A Nation 'Arrives'
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
PERSPECTIVES A Nation 'Arrives' By William Henry Chamberlin Of the four countries which I visited on a recent journalistic trip, Israel left the most vivid impressions. After a strenuous...
...After a strenuous two weeks of travel and talk in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, in development areas, communal farms and military training centers, I had the feeling of Israel's having, in a sense, "arrived...
...Almost three-quarters of a million Jews from all over the world, but mainly from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, poured into Israel between 1948-1951...
...Most Israelis believe that their demonstrated ability to hit back effectively is more responsible for this relative calm than any of the well-meant efforts of the United Nations...
...Probably about half of the Israeli industrial output comes from publicly owned plants (some belonging to the State, some to the Histadrut, the huge labor organization which fulfills social welfare as well as trade-union functions...
...Immigration for the last 10 years comes to a little over a quarter of a million, although the average of 25,000 a year may have risen in 1961 because Rumanian Jews are quietly being allowed to leave that Iron Curtain country...
...However, Israel is not yet economically self-sufficient...
...Algeria, two years, Rumania, one year...
...But once part of the Jordan River is diverted through an extensive pipeline, much of it already laid down, the reclamation of dry land in the Negev will proceed more rapidly...
...Israel, of course, still faces foes on every frontier and has a myriad of internal difficulties to solve...
...The Colonel in charge, Alexander Sharon, a Hungarian by birth and a veteran of the British Army in World War II, wore the ribbons denoting participation in Israel's 1948-49 War of Independence and in the Sinai campaign...
...One of my most interesting experiences in Israel was a visit to a military training center in Sarafand, near Tel Aviv...
...And so on, with even two from the Soviet Union, for Jews the hardest country of all from which to escape...
...but what was fascinating about the Sarafand camp, an old British installation, was the welding together of young men with scores of national and cultural backgrounds into soldiers of Israel...
...Economic conditions have also greatly improved...
...It depends heavily on such non-commercial items in its balance of payments as contributions from Jewish communities all over the world, especially the U.S., and reparation and individual restitution payments from the German Federal Republic...
...But the trend is away from nationalization for the sake of nationalization...
...Given the present supply of water, agriculture in Israel has now been developed almost to its limit...
...Foreign investment capital is being encouraged in the form of liberal assurances of convertibility of profits and withdrawal of capital...
...Militarily and economically, the situation is better than it was in the days when border settlements were in a state of constant alert against Arab raids, food was severely rationed and new immigrants had to be housed in the roughest kind of emergency shelter...
...The continuing excess of imports over exports, today in the neighborhood of $300 million, represents in the main not food and consumer goods but machinery and equipment to be added to the nation's capital assets...
...The present emphasis is on industrial development and promotion of exports by all possible means, including export premiums...
...The Colonel asked the soldiers in one platoon to state their country of origin and how long they had been in Israel, and the answer suggested a miniature United Nations: "Hungary, five years...
...The common use of the Hebrew language and the common military training are doing much to obliterate differences of background and create a new sense of citizenship...
...As Sharon explained, the methods of training are much the same in every army...
...But overall it gives one the impression of being a national community that has weathered its severest trials and is very definitely here to stay...
...The marked fall in migration has made it possible to take better care of the newcomers, most of whom are now sent from the ship to waiting houses and jobs, often in new development areas which are being reclaimed from desert or arid soil...
...There has been no serious border trouble since the Sinai campaign of 1956...
Vol. 44 • December 1961 • No. 40
