respect which they refuse to admit, and it may be the mark of a hyper-critical intelligence...

...Throughout his formative years the same message is taught him, both in school and out,'at home, in the youth clubs, in the Army: You are free, you are whole, you, for the first time as a Jew, can direct your own destiny...

...What Israel and its youth ("a generation 'which knew not Joseph' ") needed, he said, was a Zionist movement...

...It was a noble plea, grand and pathetic in its assumption that the two generations shared the same ideals, still spoke the same language...

...How were they to develop in Israeli youth a deep-rooted attachment to Jewish history, half of which had taken place outside Israel...

...The sabra is confused enough as it is...

...Everyone knows that students must work for a living, enjoy almost no leisure and in general have a rather rough time of it...

...Nevertheless, such things as the little bronze plaques in the lecture halls and classrooms at the university are daily reminders, if he is a student, of his dependence...

...But these same ideologists, the young Israeli notices, have no difficulty whatever in going abroad to beg, and indeed do it with a distressingly cheerful enthusiasm that is disturbing to the sabra—though he may accept the gifts, when they come, without apparent protest...

...The sabra will make his contribution, but in his own way...

...Carl Levine r.ecently returned from Israel, where he spent several years working in the field of education...

...It is certainly a reflection of the parents' own disenchantment with their ideals...

...As often as not the kibbutz guide will point to the depressing shacks the adults live in and then proudly compare these with the children's new houses bright on the hill...

...And it wasn't long after that that Moshe Kol, one of the prime movers of the Progressive party, deploring "the present situation" in which "skepticism is corroding large sections of our youth," came out with what may be the prize coals-to-Newcastle statement of the year...

...Already made resentful and guilty by the constant references to the sacrifices his pioneering parents made in creating the state and in building the country, he—the golden-haired youth on whom every care has been lavished—is now pilloried as interested in nothing but his own comforts and a soft, easy job that pays a steady salary...

...One direction in which young Israelis, very much like young Americans, seem to be headed is toward science...

...actually, he might more properly say we, if he is seeking to blame someone for the alienation of the youth, for it was Aranne and his generation who determined the content and the spirit of the education they wanted their Israeli-born children to have, and who now, worried by the results, are trying to redirect the thinking of the youth before it is too late...

...ISRAELS EXPRESSO GENERATION' By Carl Levine Inability to 'create any contact with youth' arouses ire of state's founding fathers In recent months there has been an outpouring of anger and dismay by Israeli leaders at what they consider the narrow, self-centered preoccupations of the country's youth, whom they accuse of disdaining the pioneering ideals of their elders and refusing to show interest in the difficult national tasks that still lie ahead...

...In their schools kibbutz children are permitted the greatest freedom of self-expression which, some observers have noted, frequently degenerates into complete indiscipline, and a tendency for the pupils to criticize the teacher openly when they feel he is wrong...

...Another member reportedly shocked the Mapai party leaders by declaring what they certainly all knew: "Your appeal to the youth to conquer the desert is doomed to failure...

...So why pretend...

...Today the proportion has been reversed...

...The angry old men who condemn the sabra for wanting to achieve in two years what it took the fathers 25 or more tend to forget that the world has been developing at an enormous rate, and that Israel's present-day problems will not be solved by largescale reversion to what now almost seems the idyllic existence of the kibbutz...

...It was the same futile appeal that had been made countless times before...

...Aranne, a leading spokesman for Mapai and the older generation, uses the word they in referring to the schools as if they were some impersonal, external force...

...Why should he do it now...

...From the latter country Minister of Agriculture Moshe Dayan recently returned to report plans for Ethiopian-Israeli cooperation involving Israeli experts in such fields as water drilling, medical services, college teaching, government service, agricultural and industrial development...

...Over two-thirds of the Institute's researchers—who have since tripled in number—are local products, graduates of either Hebrew University or the Haifa Technion...

...How were they to implant Jewish consciousness in Israeli youth when their Israeli consciousness and the revolution it inevitably occasioned led them to negate not only the concept of exile but the communities of exile...

...The malaise which afflicts the sabra is the result of his desperate search for an identity of his own in a heterogeneous society which is in many ways disoriented, sharply divided against itself politically and socially —a maze of opposing ideologies among which the young wander, unable to attach themselves to any with the same conviction and devotion with which the older generation threw itself, for example, into the kibbutz movement...

...he is the first generation to be born in complete freedom, free of the apprehension and servility which are the price, he is told, that the Jew elsewhere must pay for being tolerated in a nonJewish world...

...cried Finance Minister Levi Eshkol, addressing the Mapai Central Committee's third session devoted to the country's youth, challenging the younger generation to show the kind of stuff it was made of by going out and settling the desolate, largely unoccupied B'sor region west of Beersheba and creating there "a new social model" that would set an example for the world...

...How were they," he asked, "to educate children in the homeland to feel closeness with the Jewish people, the overwhelming majority of whom lived abroad...

...Symbolizing in dramatic form the enormous possibilities open to the sabra for a new sort of trail-blazing was the Conference on Science in the Advancement of New States, held this past August at the Weizmann Institute...

...but it is also partly a romanticized projection that obscures the reality and gets in the way of understanding the nature of the psychological disorientation from which the sabra suffers...

...This meeting of picturesquely garbed African statesmen with Israeli scientists and Government leaders, discussing their needs and hopes and frank doubts in an atmosphere of good will and mutual respect, was an exciting experience for the Israeli youth, one that gave him a glimpse of a future in which he and his generation will undoubtedly play an increasingly more active and meaningful part...

...Amid heated arguments as to who—or what—was to blame for the present situation Deputy Defense Minister Shimon Peres rose to say that the problem was not the materialism and spiritual emptiness of the new generation as contrasted with the self-sacrifice of the old, but that "we are unable to create any contact with the youth...

...These are the only alternatives, the old men have taught him, that are available to the modern Jew...

...Be the men your fathers were...

...The skills of these young people are being called on not only to serve the laboratories and industries of Israel but ever increasingly to help advance the technology of the newly created nations of Africa and Asia, as well as of the older but still largely underdeveloped ones, such as Ethiopia...

...To the old men, long ago schooled in the ignoble necessities of compromise and adjustment to an alien world, the change of direction is understandable, even unavoidable...

...In a real sense he suffers from history, Jewish history...

...It is to the sabra's credit, on the whole, that he does not slavishly follow in the footsteps of his parents, or think of his future as an extension of the once revolutionary but now largely conservative patterns which the parents established...

...At the university level, too, the Israeli is sympathetic and understanding...

...In the kibbutzim, where all this is highly visible, the children enjoy better food, better housing, better care, than the parents themselves...

...It is this kind of pioneering that may ultimately serve the national purpose even better than settling the Negev, about which Israel's old men still dream...

...and so, administrators and teachers, being human, are ready to make allowances...

...What are some of the possibilities...

...Last year, when students at the Haifa Technion fthe MIT of Israel) went out on strike in angry protest against the expulsion of two of their number who had been caught cheating at examinations, I commented about the students' behavior to an acquaintance who teaches there...

...From the very first day the Israeli child goes to school, and sometimes before, he learns that he is a unique phenomenon in Jewish history—a distinctive, almost mystically endowed human being achieved after 2,000 years of his people's suffering and degradation...

...The foreign Jew he meets in Israel, cigar in mouth, cameras hanging from his neck, beamingly outspoken about all he has done for Israel, can be an even more galling reminder...