Perspectives

...In addition, under Stalin there were massive deportations on racial grounds...

...The absorption of a million immigrants with extremely different traditions and cultural backgrounds was a tremendous task, even if one takes full account of generous aid from abroad, especially from the American Jewish community...

...about 15 per cent is Government-owned...

...This contrast is all the more significant because of the frequently expressed theory that freedom is a luxury only an affluent society can afford, and that driving compulsion is the sole road to progress and prosperity for an economically retarded nation...

...about 35 per cent belongs to the Histadrut, the powerful trade-union federation...

...Deportation was not limited to "kulaks"—i.e., peasants who did not want to submit to the new serfdom of the collective farm— but was applied indiscriminately to nationalist groups, dissident Communists, Poles and other inhabitants of areas overrun by the Red Army...

...As such, they should carry special weight in the underdeveloped African and Asian countries where Israeli technical aid missions are now active...

...About 50 per cent of Israeli industry is in private hands...

...How different has been the record in Israel...

...When some recent Soviet visitors saw an Israeli kibbutz, or communal farm, they could hardly believe that no armed guards were needed to prevent the colonists from stealing grain from the common store...

...He may live on a communal farm, he may try his hand at a more individualistic form of farming, or he may engage in some business or profession...

...Here in a nutshell was the profound difference between Russian peasants, reluctantly herded into a system which they detested, and idealistic pioneer Zionists, choosing of their own free will to live on a communal basis...

...These facts seem to support the theory that individual freedom is entirely compatible with economic growth and progress...

...As is usually the case, political democracy goes hand in hand with a free and mixed economy...

...Local authorities are convinced that they could easily absorb another million or two immigrants within the present boundaries...

...Apart from universal military service, which is a national necessity in a small country surrounded by avowed enemies, the Israeli citizen is left to the free exercise of his own judgment...

...But if the immigrant chooses to try his luck in Tel Aviv, Haifa or Jerusalem, no one will stop him, nor will anyone prevent his leaving the country altogether, if he so wishes...

...not only did innumerable individuals become "unpersons," but whole ethnic groups were simply erased from the Soviet map...

...PERSPECTIVES Two Roads to National Development By William Henry Chamberlin Tel Aviv To come to Israel with a knowledge of the Soviet Union is to sense vividly the contrast between two ways of national development, the authoritarian and the voluntary democratic...

...Yet Israel has remained faithful to the principles of voluntarism and democracy...

...No authority comes to the newly arrived immigrant in Israel and tells him what he must do...

...The Soviet method (employed even more ruthlessly by the Chinese Communists) of achieving the twin goals of a highly industrialized society and a collectivized agriculture is characterized by an inhumanity that can only be appreciated by those who have seen it in operation...

...Four million peasants starved to death in an avoidable political famine in 193233...

...Some financial inducements are offered by the World Jewish Agency to those who are willing to go to the "development areas," where living conditions are still somewhat harder and more primitive than in the settled communities...

...millions more were deported to slave labor in North Russian and Siberian concentration camps...

...Stalin himself admitted to Churchill during a wartime conversation that the forcing of the peasants into collective farms was accompanied by brutalities on a scale matched only in a major war...

...Israel's economy is dynamic and free of stagnation or unemployment...

...Although a very small society compared with the huge Soviet Union, its enormous problems of survival and economic viability might seem to have required a strong authoritarian hand...